Philip Meese Interview Published on: 13, Sep 2024

I was born in Salford but raised in Prestwich, a small town in North Manchester. I wouldn’t say Prestwich specifically shaped my writing style (although one of my future stories will be set there) as much as the North West of England has. All of my books are set in either Manchester or Lancashire (I now live in Bolton), as these are the areas I’m familiar with.

I was actually only there for three months, partly due to a couple of health problems I had at the time and also because of homesickness. It was a great experience, both living in Antalya and working for Thomas Cook, but I don’t believe it’s had any bearing on my writing. However, in Ivan, I mention that the main character’s parents are on holiday there, which was definitely not a subconscious decision.

After writing football articles, both on my own website and for Last Word on Sport, the feedback I received on those was, for the most part, exceedingly positive. I believe that gave me the confidence to take the next step.

It was because I didn’t get a promotion that, to this day, I know I deserved. After being told I hadn’t got the position, I sat down and thought, “I should write a book about this place”. And then, I thought, “You know what? I SHOULD write a book about this place.” In that role, we were cold-calling potential customers, and some people would say awful things to me, but instead of taking offence, I started writing down the best insults I received, and they all went in the book. Because I worked in the industry, I only needed to do about an hour’s worth of research, and that was just to check a few things.

However, once I started writing it, I began to see it as a self-help book. The PPI scandal that the book centres around is now in the past, but at the time, quite a few people asked me to check if they were eligible to make a claim simply because they had read the book.

It was relatively straightforward. I saw their advert in mid-2018, submitted my manuscript, and about two months later, they sent me a contract through the post, which I signed and sent back. They sent me a couple of revisions over the following year, and the book was finally published in May 2019.

I enjoyed the characters and the way I developed them. I received a few compliments regarding the relationship between Abi and Harry, siblings who can’t stand each other at the start of the book. However, living with a dangerous poltergeist draws them close, and they soon become best friends.

For some people, it’s the setting, which I described in great detail and which took a lot of research. One of the nicest things people have said to me about that was that they felt like they were inside the house while reading it. Additionally, More than one person has asked me where Blackmoor Hall is and how they would go about visiting it, believing it to be a real place, only to be disappointed when I told them I made it up.

Honestly, I can draw inspiration from absolutely anything. Ivan, for example, came from a realisation of certain people’s fear of cats, which made me wonder how a cat-related horror novel would go down.

The Presence came about when I was lying in bed one night (not long after I signed the contract for Diary of a Call Centre Agent), listening to a football phone-in show on the radio. Somebody said those two words, “The Presence,” in reference to a particular player, and I just thought what a great title that would be for a ghost story. Thanks to that, I decided to write one that I hoped would be fitting of such a title.

To my recollection, there haven’t been any recurring themes in any of my books so far. However, I am obsessed with all things 1980s (not just music but TV, film, cars, and especially some of the fashions), and I will explore this in my next few projects.

Once I’ve got an idea for a novel firmly ingrained in my head, I’ll start typing a document with some thoughts and possibilities. After that, I’ll start thinking about the kind of characters I want in the book, and once I get to a certain point, I’ll write the synopsis. Obviously, during the process of each novel, more and more ideas will come to me, and that document can get a bit messy sometimes; if someone other than me were to read it, I doubt it would make much sense, but, thankfully, I always know where I’m up to with it.

I have the Premium version of Grammarly, and I always run my work through it because it catches many spelling and grammar mistakes. It also makes suggestions on rephrasing certain sentences, cutting down the word count, and even providing feedback on the tone of your work.

I have a few specific editing techniques, which I won’t go into too much detail about. One is a specific word check, where I see if I’ve used certain words a bit too often throughout the book. When that’s the case, I’ll see if there are other pseudonyms I can use in a few of those instances.

These are just a few of the things I do; if I went through the entire list, this would be one long article.

Yeah, sometimes. In The Presence, the Thorpe family’s cat, Batears, was actually my cat growing up and is identical in every detail: a white cat with black patches who had a passion for sleeping. His name originated when he walked into the room while my dad and I watched a programme about a creature called the Bat-Eared Fox; we noticed the undeniable similarities, and that also went into the book. We loved that cat so much that I thought immortalising him in one of my novels was the perfect tribute to Batears; he was an absolute legend.

I also put one character in The Presence specifically to kill off; some of his traits, like tight-fistedness around money, were based on someone I know. However, I don’t base my main characters on specific people most of the time, but I do throw a few of their mannerisms in there occasionally.

When I decided to go self-published, I had to learn so many things about the industry. For example, finding a great designer for my book covers took me ages. Eventually, I came across Ken Dawson of Creative Covers, who did the artwork for The Presence and Ivan; he did such a brilliant job that I’ve no intention of going elsewhere. I know for a fact that a few people bought my books because of the job he did. He’s a really nice guy as well.

Another challenge was utilising patience. I finished the first draft of The Presence in early 2020, and every time I told myself I was ready to publish it, I’d come across something else I needed to check. As a result, I didn’t release it until March 2022. One of the main things that stopped that from happening sooner was when I realised I needed a professional editorial critique, an unbiased pair of eyes who will look at your work and tell you things that maybe you don’t want to hear, but at the same, things you need to hear. I employed a company called Publish Nation for this, and on the strength of the first critique I had from them, I cut about 40,000 words from my original draft (some of which will be going in the sequel) and completely ripped the guts out of the story.

About ten years ago, I noticed that a few people I knew were creeped out by cats. I’d never thought about this before, as I grew up with cats and absolutely love them. However, when they started to describe WHY they were creeped out by them, although I didn’t share the same view, I could see their point.

When I started writing horror, I thought, if your ordinary cat creeps these people out, how would they react to a possessed one? This is what happens to Ivan in that story, and even people who love cats have told me they’ll never view them in quite the same light after reading it.

Fortunately, most of the feedback I have received on all three of my books has been really positive, and that’s always nice. There haven’t been too many negative ones, but one or two have focused on some of my dialects – then I see where the review came from, and it’s pretty clear that those people have never been to Manchester, so it’s understandable that some of the expressions I use would be alien to them.

I currently have four projects on the go, all in different stages of development. The Presence is the first part of what will be known as the Blackmoor Hall trilogy. I have completed the first draft of part 2, and I’m more than halfway through part 3. I decided to write it all in one go before starting the long editing process.

Once the Blackmoor Hall trilogy is complete, my next novel will be set in my hometown of Prestwich in the late 1980s, a story I made an Easter-Egg-style reference to in Ivan. I’ve had this particular story in mind for quite a while, and I’ve done a lot of research for this and started writing the synopsis.

Finally, the other project will be a Prequel to Ivan, focusing on Kyle’s aunt, Evelyn, from whom he inherited the house where the story takes place.

One way it has shaped my writing is in the sense that some of my characters have a noticeable Mancunian dialect. For instance, when writing The Presence, I felt the need to explain what the word “Mooch” means after I used it in dialogue.

As I’ve said, all my stories take place in either Greater Manchester or Lancashire, and I think the 1980s story I have planned will probably answer this question, as it will be set in both the town and era I grew up in. I’m really looking forward to getting started on that one.

If only Manchester had a beach and nice weather (it rains a lot here), you’d be hard-pressed to find a cooler city anywhere in the world (although I think that’s true anyway). What’s so cool about it? Take your pick, but music & football (Manchester United) are two things we’re famous for.

It’s been great. I’ve definitely benefited from the Tweet Scheduler feature, which links to your Twitter account (I'm not sure I’ll ever get used to calling it X) and puts out scheduled, pre-written tweets on your behalf, promoting your work.

Also, both Ivan and The Presence did well when I entered them in the AllAuthor Cover of The Month contests; neither of them won, but they both made the top ten, and I think The Presence came fifth in the May 2023 competition. I know Ken, my cover designer, was also pleased about that.

I don’t feel as though I’ve taken full advantage of the site’s features and benefits as yet, but I will do so in the future.