That is the nickname my wife gave me and it stuck because it was true. For decades, whenever I found the excitement to do something I loved, I would stop right at the finish line. I hid my creativity away out of self-doubt and fear of failure.

The fear started early. Around the turn of the millennium I poured my heart into a school exam, writing a vivid futuristic concept of a UFO-style room with metallic walls and hidden technology. I failed. The feedback was not about the imagination or the concept. It was just a wall of red pen pointing out my terrible spelling and grammar. Thank goodness for spellcheck.

I let the fear in. The creative part of me did not die, it just went underground, masking itself as endless fidgeting and hyper-fixations. The 0% boy grew into the 90% man. I hid my writing in the shadows of my computer files, terrified people would laugh.

Then came my children. A beautiful explosion of sleep-deprived chaos.

When the world opened back up after the Covid years, something shifted on those local park walks. I started writing stories for my two boys. Today they each have a completed novel featuring a main character carrying their name. They are too young to read them now but one day they will. Those books are proof that their dad was here, that he had something to say, and that he always truly saw them.

Then came 2025. A heavy, brutal year that broke things open. It started with loss, navigating grief, and trying to explain death to a four-year-old. Then came a quiet personal pain that left me feeling entirely invisible. The darkness sat heavy.

But out of that darkness Between Stars was born. I poured everything I was carrying into the pages. The self-doubt, the grief, the feeling of being unseen. I did not realise I was writing my own story until I was already deep inside someone else's.

With the incredible support of my wife, who tolerates my late night bursts of ideas, my full moon energy crashes, and my terrible habit of interrupting adult conversations because a plot hole suddenly solved itself, I chose to fight back.

I decided to stop letting other people write the script for who I was supposed to be. I flooded the engine with change and forced myself to hit publish.

When I launched my debut science fiction novel Between Stars, I did not just finish a project. I shattered a lifelong chain. The punchline? At the exact moment of launch I was secretly sitting on a shelf of four other completed novels. Hazen, Veridiax, Ryker, and more. Stories I had previously hidden away because the 90% man told me to play it safe.

Sci-fi has always been my ultimate escape. As a kid I watched Ulysses 31 and wore my sister's headbands over my eyes to pretend I was Geordi La Forge from Star Trek. Years later, reading Whatever Next to my boys at bedtime, a story about a little bear flying to the moon in a cardboard box with a pack of biscuits, brought all that childhood wonder flooding back.

To me the cosmos is the ultimate canvas for the big questions. If your memory was wiped, would you still be you? Are we shaped by the people who failed to hold us, or is there something deeper engraved in who we are?

My writing routine is not glamorous. There is no vintage typewriter or manicured lawn. It is written in the summer house on frozen winter nights, captured on phone notes at 2am, scattered between kids toy cars and sticky fingers. It is chaotic but my mind never stops writing.

When you read my books you are getting an extension of my soul. I write with the reader first, always. I want you to close the final page, take a breath, and think, oh my god, that was sad, awesome, epic, and I need more. You might feel one of those or all of them.

I want it to feel like a grand adventure written just for you.

Because in a way it was.

The 90% man might always be lurking in the shadows. But he has finally got a direction and a go at living the life he always wanted to live.

May the stories that I write feel you with the joy they bring me in creating.

See you in the stars.

H.G. Dawson