THE WRITE DEAN
Official Website of author, Leighton Dean
About
LEIGHTON DEAN
I'm Welsh. Born in Carmarthen, raised in Llanelli, still here(ish). Five books in, and only one reader has called for the FBI to dig up my garden for bodies. The meanest thing I've written is still to come: Disconnect, second draft.
Three things I keep coming back to: systemic power, the cost of doing the right thing, and worlds that feel a little too close to ours. Kingdom United is cyberpunk with the politics dialled up and the neon dialled down. Gods & Vagrants is weird-west allegory with Welsh teeth. Save Our Souls started as a love letter to disaster movies and turned darker than I planned. The sequel, Heretics of Sehag, is being torn apart and rebuilt.
"Cyberpunk with the politics dialled up and the neon dialled down."
None of that came from nowhere. I read more than is probably reasonable. Dune more times than I'll admit. James Herbert's Domain did something to me I've never quite recovered from. Influences from Robocop to Oldboy, Ghost in the Shell to Mississippi Burning, with a political reading list underneath: Chomsky, Pilger, Naomi Klein, Adam Curtis, and more recently Yanis Varoufakis and Grace Blakeley. I take cyberpunk seriously as politics, not aesthetics.
The reading may happen in silence, but the writing doesn't. Tinnitus rules that out. Film and game scores mostly, Hans Zimmer, Marc Beltrami, Henry Jackman, and 65daysofstatic, who I love unreasonably and loudly. Different scores for different scenes. Zimmer for chases. 65days for someone about to do something they can't take back.
Across five books I've learned a lot. Mostly that learning isn't the part that matters. There are good books on craft (King, Save the Cat, plenty more) and a thousand YouTubers and TikTokers telling you how to write characters, plot a series, sell a debut. None of them talk about the part that actually decides whether you'll finish anything: whether you'd be writing if no one was watching.
I have a drawer of unpublished books for every one I've put out. That's the answer, not the marketing funnel. If you can't sit down with a pen and paper and write a scene because the scene won't leave you alone, no amount of advice is going to save you. If you can, you don't need most of it.
This is why GunBoy remains the one I'm proudest of. Not because I knew what I was doing. I didn't. The compulsion was bigger than the doubt. It got me to the end. Everything I've written since has been the same lesson, learned again.
Travel is the off-switch. Best one so far: three weeks in Los Angeles with my wife, checking out movie locations, including standing outside Doc Brown's house on the exact day Back to the Future Part II predicted the future would arrive. That probably tells you everything you need to know.
Start here...
Free read: No Witness, the opening of the Gods & Vagrants trilogy. Yours when you join the mailing list.
The Kingdom United books: political cyberpunk. Start with GunBoy. Book 2, Disconnect, lands in 2027.
The Gods & Vagrants trilogy: weird-west mythology. Start with No Witness (free).
The Save Our Souls books: deep-space horror. Start with Save Our Souls. The sequel, Heretics of Sehag, is in progress.