Nobody sits you down as a child and warns you about regret. They warn you about strangers, about running with scissors, about the tide coming in quicker than you'd think. Regret is left for you to discover on your own, usually at about two in the morning, replaying a conversation from 1994 in which you said the wrong thing to the right person. I'm fifty-four, so I have had ample time to build a decent back catalogue of the regrets. Bar one of two major mistakes, most of mine are small and … continue reading
Random Thoughts
The posts that fit nowhere else. Keith A Pearson on the odds, ends and tangents of a writing life, plus the occasional digression.
Can You Ever Really Start Over?
I have started over more than once, and never with any kind of grand plan. In 2004 I stepped down from a directorship at a property company, mostly to spend more time with two small humans before they stopped finding me interesting. Later I built a marketing business helping small businesses make sense of the internet, then sold it in 2019 to attempt the one thing I'd never quite dared: writing books for a living. So I know the pull of the clean slate reasonably well. And here's the bit … continue reading
The Roads Not Taken (and Why the Other One Probably Led to a Cul-de-Sac)
Everyone keeps a private museum of the lives they never lived. Mine has an entire wing devoted to the version of me who stayed in the property business, drives something German and expensive, and has never once known the specific thrill of arguing with a stranger on the internet about the correct use of a semicolon. He's doing fine, that other Keith. Somewhere in a parallel life, he's on his third pension review of the year, perhaps living in a different town or even a different country. … continue reading
Second Chances: Do People Really Turn Things Around
I have built most of a career on a single, faintly ridiculous premise: what if you could go back and do it all again, only properly this time? My characters are forever being handed a fresh crack at life. It sells rather well. The trouble is, miracles rarely happen in real life, so we muddle along with what we have. So I wanted to know whether the thing I keep writing about actually happens. Do real people, with no supernatural assistance and no time portal in a suburban hallway, genuinely … continue reading
Authors Who Came to Hate Their Own Most Famous Book
Every author starts out wishing for the same modest thing: a book that people actually read. You picture the kind reviews, the sales chart doing something other than impersonating a heart monitor at the exact moment of death, a stranger on a train holding your paperback and not visibly hating it. What nobody warns you about is the version of the wish where it comes true so hard it swallows you whole, and you spend the rest of your life chained to the one story you'd happily feed into a … continue reading
The Midlife Wake-Up Call
Somewhere around your mid-forties, a small voice pipes up while you stand at the bathroom mirror, studying a man who appears to have borrowed your face and aged it without asking. The voice puts one simple question to you. Is this it? You ignore it and finish brushing your teeth. The voice waits. It owns nothing but time, and lately, so do you. We have a tidy little phrase for what happens next. The midlife crisis. We picture a fiftysomething in box-fresh leathers, astride a motorbike he can … continue reading
What Would You Change About Your Life If You Could?
I write novels about ordinary people who reach back and change their lives, so this question trails me about like a faithful Labrador. People assume I keep an answer ready... a tidy anecdote about the one decision I'd undo given the chance. The truth lands closer to home and pleases nobody: I don't actually know, and the more I chew it over, the less certain I become. Everyone has a version of this question rattling around the loft space. Most of us answer it privately, usually around three … continue reading
What Life Cost in 1985 (When 77p Bought You a Pint)
I spend an unhealthy amount of my working life in the past. Not literally; my GP would have something to say about that. But a fair chunk of my fiction lives there, and you cannot drop a character into, say, 1985 without knowing what a packet of crisps might cost. Price a pint wrong, a reader in Mansfield will email you about it. So I've done the research. Quite a lot of it, frankly, most of it while pretending it counts as proper work. Here, then, is roughly what life cost in Britain in … continue reading
If You Could Go Back, What Age Would You Return To? (Think Carefully Before Answering)
I've spent the best part of a decade asking this question for a living. Every time travel novel I've written starts from the same itch: if someone handed you a return ticket to your own past, which stop would you choose? Ask it out loud at the barber's and watch what happens. People go quiet. They stare into the middle distance like a dog hearing a crisp packet opened two rooms away. Then they name an age with alarming speed, which tells you they worked it out years ago and have simply been … continue reading
The 10 Worst Things About Being an Author
2026 marks the tenth anniversary of my first novel, The '86 Fix, landing on Amazon's virtual shelves. Sitting here now, ten years on, I still find it hard to believe that I make up stories for a living. It’s a job that many people envy, and I know that because every other person I meet tells me how much they’d love to write a book. Spoiler: they rarely love the idea enough to actually sit down and write one. Anyway, for those who harbour ambitions to write books for a living, I thought I'd … continue reading
1990 UK Property Market: Cheap Houses, Brutal Interest, Hard Maths
I'm currently writing the third book in my Echo Lane series, set in an estate agency in 1990. That's led to a lot of research into the UK property market back then, and the numbers, frankly, threw me. We hear constantly that buying a house in 2026 has become impossible. There's truth in that. The deposits alone are enough to make a millennial weep into their oat milk. But the assumption underneath, that buying used to be a doddle, deserves a closer look. Spoiler: nobody had it easy. What … continue reading
An Explanation: Why You’ll Only Find My Books on Amazon (For Now)
This question lands in my inbox at least once a week. "Keith, are your books available on Kobo? Apple Books? Google Play? A small independent bookshop my dad runs in Devon?" The short answer is no. The long answer needs a couple of paragraphs and a chart. The less-short answer My books are sold exclusively through Amazon. Nowhere else. If you can't find them on a particular platform, the absence isn't a glitch or an oversight on my part. It's the deal I made when I signed up to Kindle … continue reading