Besotted was a tough novel to write. A modern-day “Lolita”, an alcoholic writer with cancer, and a bizarre, perhaps stomach-churning twist, the journey from the first few lines through to completion was eventful and inspiring.

I initially wanted to write a novel about a middle-aged man’s friendship with a young teenage girl, Sally, and have the relationship as purely platonic, perhaps even in spite of the girl’s clumsy attempts to seduce him. But of course, that wouldn’t be much of a plot. What it needed was something spicy. It needed a few more ingredients. And so Benjamin Beerenwinkel, the narrator of the story, became a writer, a novelist with one mildly successful novel in his bibliography, and his failing attempts to write a follow-up. His wife was leaving him for another man, and Benjamin had turned to alcohol to fuel his abortive writing sessions. In Bestotted, Benjamin drank a lot, and this was inspired by my own consumption of alcohol, before I gave it up (I’m an alcoholic, but I haven’t had a drink it over three years). The thirteen-year-old neighbour seemed desperate to get to know him, probably because her relationship with her father was poor, and Benjamin could be the father figure she always wanted. And in amongst all of this drama, he learns that he has testicular cancer.

So that was the premise, and the plot lurched from one disaster to the next. I recall the first draft being 130,000 words, and I’m not sure that the final draft was less than 120,000 words. I was living in the market town of Stamford when I began writing the book, but moved to a nearby village. My friend Tom was the landlord of a pub called the Hit or Miss in Stamford (he took it over from another landlord called Darren (or Cheesy)), and it had been my local boozer for a few years. I would go there most evenings and start writing, usually only managing an hour or two before the alcohol took over. I reckon I was about 60,000 words into first draft when I left the pub one evening, in a drunken stupor, my laptop stuffed into my shoulder bag, as I wandered drunkenly around town. It was one of those moments when the homing beacon kicks in, and your legs take you to where you should be, only mine was malfunctioning, and it was directing me to the flat belonging to an ex with whom I’d had a brief and exciting fling. She’d moved out three or four years previous, and it was only as I neared the building that I realized my error. There was a phone box nearby and, even though I had a mobile phone with me, I thought I’d use the payphone to call for a taxi. I recall that there were a couple of young guys, teens, standing near the phone box. There was a frank exchange of words between then and me, and I recall one of the guys – his name was, bizarrely, Junior Flake – swung for me and caught me a glancing blow on the cheek. The second punch, however, came too quickly for me to dodge, and my jaw was broken. My attempt to avoid it left me unstable on my already unsteady feet, and I slipped to the ground. And then I was kicked a few more times in the head and around my shoulders.

It was a serious assault.

I came to some time later, dragged myself to my feet and looked around for my belongings. My bag containing my laptop was gone, and my mobile phone was no longer in my pocket. Cursing, I staggered off in the direction of the town’s police station, even though I could see it was after midnight. A hundred yards or so down the road, I found my mobile phone, but it was broken, undoubtedly discarded by the muggers.

Long story short, I lost my laptop, my Kindle, and some handwritten manuscripts that were inside my bag. I hadn’t backed up Besotted for a few days, and the version I had at home was only about 40,000 words. Twenty thousand words were missing. A broken jaw and a bruised ego, and a bitterness and resentment towards not only the youths who had mugged me but the police who eventually dropped the case because it was a case of my word against Junior Flake’s, and I spent a few weeks feeling sorry for myself.

Junior Flake appears in Besotted, midway through. You’ll have to read the book to find out why he’s present and what happens to him.

But Flake was not the only real-life character to appear in the book. Whilst getting drunk and working on Besotted in the village pub a few months later, a pair of transsexuals walked into the pub and had a few drinks. One of them looked like a man in a short dress. The other still looked like a man, but could’ve passed for a manly-looking woman. And, of course, this event had to appear in Besotted. It was late in the evening, I was six pints into my writing session, and my own twisted take on this singular experience – the quiet village pub being visited by a pair of trans women – took up a lengthy chapter.

Ultimately, I managed to rewrite most of what I had lost on my stolen laptop, and I had, by that time, discovered the Cloud, so my work was instantly uploaded and saved every five or ten minutes.

Besotted loses its way perhaps midway through the book – that’s my opinion – and if I had the time, I would’ve revised it, perhaps made it 10,000 words shorter. But the development of the relationship between Benjamin Beerenwinkel and Sally, the big reveal, and the ending I think are worth it. In the end, Benjamin is an unsavoury character, but I think given the plot, it works. A good friend of mine – in fact, the best man at my wedding – the writer Gary Wright (check out his novel The Caging of George James on Amazon) once asked me, after reading Besotted, “Who did you base the character of Benjamin Beerenwinkel on?” I told him I based Benjamin a lot on myself and asked him why. Gary’s reply, blunt and honest, as only Gary can be, was to tell me that he found Benjamin Beerenwinkel to be a thoroughly detestable creature. Actually, I recall we were sitting in a pub called the Cock Inn when we had that conversation. And, as Joe Biden would say, “That’s not a joke. It really happened.”

It’s also not a joke that the cover model is one of my exes. And no, she wasn’t a teenager when she posed for the photo shoot.

Ultimately, you might need a strong stomach to read Besotted, but as the first novel in a trilogy of books about troubled men (Maggie’s Children and Muslamic Ray Gun complete the trilogy), you might, if you’re honest, see something of yourself in Benjamin Beerenwinkel.

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