DON'T TELL MY MOTHER was a novel I wrote in 2002.  In 2003 I landed a great agent at a great literary agency in New York.  He shopped it to publishers and before I knew it he had MGM on the phone wanting to option the film rights.  The film rights were optioned, my novel was sent to a big Hollywood actor who said he liked it and was interested in reading the screenplay, a screenplay was written and then Sony came along in 2005 and fucked everything up.  So no film.  No book.  Nothing.  Nada.  Life is cruel.  Lucky I kept my day job!!

Click here to read the full manuscript of Don't Tell My Mother

About the Novel - DON'T TELL MY MOTHER can best be described as a comedy that is a cross between Californication, Sex and the City and Bridget Jones.  The novel's main character is Toby Willis.  Toby has every man's dream job.  It is 2001 and he works in London as the editor of an adult entertainment magazine called Thruster.  There is only one problem.  Toby is too embarrassed to tell anyone what he does; especially his mother and prospective girlfriends.  All of which poses a problem when Toby falls in love with Charlotte Fisher, a beautiful American working as a lawyer in London for a large US law firm, and tells her he's the editor of an architectural magazine.  Toby's life is further complicated by the fact that Thruster, a 3rd-tier porn mag at best, is facing declining sales and advertising revenue.  Unless Toby can turn it around he won't have a job to be embarrassed about.  But Toby has ideas about how he can win the love of Charlotte and turn around the magazine.  Toby Willis, like David Duchovny’s Hank Moody in Californication, isn’t a perfect person but he has a good heart.  He makes mistakes and does things he knows his mother wouldn’t be proud of.  But readers will find that they can’t help rooting for him and praying he wins the heart of Charlotte and turns around the fortunes of Thruster.

Researching the Novel - Writing any book necessitates some research and so it was with this novel.  In an effort to try and encapsulate the true spirit of the novel's central character Toby Willis I decided that it was necessary for me to travel to London, New York, Paris and Florence; to read hundreds of back issues of Playboy and Penthouse; to review more hours of footage of adult entertainment films than I care to remember; to smoke dozens of cartons of Marlboro and Dunhill cigarettes; to drink copious litres of Stella Artois and Heineken beer; to listen to the music of Kylie Minogue, Dido, Britney Spears, Geri Halliwell and S Club 7; to be made redundant within 6 weeks of starting a job; to lie and conceal things from my mother and friends; to visit synagogues in Hampstead Garden Suburb and South Hampstead; to witness a bris or two; to watch Ally McBeal and The Practice; to fantasise about Helen Gamble; and to eat as much butter chicken (mild) and naan bread as possible.