Here is the version of the story I could have told you.
A seasoned marketing director in his fifties discovers an unexpected creative calling. He writes a children’s book. It gets published. He reflects warmly on the journey. The End
That version is accurate and almost completely useless. So let me tell you the other one.
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The idea started with an image. A quiet boy in an attic storeroom above a costume shop, surrounded by the kind of things that have been set aside rather than thrown away. Old objects with old stories. A space helmet sitting in the corner.
The boy puts the helmet on. Something shifts. He gets pulled into another world, one shaped by the very emotions he has been avoiding. And from there, an adventure.
I want to be clear that I didn’t write this as a creative exercise or a side project. I wrote it because the themes felt uncomfortably relevant. Not just to a ten-year-old figuring out who he is. To me, at fifty-something, sitting in the particular discomfort of caring deeply about something I wasn’t sure I was good enough to do.
That discomfort, by the way, is a direct and accurate description of the whole process.
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The book is called Ruben & The Curious Cosmonaut. It’s the first in a five-book series, The Great Disguise Chronicles. Ruben Grey is nine years old. He spends his spare time in the storeroom above his grandfather Baba Jaan’s costume shop in London. It’s his safe space. Quiet, familiar, a place for imagination and memories. Then the space helmet changes everything.
Each book in the series pulls Ruben into a different world through a mirror in the shop. Each world places him under different kinds of pressure. Each story asks some version of the same question: what does it take to move forward when you don’t feel ready?
I knew from early on that this was a series. Not one book with space for sequels, but a series with a real shape, an emotional architecture that needed room across multiple books to earn its weight. That’s either vision or delusion. Probably both, when you haven’t published a single word.
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I should tell you what it actually felt like, because I think the honest version is the useful one.
I’m a marketing director. I’ve spent my career in B2B technology, building propositions, repositioning brands, working with teams across product, sales, and marketing. Writing children’s fiction is not a natural next step by any conventional measure. And the voice that reminds you of that is specific and persistent.
A marketing director in his fifties, writing stories for kids. Not exactly a natural next step.
I made peace with that sentence by saying it out loud. Not by arguing with it, but by deciding that “natural” was not the point.
The imposter syndrome was real. What I felt wasn’t just the question of whether I was good enough. It was more fundamental: whether this was a legitimate thing for someone like me to attempt. Whether people who knew me professionally would find out and find it strange. Whether I was writing something that mattered or just indulging myself.
I wrote for a long time before I told anyone. A quiet idea, held privately, protected from the moment it might have to become real.
That’s the particular irony here. The series is fundamentally about the courage to be seen. The book’s emotional spine is the idea that vulnerability isn’t weakness, that growth comes from stepping into unfamiliar territory before you feel ready. And the person writing it spent a year hiding.
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What finally broke that open was understanding that what Ruben goes through in the story is exactly what I was going through making it.
Ruben is not a fearless hero. He is a careful, observational, quietly thoughtful kid who has learned to keep his face still when things are hard. He is getting better at that. He puts difficult feelings somewhere private while he works out what to do with them. He is braver than he believes, but he doesn’t know that yet.
He is nine years old and he is absolutely recognisable.
There is a version of Ruben in most of us. The part that sits with the quiet idea too long. That waits for certainty before committing. That has learned, from experience, that being seen is a risk worth managing carefully.
Children feel this acutely, and with less distance from it. The social sharpness of not quite fitting. The private work of figuring out who you are while the world has already decided how to see you. Ruben knows all of that. But so do adults. We just call it something else. Reputation, professional risk, not wanting to look foolish in front of people who know you in a different context.
I wrote a children’s book in secret. And then I published it.
Those two sentences feel important side by side.
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*Ruben & The Curious Cosmonaut* is published now. There’s more to come: the rest of the series, the website, reading packs for schools and libraries, and the ongoing work of getting these books to the children who need them.
I’m going to keep sharing this journey, not because I think everyone needs to write a book, but because I think most people have a version of the attic storeroom. A quiet idea they’ve been sitting with. Something they keep meaning to start, waiting for the moment they feel ready enough.
Growth rarely comes from clarity alone. It comes from stepping into unfamiliar territory and learning as you go.
I meant that about Ruben. I also meant it about myself. Turns out they were always the same lesson.
This is what it looks like when you stop waiting.
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*Ruben & The Curious Cosmonaut, Book One of The Great Disguise Chronicles, is out now.*
*A R Marchant*