Hi, I'm Glen.
I'm the slightly older half of this partnership — something I occasionally have to remind Bradley of when we disagree.
Although, to be fair, being the eldest usually means he eventually comes around to my way of thinking.
At least that's my version of events.
Bradley may tell you something completely different.
We grew up across the road from one another in Kent, surrounded by the same enormous extended family Bradley has already told you about. When your family occupies half the road, the word cousin doesn't really explain the relationship properly.
Bradley has always been more like my younger brother.
Life eventually took me much further from that road. I've spent around half of my life living abroad and built much of my adult life in Italy. I'm married to an Italian woman who has taught me many things over the years, but perhaps one of the most important has been that when you're fortunate enough to be able to help somebody, you should.
Family remains the centre of my life.
I have three amazing children — two daughters and a son — and everything I've worked for has ultimately been about giving my family the best life I could.
And I have always worked.
Hard.
For much of my career, I worked for a multinational company. I believed in putting the hours in, taking responsibility, providing for my family and doing the job properly. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and I'm proud of what those years allowed me to provide.
But I realised something later in life that I wish I had understood when I was younger.
You are allowed to build something for yourself as well.
You can spend decades working hard to help somebody else's business grow and suddenly realise that you've never given one of your own dreams the same commitment.
I've always been a dreamer. The difference today is that I've stopped being satisfied with dreams remaining dreams.
Now, whenever I speak to people who have an idea they can't stop thinking about, I tell them the same thing:
Do something with it.
It doesn't have to succeed immediately. It doesn't even have to succeed at all. But give yourself the opportunity to find out.
That philosophy is a large part of how these books came into existence.
For years, Bradley had been telling me stories.
Some of my favourite memories are of long evenings together on the Tuscan hillsides, usually accompanied by more than a few glasses of wine, while Bradley threw another extraordinary idea at me.
Some were dark.
Some were completely mad.
Some took me a while to understand.
But underneath them all, I could see the same thing.
Raw imagination.
Bradley could see stories where other people couldn't. He had characters, worlds, scenes and ideas constantly running through his head. I knew he'd been writing on and off for years, and I kept encouraging him to finish something — to take all that imagination and finally turn it into a completed book.
Then life dealt him a particularly difficult hand.
I watched someone I loved struggle physically after his accident and operations, but I also watched what that pain was doing to him mentally.
That was harder.
When somebody you consider a brother is in that position, you desperately want to help. The problem is that sometimes you don't know how.
I couldn't repair his spine.
I couldn't take his pain away.
And I couldn't simply tell depression to leave him alone.
But I could remind him of something that pain had made him forget.
He could still create.
I knew the talent was there. I'd heard the stories for years.
So eventually, instead of continuing to talk about the books we might write one day, we decided to actually write them.
And that changed things for both of us.
Bradley brought this extraordinary reservoir of imagination. I helped challenge it, organise it, develop it and push it from an idea into words on a page. We discovered that our differences weren't a weakness — they were exactly what made the partnership work.
We push each other.
We argue.
We clash heads.
We laugh.
One of us will become convinced something is brilliant while the other explains exactly why it isn't.
Then we keep working until we're both satisfied.
We've known each other for virtually our entire lives, so neither of us has much chance of getting away with nonsense.
And somewhere during all of that, we became a team.
But the part of this journey that means the most to me isn't seeing our names on a book.
It's seeing what creating those books has done for Bradley.
I've watched that spark come back.
I've watched him work relentlessly, throw himself into these stories and find a new purpose in something that had lived inside him for years.
I'm incredibly proud of him.
Bradley hasn't always had an easy run through life. None of us does, of course, but with him it became such a regular occurrence that our family stopped calling it bad luck.
We call it Brad luck.
If something ridiculous is going to happen to somebody, there's a suspiciously good chance Bradley will be standing nearby.
Fortunately, after everything he's been through, he's still standing.
And now he's writing.
I think he deserves every bit of success that comes his way.
As for me, this journey has reinforced something I learned later than I should have:
Life cannot only be about what you have to do. Somewhere in it, you have to make room for what you dream of doing.
These books are part of that for both of us.
Two cousins who grew up across the road from each other in Kent, eventually sitting together on hillsides in Tuscany discussing impossible stories over glasses of wine — and somehow deciding to turn those conversations into something real.
We don't know exactly where this journey will take us.
But we're ambitious enough to find out.
Our first great milestone is simple:
We want to write our first bestseller.
And we'd genuinely like you to be part of the journey towards it.
We want to hear what you think about the books — the characters you love, the moments that frightened you, the things you didn't expect and, yes, even the things you think we could have done differently.
So please join the newsletter, stay in touch and come along with us.
If one day we get to celebrate that first bestseller, it would mean considerably more knowing there were readers who had been with us from the beginning.
Bradley and I spent years talking about what we might do one day.
We're not talking about it anymore.
We're doing it.
And we're only getting started.
Kindest regards,
Glen