About M.G. Darwish

The story behind the stories

M.G. Darwish writes worlds that rise, crack and demand hard choices. His stories test power, its price, and the vows people break, and he rarely repeats the same voice: he believes every tale should be told in the style it demands, then cuts anything he wouldn’t want to read himself.

He started writing at eight, imagining other endings to books and films and asking what would happen if the hero was not in the right place at the right time. That question still drives his fiction. He collects sparks from glitchy video games, stray headlines and overheard lies, then follows the chain of cause and effect to its brutal conclusion. Titanlord began with a player-versus-player dungeon raid in the game Aion that went wrong.

His first story in English was A Duck’s Sacrifice, written in 2012. His first published story was Minds: The Secret Society in 2015, and his first novel, Dragon Tooth, followed in 2016. Fortier began in 2017 and Titanlord in 2018.

How he works

Darwish says discipline beats motivation. A regular writing routine lets him write through exhaustion, produce consistently and treat his craft like a business. The ritual is part discipline and part theatre: a small writing cave with candles, a giant TV, a mechanical keyboard, and anime battle music booming through a gaming chair. Over time he learned to write anywhere.

He treats an author career like a startup: building an author brand, keeping a newsletter, and researching new ways to reach readers. He chose self-publishing, and he is blunt about vanity presses: authors should be paid for their work, not pay to be published. He wrote about why.

Writing from Bahrain

Darwish grew up in Bahrain, where most literature is written and published in Arabic, and chose to write genre fiction in English. He has written about what it is like to be a writer in Bahrain and what shaped his English and his writing. He now lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Infrangilis

Infrangilis is Latin for “unbreakable”. It is his personal motto, a reminder to keep moving forward, and the banner he publishes under.