Back to Work

 

Now Mr T is back on his feet and life is getting back to normal, I’ve been able to get back to writing projects.

 

I was already working on a sequel to A Gift for Murder and was one chapter in when everything ground to a halt. But a couple of weeks ago a lucky encounter on Facebook offered another project.

 

I don’t know about you, but I have a love/hate relationship with FB. On the one hand I love it because it enabled me to find three special friends I had lost touch with and I have since made lots of new friends who have become, if you like, real friends.

On the other hand, there are an awful lot of weirdos out there.

 

When I first joined FB I accepted every offer I received, happy that people wanted to be my friends, but after a while I began to suspect that a lot of these people were not what they seemed. Call me paranoid, but now I check each one. Are they an author? Do they read? Do they like dogs? So that was what made me notice the request from Jan McNamara. She certainly reads and likes dogs but also she is a narrator who  lives and works in Canada.

What a perfect person to do an audio book of The Cottage at the End of the World, I thought, My books are mainly set in England but my main readership is in America. A Canadian accent – half way between the two – might be ideal.

I looked her up on ACX – the audio production branch of Amazon – she has her own studio and she has an impressive number of audio books under her belt. I listened to her voice and liked it very much – young, clear and friendly. So I asked her and she accepted. Hurrah!

 

Three chapters in, we had been talking about what we might do next and she suggested we pause The Cottage and do a Christmas book. “We’ve just about got time,” she said.

So that’s the next thing on the agenda, folks. Yesterday she finished it, in record time and with no errors. It should launch on Amazon by the end of the month.                                                   

I’m so excited.

I haven’t forgotten about the sequel – working title, Murder is a Fool’s Game – and I’ve picked up from where I left off. This one needs a fair bit of research into Morris dancing and folk rituals in Oxfordshire. I’m looking forward to that, but something else has grabbed my attention.

I recently had a conversation with some friends about a series of weird dreams I had as a child – two conversations, actually, the first with a couple of old friends and the second with my trusted writing group of 3 authors. They all said I should write the dream sequences as a story. Now I can’t seem to do anything else until I’ve written it.

The more I think about these dreams, the more intrigued I am about where they came from. They occurred long before I had any experience of science fiction, beginning when I was about 6 or 7 years old, when most of my reading consisted of Enid Blyton books and long before Doctor Who was broadcast, which I think was my first encounter with that genre.

But now I analyse those dreams, I find myself interpreting them against a background of alien invaders and a multi-dimensional universe, ideas which are now well-entrenched in literature.

 

It’s almost as if I were picking up these strange ideas from the ether – ideas which were way beyond the understanding of such a young child.
I’m hoping that I’ll have the story finished in a week or so.

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Meantime, keep safe and keep reading. There’s a universe out there to explore.