Sunday 14 October 2012

New cover?



It is my grateful heart that makes me invent God anew every day. - The Immoralist.

How horrible it is to start in the semi-darkness before dawn! - “
I have seen the sky shiver as it waited for dawn. One by one the stars faded. - “

Watching For The Dawn

..is back on track! Have done what is probably a final edit on the 65k words written so far (already edited down so that's a good figure) and last evening started on new writing to complete the book.

Impressions: it flows well from We Go Down Slowly Rising, and they blend they admirably as part of a series.

The locations are a bit more diverse in this sequel than the first book: beginning in Uplands, Swansea, the action moves to Whitchurch in Cardiff and then to the bulk of the narrative, which happens in Newport and Caerleon.

I took a photograph yesterday by the Usk - close to where the cover photo for We Go Down... was taken -  and have mocked-up a cover for this new novel. I'll post it here.

A lot of quotes in this book too: as before, some Mao. And much of Andre Gide.


Thursday 11 October 2012

The Bee And Other Stories



Published 10.10.12, Kindle ebook

The Bee And Other Stories

And the last thing I'm publishing for a while (again, as a Kindle ebook), so I can get back down to work finishing Watching For The Dawn.

The Bee And Other Stories is a collection of 11 short stories written after my three extended visits to India, between 1986 and 1998.

One of the stories, A Night At Mrs Rajalaxmi's, was published in the Sci-fi magazine The Third Alternative (Summer, 1994), otherwise they are previously unpublished.

The locations span much of the subcontinent, including: Kashmir; Fatehpur Sikri; Goa; Kerala; Agra; Mahaballipuram and many other places.

The Bee And Other Stories is available for download now.




Tuesday 9 October 2012

Tangier, late 1980s










Under The Hill - Morocco

Under The Hill is set in Morocco, particularly in and around the city of Chefchaouen just inland from Tangier. 

Much of the atmosphere drawn on by me was from a brief - 48 hours - visit to Tangier in 1987 or 1988. 

I will post a few of the photos I took on that trip.

Under The Hill


Under The Hill, a short novel, now available as a Kindle ebook. 

New Old Novel!

An early, unpublished novel of mine, Under The Hill is now available as a Kindle ebook.

It's a short novel completed in the mid-1980s. I had just begun to send it off to publishers and agents when Paulo Coelho's novel The Alchemist was published to wide acclaim. I read it with incredulity: it was -totally coincidentally - very similar in subject matter, tone and style to Under The Hill.

I gave up sending my novel out and since then it's been collecting digital dust along with a considerable amount of other prose: fiction (novels, novellas, stories), plays (rejected by BBC Radio), travel articles, essays and criticism of Art.

There is another short novel completed in the late 1990s which I hope to make available soon also, in the same format.

Watching For The Dawn, the sequel to We Go Down... and promised for this summer, I have now put back until the winter. It remains tantalisingly close to completion though I experiencing something of a block in this effort.