Skip to main content

Newness, Neighbours, Novels - and Bruises!

Fabian: An Artisan-Sorcerer Story out 09.09.16
I can now announce that the fourth novel in the Artisan-Sorcerer Series is now available in book shops the world over, in both paperback and ebook formats.

I hope you all enjoy Fabian, and will consider writing a review on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble or your blog or social networking site.  We indie authors can always use a bit of help, you know!

I'm already developing ideas for the fifth novel.  I already know how it's going to end and who is going to die.  I'm not quite sure how our heroes are going to arrive at that point yet, but it will come.  The process is like daydreaming.  I toy around with an idea and allow my imagination to go anywhere it wants to, sometimes prodding it along a little with 'what if' questions but not trying to force ideas in any specific direction as that tends to limit creativity.  In this way, I end up with a flexible plot outline without having written even one word yet.

There has been a huge increase in webtraffic here, so I'd like to extend a warm hello to you all.  Please feel free to leave comments.  All comments are screened to prevent spammers from making a nuisance of themselves, but other comments are most welcome.

There's also been a big surge in traffic to my Hubpages.  I plan to add new material to that site very soon, and so I encourage readers to keep an eye on it.

Richard and I have new neighbours.  They began the process of renovating their house before we moved here in March 2015, and it's been a huge project.  Apparently, nothing had been done to their house since the 1950s and so they had to rewire, replumb, repair and replaster interior walls, install central heating plus a new kitchen and bathroom, install new windows and doors throughout, knock down a sagging garden wall...  You get the picture - we had the noise; lots of it!  The young couple seem really nice.  They have a new baby girl and a little boy who's around four.

As yet the garden wall hasn't been replaced, which means our two little dogs keep running into their garden.  They knew this would happen and they're ok with it.  Poppi even invited herself into their house yesterday, as their back door was open.  New fencing is due to arrive soon.  Once that's been installed they'll be able to collect their own dog, a Westie - and you know I love Westies! - which is currently staying with their relatives.

Richard had nasty fall this week, though he readily admitted it was his own fault for standing on an office chair - the type with wheels - rather than put one of our stepladders to good use.  He had wanted to reach down a book from a high shelf.  Well, the chair went one way, he went the other way and landed on a folding table which promptly folded, taking both him and a stack of hi-fi gear crashing to the floor.  From downstairs I heard an alarmed yell, followed by a short series of crash-bang-wallops, then a loud groan.  So from the bottom of the stairs I called out, "Are you all right?"  No, he said, and so I hared it upstairs and found him a bit dazed but already slowly clambering to his feet.  Anyway, other than for a few mustard-yellow and purple bruises, fortunately he's ok. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Cure for Aging?

"All that we profess to do is but this, - to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effort of time.  This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood.  In our order we hold most noble -, first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body.  But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret which I will only hint to thee at present, by which heat or calorific, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpectual renovator...." Zanoni, book IV, chapter II, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first published in 1842. Oroboros keyring - Spooky Cute Designs The idea of being able to achieve an immortal life is probably as old as human life itself.  Folklore and myt...

Remembering Richie Tattoo Artist's Studio

Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist".  I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri...

Dear Diary...

Do you keep a diary? Why did you start it, and, if you started one then stopped, why was that? What sort of things do (or did) you write about? I ask as, as a long-time diarist myself, there is an interesting piece in The Guardian today which talks about one woman's diary habit, which she began at the age of fourteen. I started a diary around that age too, but destroyed it after my mother accused me of using cocaine.  A stern scene followed, with both parents perched ram-rod straight in their armchairs, while I was subjected to a heated inquisition. Where had I bought it, and who from? Didn't I know such things led to death and doom? I struggled to decipher their bewildering accusations, until Mum blurted out, "I read it in your diary!" To find my diary, Mum would first have had to rummage through my dressing table, obviously when I wasn't around to protest. Her intrusion on my privacy was assumed by both parents to be acceptable, and now, with this handwritten c...