After twenty-five years, I have returned to publishing my work. This time on-line in formats that didn’t exist when last I peeped over the parapet. Yes, I’ve played with blogs and stuff over the years, but I wanted somewhere to actually ‘put’ my work that wasn’t a folder on a private PC or half a ream of scrappy A4 mouldering on a shelf, so here it is. I’m reopening a very old can of worms.
Full disclosure: way back when, at the end of the last century, if you want to get technical, Gollancz put out two of my novels, The Chessmen and Fatal Climate, under the completely made up pen-name David Hood), thrillers that showed off a technological background I’ve otherwise done my best to hide, and had vaguely Science-Fiction themes as their back drop.
‘The Chessmen’ was described by The Daily Telegraph as a ‘contender for the best first crime novel of the year’, even though it wasn’t a crime novel. It went on to be translated into German, Polish and Greek, and bomb at sales counters in all three languages.
That second novel, ‘Fatal Climate’, proved a profound piece of prophesy. It was written in the middle of terrible droughts in 1998, and was predicated on the idea that Global Warming (comprehensively denied by government scientists at the time) was going to cause huge storms and unpredictable climatic events. Who knew? It was so ahead of its time, it didn’t make it into translation. As my agent said at the time, ‘It’s being printed but I wouldn’t say it’s been published.’
These days, if you can find a copy of either novel, you’ll be lucky, and maybe rich in the long term. In fact, if you can find a hard back copy of ‘Fatal Climate’, you maybe very rich, especially if it doesn’t have the made-up author’s made-up signature inside (even I don’t have one of those).
Several short stories won local competitions and I placed in both the International Fish Prize and the HE Bates Centenary Memorial Competition, but a long hiatus followed early successes because – to be honest – I had to make a living in a real job. I had kids, what else can I say? But I kept up my membership of Leicester Writers Club (was the Club President in 2022/23) and played first-reader for a number of published authors (books like ‘The Bone Readers’ by Jacob Ross, which won the inaugural Jhalak Prize and made it into ‘Big Jubilee Read’ list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors). I also led some pretty awesome Creative Writing workshops (well, I enjoyed them!) and accidentally won the ‘Words With Jam’ Short Story Competition in 2018 (long story, I’ll blog about it one day.)
Am I working on a new novel? Well, sure, isn’t everybody?
Forged Truth - Fiction is the only truth 