Kath Middleton's Blog, page 11

Happy New Year

It’s been an amazing year for me. Since the beginning of 2014 I've released two publications bearing my own name and I hope the coming year will see more books from me through the good offices of my publisher, Hilltop.

I’ve had some very thoughtful reviews and enough people have enjoyed my stories and asked when the next is due out to keep me plotting, writing, and tweaking. The story I’m now working on, and heaven knows when that will be published – it’s way down the queue – is the one I wrote in November – NaNoWriMo. Since then, I finished the story and am now working through and adding a bit of finesse. It’s another new genre for me and I’m having a lot of fun.

I hope to have a new publication out before too long and I'm starting 2015 by embarking upon a new book. I wish you all the best for the New Year. Happy reading!

NaNoWriMo - How it went

National Novel Writing Month, November, is the occasion on which the writer promises to attempt to write fifty thousand words of a novel in one month. This is my first time signing up to the website and I found that having somewhere that totalled up my word scores (although I do that myself), produced a graph and gave me a breakdown of how many words per day I needed to write to complete the 50K was a great spur.

Initially I wrote like there was a fire under my chair. I knew I’d have some days where I couldn’t keep to the total so I ‘banked’ extra words. This gave me leeway for the lean days. I really enjoyed the challenge and also enjoyed sharing the totals with my ‘buddies’, some of whom have made the total and others, for various reasons, haven’t. Still, we’ve written more than we would have done without the impetus of NaNoWriMo.

What next? The website is encouraging me to buy a winners’ tee-shirt. I’m so vain that I’m tempted! But I still need to finish the story. I hope to have that done by Christmas and there seem to be editing sessions in the new year, where all those who completed their novel are encouraged to take the next steps and produce a polished piece of work.

New Year’s resolution – to turn a month’s keyboard frenzy into a story worth reading.

NaNoWriMo - What's it all about?

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. This takes place in November. Well, fair enough. In Britain it’s too cold to do much else. This time last year I was just about to embark on my first novella, Ravenfold, which I began on the last day of October. By the last week in November I’d finished the first draft. I felt sure it wouldn’t run to novel length so I didn’t sign up to the site but kept my own word count throughout the month. This time I thought I’d do it properly. When you join the site you find authors you know who are prepared to be your writing buddies. I think that means they will happily poke you from the side-lines if you flag!

I have an idea – the germ of a story. As usual with me, it’s a genre I’ve not written in before, although I’ve always enjoyed reading it. This will be Kath’s First Fantasy Novel. I tend to think of it as Fantasy-Lite because there are no orcs, elves, giants or monumental battles.

It takes place in an imagined country, somewhere in the region of Scandinavia. And mystical things happen.

The novel starts here…

A Haunting for Halloween

The Waterfall

Hinckley Hall was said to be haunted. It had changed hands several times in recent years because people couldn't settle there. Some places simply had an aura about them. They had an unsettling effect on those who lived there. Finally it went on the market at a rock bottom price because bad news gets round and nobody wanted to live there anymore.

   It was bought by George Graham, a property developer, who was delighted with the place and its spectacular views. Because it was so cheap, he would be able to afford to lavish money on the renovations and he intended to turn the place into a hotel. He planned a spectacular opening with a full-page feature in a glossy lifestyle magazine so that the people with the money would know he was open for business.

   His wife, Helena, said he was mad.

   "What are you thinking spending all that money on a haunted house?" she asked him. "Nervous people won't come at all and others won't sleep in the haunted room."
   "What haunted room?" he asked. "I had a good shufti round when I went to view the place. I'm not daft, you know. I asked the agent which room was haunted. He didn't even know. He'd heard the rumours like everyone else but he didn't know the specifics. Anyway, I managed to contact the seller. The agent wouldn't give me contact details but I know how to use the internet."
   "What did he have to say, then?"
   "He said it was the Blue Room. Lady Sarah Hinckley is supposed to have died in there about three hundred years ago. I went back for another look and I paid special attention to that room. I tell you, I couldn't sense anything."
   "I should think you'd have to sleep in the room. Don't ghosts come out at night?"
   "I think that's the superstition. Don't believe it myself. I think, once a rumour starts, people are open to suggestion. They think they feel cold or they've heard a creepy noise or something. It's all a load of rubbish."
   "I hope you're right!"

    The renovation work went on apace and George and Helena decided they needed to be on site to keep the job on track. The rooms were in no state to be lived in so they brought in a caravan. The grounds of Hinckley Hall were magnificent and had been well laid out many years before. Gorgeous lawns swept right up to the front of the hall and were currently being thoroughly trashed by the workmen and their vehicles.
   "Oh, look what they've done to the grass!" Helena cried.
   "Don't worry," George reassured her. "I've been in touch with a landscape gardener. His outfit will sort it all out for us when the builders have gone. Not a problem, he said."

    George liked to be hands-on with his building projects but Helena's skills didn't come into their own until the structural work was finished. She was an interior designer and it would be her job to turn the empty spaces inside into luxurious rooms for those who wanted to be thoroughly spoilt for a few days. She was looking forward to this.

    George and his team redesigned the interior of the building, ensuring the plumbing was upgraded and every room had en-suite facilities. They also totally rewired the place so there were enough sockets for modern living. A luxury kitchen ensured that the food they offered would be second to none. While all this was happening and Helena had nothing to do, she took to exploring the grounds.

   There was a network of paths which would give their guests some lovely walks without leaving the premises. There was a small lake, a rock garden and even a waterfall. It was all so beautiful. Whenever Helena took the path which led to the top of the waterfall, she felt as though she was coming out of shelter and into the wind. It was up a hill of course, but there was, however still the day, an inexplicable draught. The view from up there was stunning. It was the most elevated point in the grounds and the house stood proud a few hundred yards away. She could see the back of the building from the top of the falls and would go up there to stand in the strange breeze and watch the progress of the build.

   "We're gutting the Blue Room today," George told her one morning. "I've still not seen anything ghostly and the lads haven't either. Do you reckon we'll find anything when we rip all that old Anaglypta and thick paint off? What's the betting on a secret room or a bricked-up nun?"

   Helena tutted at him and went off for a walk again.
   "I'll keep you posted," he yelled after her, laughing.
   She let her mind and her feet wander. Perhaps for tradition's sake she would keep that room blue when she redecorated. It would be good to be able to keep the story going for the tourists. In her mind she chose fabrics for the soft furnishings, decided on swags and tails for the curtains and thought she would go for a patterned paper on one wall.

   She slowly climbed the rugged path to the head of the waterfall and as she turned from the sheltered side into the usual wind, right at the edge of hearing, she became aware of a sound like a baby's cry. She turned her head this way and that to try and get an idea of direction. She couldn't hear it now. Had it really been there? Such a small sound. Was it in her imagination? Was it just this inexplicable draught?

   When she got back, George saw her approaching and went out to her with a spare hard hat in his hand.
   "Want to come and look at the haunted room, then?"
  "What have you found?" she asked. He wouldn't tell her. He must have wanted her to see for herself.
   "But there's nothing here!" she said, twirling around in the middle of the empty, echoing room.
   "Exactly!" George said with a smug smile. "Nothing at all. I told you. That 'haunted room' stuff is a load of baloney!"

   Certainly, as she looked about her, there was no sign of bricked-up apertures or trapdoors. Nothing to suggest any 'leftover echoes' from the past. Against one of the walls the workmen had propped some lengths of plasterboard to be used in making an en-suite cubicle.
   "You've checked under the floorboards?" she asked. George and the two workmen looked at one another.
   "Erm... no. I never thought of that."

    George tapped the boards with a broom handle listening in case any sounded different; hollow. One of the lads lifted a couple of boards by the window. They came up easily. There was a slight gust, a puff of dust, as the boards came up. Inside was a small piece of cloth. It didn't seem to be anything identifiable. Just some old-fashioned fabric, perhaps cut from a woman's dress long ago. Inside it, carefully wrapped in the dark green, patterned velvet, was a pair of small, black leather shoes. They looked a size or two too small for Helena's feet. A woman's, then, but a petite woman's. Their leather was still soft as a glove and they had slightly elevated heels with a metal edge, presumably to prevent wear.

    “Oh, aren’t these just sweet?” Helena asked, holding them almost reverently. “We could put them in a display cabinet in Reception and get the story of the Haunted Room printed up and framed to show next to it. Tourists love that kind of thing!”
   “I think you’re on to something there,” said George. “If it gets to be famous we could even charge more for the Haunted Room. Like a challenge, you know?”
   “I think we need to sleep in it first, though. If it’s too spooky we can just have it as a sort of ghostly exhibition. Maybe I can find out something about Sarah Hinckley and we can make a feature of it?”

    Until the rooms were ready for decoration, Helena continued her walks in the grounds. There was an ideal spot by the lake for a little pavilion. She made some notes to ask George if he thought it was a good idea. It would make a superb photo-spot for weddings. Yes, they could branch out into weddings and functions. She was fired up with ideas. Each time she climbed the path to the top of the falls, she listened for the baby’s cry. Her heart beat faster each time she heard it. More often than not when she visited the spot, she heard the little, hiccupping sob of a tiny child.

    Eventually, her turn came and though she didn’t do the decorating herself, she supervised a team of painters and paper-hangers. Her strengths were in soft furnishings and she chose fabrics, cut and stitched and was able to produce the most opulent effects for a fraction of what they would have paid if they’d bought them in.

    They were almost ready to organise their grand opening and, although they had their own rooms in the attic level, Helena insisted they spend a night in the Blue Room, now decorated dramatically in turquoise with accents of chocolate brown. Three of the walls were painted in the blue with a marbled effect and one was hung with a gorgeous paper featuring peacock feathers with gold highlights. The carpet was brown and so thick you could leave footprints in it. Gold fittings in the en-suite added to the feeling of luxury. Helena was pleased with herself.

    They settled to sleep. George tried to convince her that if anything supernatural had clung to the small shoes, it would now be transferred to the reception desk and disturb nobody at night.

    The night progressed and George began to snore softly. Helena nudged him awake around 2:00 a.m. to ask if he thought it had gone cold.
   “The heating’s gone off, love. Of course it’s cold.”
   “Can you hear anything?” she asked, determined to keep him awake and on the alert, as she was.
   “Not a dicky bird. Now go to sleep!” he instructed.

    Helena heard creaks, groans, the natural settling of a wooden framed house as the temperature changed at night. She started to believe George was right. Then just on the edge of sleep and the borders of hearing, she heard footsteps. She poked poor, long-suffering George again.
   “Listen!” her urgent whisper and the bruise-inducing elbow shattered his sleep again.
   “What now?” he muttered. He seemed to be trying to make his brain understand where his body was.
   “Footsteps! Can you hear them? Can you hear that gentle ‘clop, clop’ of footsteps on floorboards?”
   “Where the hell’s it coming from?” he whispered, his mouth falling open as the sound grew closer, louder.
   “It’s in this room! But how can it be?” Helena asked. “There’s carpet everywhere. You could clomp round here in steel-soled clogs and not be heard.”

    They lay side by side, rigid and tense, as they heard the footfalls crossing the room, passing right by George’s side of the bed and halting at the window. After a few seconds, when they began to release their pent-up breaths, it began again, as though somebody had turned away from observing the view and re-crossed the room, back toward the door.
   “Now do you think it’s haunted?” Helena asked, as the footsteps crossed the room and back a third time, clearly ringing on wooden boards.
   “I can’t think how else to explain it. I don’t believe in ghosts, though.”
   “You believe your own ears, don’t you?” she whispered from the other side of the bed.

   Next morning, after a restless night, when each expected another noise, another temperature shift, another heart-thumping fright, they decided to make some enquiries about Lady Sarah Hinckley.
   “Let’s assume she was crossing the room to look out of the window,” George said. “What’s the view from this window?” He pulled back and tied the drapes carefully – Helena was watching, after all – and stared out across the grounds.
   “What’s that big hill back there? You walk around the gardens a bit, don’t you?”
   “It’s the hill where the waterfall tumbles into the little lake,” Helena said. “That’s a bit spooky too.”
    “You and your ‘spooky’! Who ever heard of a haunted waterfall? What does it do? Shriek and drip blood?”
   “George, you can be so sarcastic at times. It’s not clever and it’s not an endearing trait! You didn’t believe the room was haunted, did you?”
   “I’m still not sure I do but I can’t explain it any other way. Alright then, in what way is the waterfall spooky?”
   “Will you come with me for a walk and you’ll see what I mean? Probably.”
   “Probably?”
   “Well, most times, I hear something. Just occasionally I don’t.”

   They put on their coats and took what was George’s first walk around the grounds of his ‘almost ready to open’ hotel.
   “I can’t believe you’ve never wanted to explore this place,” Helena said. “It’s a huge selling point. Think of the wedding-photo opportunities.”

   They walked hand in hand along the paths, admiring the solitude of the garden and the way its winding tracks gave upon new and unexpected views. Even with dozens, hundreds of people here, you could manage to find a bit all to yourself and imagine you were alone.

   They turned a final bend and came upon the steep path which led up the side of the hill to the source of the waterfall.
   “Blimey, it’s breezy up here all of a sudden!” George said. “I should have put a scarf on.”
   “It’s always like that up here,” Helena replied. “Always draughty, chilly. Let’s stop and see if we can hear anything.” For almost a minute they stood together, the strange little breeze whiffling through their hair.
   “Nope! Can’t hear any… Is that a baby?” They both turned their heads slightly. From up here it was always hard to tell where the sound was coming from. Helena had tried to trace it so many times without success.
   “I think it’s coming from down there,” said George, pointing down the river of shining water, splashing into a little pool below before running in glistening rills into the lake.

   They walked slowly back down the path in silence, straining their ears to hear the sound again. It had quite gone and there was nothing but the chuckling of the water on the stones when they got to the bottom.
   “I never hear it anywhere but at the top,” Helena said.
   “I’m happy to advertise a haunted room,” said George. “There are some people that will really fancy that – to tell their mates about. But I think I’ll go easy on advertising a haunted waterfall. That’s a bit too bizarre!”

    The grand opening of Hinckley Hall Country House Hotel was announced in the local press and in the quality glossy magazine with which George had an arrangement. It would take place in a week’s time. They had a chef working on menus, a cleaning team ensuring that no builders’ dust was left in any dark corners and George had hired gardeners to repair the damaged lawn and tidy up the gardens. They were not exactly neglected but they looked so much better for a bit of pruning and weeding.

    Helena had looked on the internet to try to find something about Sarah Hinckley but in vain. Then she thought to look in the local history library. A helpful librarian brought out a couple of ancient books for her and she leafed through searching for the name.

   ‘Lady Sarah Hinckley. Born 1698; died 1717. Scandal surrounded her death. She was incarcerated in the family Manor House for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. She is said to have killed herself by jumping from her bedroom window. There is no record of the birth or the sex of the child.’
    “Yes!” said Helena, then looked around in embarrassment in case anyone had noticed. She was still alone in the room, though. She went through to ask the librarian if she could have a photocopy of the original, which she intended to use for her ‘haunting’ display, with the small shoes.

 She returned to the hotel that afternoon with a look of triumph on her face and a sheet of paper in her hands.
   “Look, I think we’ve got her! It was a tragic suicide. She threw herself from the window of that room!” Suddenly she realised her elation was callous. It was a young girl’s life they were talking about. No doubt she was driven by parental cruelty to take such a final step.
   “It’s going to make a good story for the opening, isn’t it?” George said. “Pity we’re too late to add it to the glossy. It’s gone to press – weeks ago, I think.”
   “It’ll catch the locals and we can include it when we re-print our brochure.”

    The day before the hotel opened to the public there was a big reception for local business people, the newspapers, the chamber of commerce. Just about everyone George could think of. All was ready apart from last minute titivation in the grounds. One of the lads had decided stones around the plunge-pool beneath the waterfall were getting mossy and could constitute a slip hazard. He’d taken the big, surrounding stones off, one by one, marked their position on a diagram and scrubbed the moss from them. Then he lifted some of the stones in the bottom of the pool only a couple of feet deep in the centre, so he could take out the pond-weed growing there.

    His freezing fingers began to lift out miniature rib bones, a small skull, the whole tiny, pathetic skeleton of a new-born baby.

 

The Lost Metaphor

I love metaphor. There are different ways of comparing things. You can say ‘the frost is like jewels on the grass’ or you can say ‘the frost is jewels on the grass’ and I think the latter is more immediate. Nobody thinks for a minute that there really are jewels there, of course. If we say ‘is like’ we are using a simile. If we say ‘is’ we’re using a metaphor.

A metaphor we’re all familiar with is ‘The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.’ What an image! Not that we think the moon is anything but a lump of rock but the comparison works on so many levels. Apart from the fact that you’d trash the precision of the poem’s rhythm, ‘The moon was like a ghostly galleon’ just doesn’t stir me up to the same extent. 

David Niven’s autobiography (one of them) is called The Moon’s a Balloon. Again, it puts pictures directly into our minds.

The problem occurs when people don’t know that the word or phrase is a metaphor. One which I originally thought was brilliant was Juggernaut. I don’t mean the Marvel Comic Book creation but as it is currently used in British English meaning a huge lorry. Juggernaut is a statue, an idol, of a Hindu god and it was hauled through the streets on a massive cart under which devotees threw themselves in sacrifice to be crushed under the wheels. Someone – some unsung genius – coined the metaphor which compared this with the huge vehicles taking goods through tiny villages and the inadequate roads of small towns. How brilliant. We sacrifice our clean air, our buildings, our quality of life and the safety of our children, for the great god commerce. It’s a wonderful comparison and it works. The trouble is, many, possibly most, people now think that Juggernaut is simply a word which means lorry. Eventually, no doubt, that’s all it will be, and the wonderful imagery of the original metaphor will be lost.

I wish I knew who came up with that metaphor. I would like to shake that person’s hand. It’s wonderful, but because we don’t understand it, we’re losing it.


Thanks to Jonathan Hill for allowing me the use of his excellent 'balloon' photograph.

Too many notes, Mr Mozart!

Recently, and for the first time since I threw Virginia Woolf's Orlando across the bedroom three years ago, I gave up on a book. I didn't throw this one as I was reading it on my Nexus but I'd had enough. I’m getting to the age when you don’t buy green bananas in case you’re not around when they ripen so I have less patience than I used to with a book that’s dragging me down. It was Fantasy, which I usually enjoy but it broke many of the rules, as I perceive them as a reader.

It had an alternative world. Great. There were loads of characters, all with new, unmemorable names so the reader has no mental peg to hang them on. Not so great. It was populated by some sentient, talking animals. Fine. But if you define your animals as being like pigs, then call them noggletrugs you've added another word for the poor reader to remember.

There has to be a danger, a journey or quest, some fights - all the usual things. But the reader struggling to remember who's who will very soon forget the whys and wherefores. I literally lost the plot while trying to remember all the names of the characters and their relationship to one another. I couldn't remember who was going where and why. I didn't care why the noggletrugs were fighting with the… for flip's sake, if they’re like goats, call them goats! I stopped reading.

Tolkien had lots of characters in LOTR but he'd introduced some of them in The Hobbit and eased us in gently. He called his trees trees but the tree-herders were Ents. In giving the Ents characters, a story, a part in the plot, he made them memorable. But he called his horses horses and his eagles eagles. We were in with a shout.

I know that Mozart’s patron was supposedly showing his ignorance of the musical style when complaining that there were too many notes, but I find myself thinking there are too many names in some books. I feel that if the character isn’t important enough for us to get to know him/her so that the name has a meaning and not merely a sound, then that character probably doesn’t need to be there.

At the risk of appearing a philistine, like Emperor Joseph II, I have to say, ‘Too many names, Mr Author!’

What if...?

The connection between plant breeding and writing novels? They both start with, 'What would happen if...?'

I love tomatoes. I grow a variety of colours but I choose them for their flavour. The dark ones at the top of the picture are known to me as French Black. A friend from a gardening forum bought some on holiday in a French market, loved them and saved the seeds, which come true to type. 

Underneath those are the classic red Alicante. This is an old variety our dads probably grew and has the old-fashioned tomato taste you don't get in the shop-bought. Again, if you save the seed, the resultant tomatoes are the same as their parents.

To their left are the fabulous Green Zebras. In my opinion this is the world's best grilling tomato with its balance of sweetness and acidity. Unripe, it's pale green and dark green. It's ripe when the pale green becomes yellow and the tomato feels soft. This also breeds true. These three are all pollinated by their own pollen so there's no genetic diversity.

At the bottom (there's a pound coin for scale) the oval yellow tomatoes are my own variety. I have one variety which I cross-pollinated but it's not in the picture as I didn't grow it this year. It'll be on next year's menu. The yellow is a selection from Sungold, a well-known orange cherry tomato famed for its flavour. It's also famed for its price - around £3 for 6 seeds! That's because it's a cross from two parents and has to be crossed each season.

People who know these things will tell you that you can't save seeds from a first generation cross of two varieties - known as an F1 hybrid - like Sungold. Don't be deterred if you want to do it. You can do anything! What you won't get if you do, is a Sungold tomato from your next generation. I did it about 7 years ago (it's called unhybriding or dehybridising) and from each generation of several plants, I saved seed from those with the best flavour. I no longer have a round orange tomato but an oval yellow one and each year I chose a flavour I like. I also select out the ones with the tough skins. This tomato is called Sweet Eleanor (after a grandchild). These Sweet Eleanors mostly come true from seed but there's still a little genetic 'settling down' going on. I've never had one that wasn't worth eating and the current line is producing a delightful tomato with a good balance of sweet/sharp flavours.

Incidentally, if anybody would like seeds of any of these, let me know before the season is over and I'll make sure I save enough. 

Short Story - Dead End

This short story from me came second in a monthly competition run by Michael Brookes and you can see the three prizewinners on his website if you click his name.

Here's mine

Dead End 

It has been reported in some of the more dubious press outlets that 3.7 million Americans believe that they have been subjected to alien abduction. Ridiculous. Why would aliens choose one nationality above others? I know that they don't. They took me.

I lost a week from my life last year. I went to bed as usual and when I woke I assumed it was the following morning. I felt a bit sore but otherwise I had no reason to think anything was amiss. People asked where I'd been when I went into work 'next day' and I didn't know what they were talking about. Reality came back slowly, like the snatched morning memories of nightmare.

I went to bed one night and woke, sedated and partially anaesthetised, in a gleaming laboratory staffed with metal ‘workers’. I never knew where it was situated: on a ship: on another planet? An ovum was removed from my body and returned fertilised. I was left alone then, but for the metal beings which brought me food and drink and removed my waste products with mechanical efficiency. My belly swelled at a frightening rate and three days later the true nightmare began.

The hot, tight mound of my abdomen began to lurch and writhe. It appeared that the gestation period was mercifully short. I lay upon the couch, groaning as my body tried to wrench itself apart. I was mortally afraid. I did not see any of my abductors so, thank god, I didn’t know what the father of the hybrid child looked like. I struggled to expel it, screaming both in pain and in rage at the violation of my body.

With one final lurching contraction I expelled the monster in a slurry of stinking mucous and it lay, writhing and tormented, between my trembling thighs. It was unnaturally thin and long and had been curled, folded, within me. It stretched and opened a ghastly mouth ringed with needle-like teeth and I could immediately see that there was no throat, no oesophagus. This thing could not feed! I felt elated and hoped they would discard this as a failed hybridisation experiment.

They returned me to my bed at home but the horror is not yet over. Unwilling to admit defeat, the alien beings seem bent upon keeping this creature alive, perhaps to backcross it and introduce some element of its genetic make-up into their moribund species. I am not expected to feed it as I would a human child. Thank god! But they return it to me every night to clutch at my body, lie along the length of me in a travesty of a human hug, and leech the life-force from my body as it grasps me with its cold, sticky limbs.

This cannot go on. I am losing weight and will not live much longer. When I die, it will die too, this hybrid disaster; this evolutionary dead end. I am happy, on both counts.

I know it's only August...

I know it’s only August but I’m a slow plotter! I’m starting to think about my Christmas cards and gifts which I usually make by hand. In fact I had a minor triumph at a well-known supermarket yesterday. I was looking for metallic pens and the same pack of three – bronze, silver and gold, like the Olympics – was marked on one shelf as £2 and on a separate fitment as £5. It wasn’t a case of something being put back in the wrong place. The shelf label bore the description, correctly in both cases.

‘Try your luck, Kath,’ I told myself and I asked for it to be scanned before I bought my other shopping. It came up as £5 even though it was taken from the £2 display. It was good value for the latter but I wouldn’t have bought it at the former price. Management had to be summoned! ‘We will honour the £2 price but we’re changing the display label,’ they told me. Too right you’ll honour it!

Where was I – preparations for Christmas? I get so annoyed when the shops do this! However, another thing I hope for Christmas is that my third publication will be available. This is a longer work and is (intended to be) funny. Mostly. So don’t forget. Post early… or something.

Message in a Bottle - paperbacks!

I'm happy to announce that the paperback of Message in a Bottle is now available from Amazon for £4.50.

I received my first batch of paperbacks on Friday and I'm thrilled to bits with them. Jonathan Hill, who does all the technical side of my publishing, designed the cover, formatted and uploaded them to Createspace. He received a warning message to say that some illustration inside had insufficient dots per inch and would come out fuzzy. There are no illustrations but we decided to go for a small order initially, just so I could check. There was no problem and the first lot have vanished already. Better get another order in.

And in other news... I have completed a novella on a supernatural theme and enjoyed it so much that I've just written the opening line of another. I think I'll publish them together as a double bill.