Four weeks to go.

Jan 2024. Never actually thought we’d make it out of ‘23 TBH.

Where I am, in Pembrokeshire, it’s raining, raining hard. It’s been raining pretty much every day since December.

The ground is flooded, the garden’s dead, we’ve had back to back storms and dozens, yes, dozens, of power cuts. My PC died on Christmas morning, couldn’t take the power cuts any more. I needed a new mobo, cpu and ram. But this was that time of the year when everything stops. Amazingly I managed to get everything delivered by the 28th and got back up and running by the evening. Now, after the long, long stretch of the end of ‘24 I can think of what lies ahead.

Every now and then I have to remind myself I have a new book coming out, and now, after years of waiting for it, I’m now just four weeks away from Quint being published. That didn’t happen last year, in fact, I haven’t had a book published since 2018.

For most of us ‘23 has been a hard year, and I’m heading into this year, like millions of others, with less money and more debt than I started last year. Every thing coming in is less, every thing going out is more. But I’ve got to put hope into this book, I’ve got to get behind it more than any other book I’ve written because it means so much to me.

I know that might sound odd (it’s a book about Quint from JAWS, how serious can it be?) but it’s a novel that I think has a perfect timing and resonance for today. And I’m serious.

There are themes and attitudes in the novel that when I re-read it seem to be all around us now but there is hope in the story. Obviously we all know Quint’s ultimate fate so I made this book to end on a comparatively more positive outlook and when we see Quint in JAWS he’s not exactly a negative person, in fact I’d argue he’s the jolliest asshole out of the cast, so I wanted to roll into that character, the comedy of his life, the tragedy of his life and how at the end of it he’s still smiling and singing (until those black eyes roll over white, of course).

Feb 2024 it’s out. I hope you like it and let me know what you think.