Worth a grand or two

The entertainer Max Bygraves used to say I'm gonna tell you a story, and here's a thousand words worth, a short story or the beginning of a novel? Crop the picture, frame it carefully like a film maker and it is a gateway to somewhere else. A rooftop through the trees when you're out in the park is familar territory, but apply the film-maker's eye and curiousity glimpsed a place of intrigue and adventure. That's the start; what sort of business could you conduct in a large house surrounded by trees and parkland? Plenty of space to run around in and you have the grown up adventure playground, on the surface, It's what lies beneath that's interesting. Crop the familiar and lose the surroundings, see the detail in the imagination and let it run. Team building, corporate activity, mystery, secret meetings, whatever it suggests!

Bottle Stacks

The wrong thing, or person in the wrong place. It's possibly something we've all experienced, but not with the same consequences as Steel, the character in my novel Iceline. He's on holiday in Scotland, blagging a dive where he can when an empty place turns up. He's checking his demand valve one night at the bottle stack when things turn nasty.
The bottle stacks are by the compressor shed, every diver knows about them and which one is which, the empty and the full. Occasionally one does get missed and shoved in the wrong pile, so when you turn up the next morning fuelled by coffee and bacon sandwiches there is a bit of standing around waiting while the cylinder is filled. Steel finds an empty in the full stack and when he tries to tell the guy who challenged him he's abducted, beaten and eventually dumped in the mountains for the weather to finish him off, and that's where the story begins.

Missed

Postings thin for the last month - been busy. Time on the blog - careful how you type that - put aside for time on the book. Scribbling new novel and neuroticallty checking previous works; will have to draw a line and say - enough. Cover art causing much head scratching, pictures and font. Getting there bit by bit, growing sense of anticipation. Feel like a kid at Christmas, you know its coming but have no idea what it will bring.
Will blog soon and give you a shout when launch is due.