Proof of Obedience

The Obedience of Fools; text completed and undergoing an edit and proof read to nail down the obvious glitches and grammatical goof ups. The updated and formated text should be uploaded to smashwords within the next few days, I can't say exactly when at the moment, watch this space and @MartynSeagull for the latest news. The text will then go through the Premium catalogue selection and once that hurdle is cleared it should appear in the retailers shortly after. If you already have a copy and want to finish the story, please help yourself.  New readers on the Premium channels will find there is a tag of $3.99 and it will take its place as the fourth in the Grange Series at smashwords for the same price.

A funny thing happpened the other night, Thursday 15 October 2015, as I wrote the final pages. The last scene had a particular engine waiting on the platform at Goathland on the North York Moors Railway, heading the train to Pickering. The LMS Stanier Black 5 45428 "Eric Treacy" is the type of engine in some versions of the myth of the Strategic Steam Reserve  that were hidden away and is unique in the class. Very few Black Fives were named (barely half a dozen)during their service with the London Midland Scottish Railway or later with British Railways;  45428 "Eric Treacy" was named after she was retired and went to work the Heritage Railways

The scene has "Eric Treacy" waiting to depart, and just to make sure I had the details spot on, for dramatic effect, I checked the website of the North York Moors Railway and discovered that "Eric Treacy" was heading the working locomotive list for that day. Even as I wrote the last words of the text, drawing The Obedience of Fools to a close, the locomotive in the book may have been standing at the station waiting to depart!

The locomotive honours the former Bishop of Wakefield, Eric Treacy, a noted railway photographer who recorded the last days of steam and published his photographs in numerous books. In the introduction to "The Lure of Steam" (pub: Ian Allen 1966, reprinted 1967) he describes sitting in Church House at Wakefield and watching a sleek Deltic, the largest diesel electric locomotive on British Railways at the time, crossing the viaduct with the London train and below it, running under the arches a Stainer Black 5 belching smoke on the Yorkshire to Lancashire line with a string of coal wagons. His powerful images evocatively recall the changeover to diesel and the demise of steam made more poignant in monchrome.
The medium lends itself to the sense of things past.

One of the strongest arguments against the existence of the SSR is the feasability of maintaining it over the long term, preserving the skills and knowledge and the basic infrastructure to ensure its viability, even down to simply running the engines and carriages.

A government reserve would require masses of support and maintenance, and always be at the mercy of policy changes; perhaps that is what happened. The policy changed, the designated engines were shunted around, and the counter strike brought it down, but another level, driven by a passion for the engines themselves swung into action and in the confusion of move and counter move brought enough engines and rolling stock to where they could be kept safe.

A collection of locomotives and rolling stock scattered across the length and breadth of the countryside, so widely dispersed that it couldn't be crippled during an attack instead of locked down in a handful of easily targeted locations. Free of government policy and the meanness of bean counters entrusted to those who knew its value and its worth...

Manned by volunteers who shared their passion for the beauty and splendour of steam, harnessing the nostalgia for a better time, passing on the intricate knowldge and practices of running steam on the railways and out of the dark shadows of the Cold War came something that leaves a warm glow.

Tell me it doesn't happen to you; when you breathe in the smell of the loco, feel the warm touch of swirling vapour and hear the rasp of the smoke and steam from the chinmey. The pistons start to lift the pulse from resting and the steel sinews of the drivng rods and cranks turn the wheels as the train begins to movel the whole thing comes alive - and there's that lump again, stuck in your throat!

That time again

Down to the last couple of hours local time, and NaNoWriMo starts again; The Obedience of Fools is on the back-burner for the next month and Gone To Earth starts tonight, taking the story of Control Escape beyond Arkwright's leap from the lightweight land Rover in Hull and picking up when he needs the assistance of The Grange once more...

and to everyone out there who's up for the challenge, good luck!

UPDATE The Obedience of Fools

New chapters have gone up this afternoon, taking the story a further.. The Obedience of Fools at smashwords.com, help yourself, it is a work in progress and free to download. Feedback welcome! Drop me a line and say hello...

Smashwords and OverDrive to Bring 200,000+ Indie eBooks to 20,000+ public libraries.

Smashwords: Smashwords and OverDrive to Bring 200,000+ Indie E...: Imagine if your indie eBook was purchasable by thousands of public libraries around the globe.  Now imagine no more. Smashwords announced a deal with Overdrive, the world's largest library eBook platform.

Read an ebook (week) 2014

Spring is starting to break out, the first green shoots are struggling through the damp and cold, stretching for the warmth and deep inside a longing for summer sun and long lazy days on holiday; with a book, or lots of books.

Read an ebook week is upon us and links are prepared, ready for the new links between readers and author I your new best author waiting with something special lined up for you?

The Grange novels are part of the action again this year, Control Escape has a 50% discount (enter the code REW50) and the rest are FREE; Iceline, What You Ask For and The Obedience of Fools.

Enjoy yourself, check out some really great writing and stock up!

Who or what is Cheekyseagull?

Maybe the question should be where does the name come from? A comment from a fellow Commonwealther to this blog said the name piqued her curiosity and she re tweeted the post of the 9th February - Just to let you know, so there's a small piece on the home page at cheekyseagull  a touch less of the book plugging, but not entirely free - unlike Iceline which is now free on all the distribution channels on the left hand column. There will be more to come, the piece on the home page is just a part of it...

Iceline - New Year kick off

Happy New Year to everyone,:
Iceline has just gone live at feedbooks.com as a free download, readers and comments are welcome. Enjoy it, slide away to the wilds of Scotland for a few hours this holiday.

The first of the Grange novels introduced the usual suspects, the characters to be found in Control: Escape, What You Ask for and the current work in progress The Obedience of Fools.
All are available at Smashwords if you follow the links with the blog,

Been there, done it.. tee shirt thingy

With three and a bit days left the word count tumbled over the 50,000 mark and the validation screen verified the total (50188).
Result: The Obedience of Fools is a NaNoWriMo winner, 2013. (See picture thingy below)

The story isn't finished, obviously, the tale will continue to unfold over the next few weeks, perhaps a month or two, and then the polishing starts. Check it out at smashwords and keep up with the action, the text will be updated in the next couple of days. 

Fresh in today...

New material for the Obedience of Fools, this year's NaNoWriMo entry, updated and free to download. Very much a work in progress and a happening event, I think the plot took a twist I wasn't expecting, now we'll have to see what happens next...

Check out the links and the stats via cheekyseagull,co,uk, on the page for The Obedience of Fools.

Imagination to the power of...

Do you think NaNoWriMo is craziness squared, 50,000 words in 30 days, OK, shift the perspective and walk another path. Imagine this; you are the guide at a historic building somewhere. A place where history and the personal stories of people ooze from the walls.
The mission, should you accept it, is to tell those stories and unfold that history in a lively entertaining way, to draw the visitors in and hold their imagination with your words. There is no rehearsal, you go live with one chance, this will be your first and only draft. It is a different group of people every time you open the door.
Your talk will last at least an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, at between ninety and a hundred and ten words a minute.
No notes, just the prompts from the things around you. You are passionate about it and once you start the words flow freely. Work an average, 100 words a minute for 75 minutes, 7500 words. That's a little less than one seventh of NaNoWriMo in an hour and fifteen minutes.
The challenge is fifty thousand words in thirty days.
Now tell me that my first draft should be anything less than my best.
Write your first draft as though it was your last.

Caught on the horns

Definitely didn't expect this. A month ago I was struggling to pull together an idea for NaNoWriMo, then The Duck Test began to formulate and for want of any other choices I decided to go with it,  until yesterday morning when a story I had been thinking about over a year ago suddenly clicked and The Obedience of Fools took over from the Duck Test. I'm not giving up on the Duck Test, but at the moment Obedience of Fools has the edge.

The title is a quote attributed to the British WW2 fighter ace, Douglas Bader, commander of the Duxford wing in the Battle Of Britain. A double amputee who challenged authority to get back in the air when war broke out in 1939 and said that  "rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men."

Come 0001 on the 1st of November, I may just toss a coin in the air and see how it lands. Heads for foolishness and tails for ducks should settle the question.

A ridiculous way to start a novel or in the spirit of NaNoWriMo? Instead of No Plot, No Problem, two to choose from, disobeying the rules of novelliing - they're really guidelines - and flying by the seat my pants, Nano style.

Follow the story as it unfolds through the month at Smashwords NaNoWriMo page, keep up with stats at NaNoWriMo

Stick around and be part of the action.

K.O. bo

David Gaughran has a considered response to the events involving WH Smith and Kobo in the UK and Victoria Strauss at Writer's Beware has a good resume with links to various articles including The Kernel. Both are worth reading.

If the newspapers in question could find the offensive title with such apparent relative ease it does beg the question why the sites involved failed to monitor their content. As David Gaughran reports in his piece, most of the titles involved have no erotic content whatsoever, and I agree with his sentiments.

Kobo hopes that the majority of it's catalogue will be back on-line - minus any offending titles - by Saturday the 19th of October. Kobo's and WH Smith's reaction was the most extreme, Barnes & Noble have removed similar titles from their stores. A follow up in the Telegraph has more detail and comments from Mike Serbinis, Kobo's chief executive.

On my bookshelf I have a copy of Iceline under its original title of Bark At Thunder. A Christmas present from a very good friend who read the first draft of the story and unbeknown to me and in collusion with others found a way of having it printed and bound. He handed it over with the hope it would encourage me to go further with it. I have no idea how closely the contents of the book were checked, you paid your money, picked the stock cover depending on the genre and the finished volumes were then posted out.

Following the story in the Daily Mail and others two of my own novels distributed to Kobo through smashwords have been culled and can no longer be found on the sites in question,  however, Iceline (previously Bark At Thunder) and Control Escape are available directly  through Smashwords.


Add the code KF94R for Control Escape and SG33W for Iceline and pick them up for 99c each.

Remember, Remember

Remember, Remember, the first of November;
complete loss of reason and plot
No characters or story,  a vain lust for glory,
its Nano time, give it a shot!

That time of year again!

It has to be true, halfway through September and the Halloween goblins are locked in a bitter struggle for shelf space with the Christmas fairy and the oddly leering Santa who looks like a resprayed Leprechaun left over from a drunken St Pat`s Day where the black stuff flowed like the Liffey through Dublin.

The headlong crash through the Autumn months towards the Christmas season has begun, the slippery slope is oiled and the ball is rolling. Right now, who cares, Grange Four (Work in Progress, tagged not titled) has made a faltering start and will probably be dumped  on the 1st of November when Nanowrimo comes a-calling once more and with it the tense countdown to the witching hour. At midnight on Halloween when the clock strikes and the keyboards start to clatter with the rattling dance of fingers whatever skeletal dance macabre is going on outside will be pushed aside as imaginations the world over leap into their own frenzied state. Woe betide any supernatural beastie that tries to interrupt that moment; it will be death by flash-drive at fifty paces.

Nanowrimo again, 50,000 words in thirty days and at the moment I have either too many ideas or my head is empty. That's what it is all about, if you think about the core of Nanowrimo it makes no sense, everything is wrong, completely and utterly wrong, and that is exactly what makes it right. So absolutely beautifully wonderfully right.

Am I going to do it again, yes, YES, YES!

 So you have a shortage of ideas, spend an hour or two in the pub and listen to the conversations around you. Don't read a book, read two books, maybe three and stare at the ceiling for hours, do whatever it takes to get the imagination working again.

Challenge yourself, if you`re still waiting for that "One day I'm going to write a novel" then make a date. Wine it. dine it, romance it and lavish your time and attention on it.  It will be beautiful and by the end of the month you will ant to spend more time with and see the work done. 50,000 words maybe more, thousands more, a story told and a story to tell of how you rose to the challenge and wrote your novel.

When the dust settles into December and the frost leaves its fingerprints on the windows, the rings on the coffee mug can be counted to track your progress through Nanowrimo you can tell the story of how you went there, did it and got the winner's tee shirt. The one that says it all; 50,000 Words 30 Days and 0 Excuses.

Last year's effort; What You Ask For, is available as a free download. Still undergoing the proof reading and editing. The cover art needs a good look at too, but help yourself, follow the link and if you have any feedback use the contact box on this site or via website at www.cheekyseagull.co.uk.

So I've just shot my mouth off about Nanowrimo 2013, opened it wide and inserted one or both feet? The bottom line is the same.


50,000 words, 30 Days, 0 Excuses.

Sun, Sand and an ebook

Long. lazy days, sunshine, time and space in the garden or on the beach, or simply time to catch up on your reading, you can't do it without the right material. Smashwords summer/winter promotion has started here. An incredible choice of books by Independent authors many of them available discounted or free throughout July. The Grange novels Iceline and Control Escape are available free with code SW100 at smashwords.com. The third novel in the series What You Ask For is free to download. Check them out now!

Letters from the Wilderness

The Office of Letters and Light Blog .Just had a few minutes reading the post from Camp Nanowrimo, the first challenge went off in April and the second thirty day blast of creativity starts in a couple of weeks on the 1st of July. I had my first Nanowrimo last November, and finished the draft of the novel late last Sunday night. What You Ask for is now preparing for the not so much fun bits of being a writer - proofreading and editing. The first fifty thousand had the thirty day deadline to keep the pace, after that I slowed down. It is finished now, and the draft text is available at Smashwords.com.

Check out the link above, if Nanowrimo is a challenge you have taken, and completed, I am sure you will sympathise with Mike Adamson and congratulate him and everyone else who took up the challenge to venture into the uncharted territory of the imagination and reaped a harvest of fifty thousand words in thirty days. I shall be heading that way myself in November once again - (You've done it now, you fool, there's no chance of backing out now!)

I am undecided about the July Camp Nanowrimo, That may be a last minute plunge into the wilds. 

Admissions and submissions

Iceline, the first of The Grange novels took a long time to get where it is today, and the delay was not down to the amount of rewriting it required. The manuscript sat on the bookshelf for ten years. A sealed copy with a Post Office date stamp on the seal is still there, and whatever the merits of proving copyright,  the interaction with Post office staff when you explain why you are sending a parcel to yourself is worth it.

It was down to confidence, in myself and my abilities as a writer, I needed that encouragement, and the kick up the backside to get the thing off the ground, and like many writers I was looking for that way forward, the road to find an audience.

Reading through Mark Coker's blog at Smashwords and listening to an interview with him on Late Night Library from Portland  Oregon, via a link in his blog and hearing him recall his own experiences and the journey that brought him to establish Smashwords, and then how the company has developed and contributed to the revolution in publishing over the last few years. He refers to the time just over five years ago as the dark ages of publishing.

I can procrastinate when it suits me, and when I shouldn't but isn't that a common situation. Hanging fire and waiting for the right moment, but that moment has a nasty habit of never actually coming, so the kick in the pants becomes a useful tool. Perhaps that's a bit harsh, let's agree a healthy shove in the right direction is more diplomatic, but it amounts to about the same thing really.

Tradition is a great thing if you know why you are doing it, and for so many years the respectable way to publish has been "Traditional" publishers, with the Vanity and self-publishing apparently lumped together as more or less the same thing, (I'll leave that discussion for another time maybe), with each one looking up or down at the other depending on where they saw their niche in publishing society.

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the various strands of publishing they had their way of doing things, their own traditions and amongst writers there are tradition and mythology. I picked up a tweet a day or so ago, retweeted across the system and it irritated me; the gist of it was that "The first draft is supposed to suck" reposted with a twitter link to the The Indie View photo and taken with the context of the picture the advice is sound, but I have never set out to write anything that sucks, my aim is and always has been to be the best from the first word. the reason is simple, I really don't like proofreading, editing, etc, and yes I know everybody says you should get somebody else to do it, but there are perfect worlds and there is reality.

Reality, the stark reality portrayed to the aspiring author, the barely hidden subtext I found in so many books on how to get published always pointed to how difficult, nay, near impossible it could be to get into print.

They make it sound like rules and stuff, you do this or don't do that, and I find myself drifting back to Kenneth More's portrayal of Douglas Bader, in Reach For The Sky and two particular scenes. the first he turns up to rejoin as a pilot, already due to a flying accident a double amputee and is told that there is nothing in the regulations that says he can fly. His response; there is nothing there that says I can't. The second clip is when the much needed spares he requires to get his squadron operational arrive and he admits to having by-passed all the proper channels declaring that "rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men."

There had to be another way, and most of my life I have been an admirer of Bader, I wouldn't nominate him for sainthood. He was no plaster saint, to borrow from Rudyard Kipling and like many of his compatriots who were single men in barracks they had a job to do, and Churchill's rubber stamp  of "Action This Day" gave them the motivation. I needed a way and the motivation, and eventually found both.

I found Smashwords by accident, researching something else and looking for a book by the American Criminal Profiler, Pat Brown, and was wary of anything that said it was free, but the claim held good, and I found my way. Publishing on Smashwords was my Bader moment, I bypassed all the traditionally accepted channels, and took Mark Coker at his word, that every writer has the right to be published. That was motivation.

When Bader wanted his spares he went straight to Fighter Command, and I'm doing the same. You, reader, are the one I want to send my book out to you and they won't cost you an arm or a leg, maybe the price of a cup of coffee, Iceline (use the Smashwords discount code SG33N) and Control Escape (Smashwords Discount Code VK56T) are out already and What You Ask For, the third novel in the series is nearing completion, and while it is still a work in progress is a freebie from Smashwords. The other two are already out through the major ebook channels, nip across to www.cheekyseagull.co.uk/iceline  or /control_escape  and follow the links or use the links on this blog to reach my website. Have a look around while your there.

Registration Call

Names, our own personal keywords, the labels that pick us out from the crowd and are almost never chosen by ourselves, even the characters in books are chosen by me, and getting it right can be difficult. Tagging a first name on to a surname sounds easy but when you say it for the first time it can feel strange, artificial even. It doesn't ring true. (If you're really stuck, wander around an old graveyard or church and read the monuments).

I haven't done that yet, but I do find myself reading names on memorials and monuments. My characters draw their names from a variety of sources, even down to snippets of conversation. Take the feisty auburn haired female in the Grange stories, Josie Burke, her first name is diminutive, shortened from Josephine (she would call that her best name, a Sunday name, only used formally) Josie is the name she lives and works with and Burke, that came from a number of suggestions. Burke and Hare were the infamous body-snatchers supplying the Edinburgh medical schools with cadavers, James Burke was a presenter of science and technology programmes in the Seventies (Do you remember Connections?) and someone is a Berk when they do something daft. Josie refers to Burke and Hare in Control Escape, and she expresses something about how names influence our character and development. Names can become nicknames, and a source of humour for other people, and discomfort for the carrier.

Steel carries that baggage, Don Steel, what on earth was I thinking about, a character who reportedly grew up in Sheffield called Don Steel. Sheffield steel has been known about since the days of Geoffrey Chaucer. In the Canterbury Tales he mentions a simple working blade called the thwitel, made in Sheffield, and the earliest literary reference in fiction to knife making in the area.

The River that Sheffield straddles is the Don, can you see where this is going, his name caused trouble for him, and if you call him by his full name, Donald, it doesn't seem to be getting any better does it, but that was part of the selection process, the thinking behind his insistence that people use his surname, an expression of character. The inner circle who know his full name are people he can trust, and because of the trust he can accept the banter, but the banter is absent because of the trust. The logic is circular, but it works.

His first name is used, usually by Josie and only in specific circumstances, whereas Kurt Langhers uses and is referred to by both names on an almos casual basis. Kurt's name originated with the Commando comics I read as a young boy, given to a German officer in one of the stories, I liked the name and remembered it, and the character grew out of that. A German name, but with a Yorkshire accent? Unlikely, but not impossible perhaps a German grandfather, POW, who stayed behind after the war because the part of Germany he grew up in was on the other side of the wire. Did it happen, could it happen, turn the parts around, a National Serviceman from England posted to Germany after the war returns with a German bride, and they ran a local shop for years just down the road from where I grew up.

Fiction, isn't part of that taking what is real and making something novel out of it, recreating it with the imagination as another reality? Then we come to Bill Jardine; Jardine is a Scottish town, in one part of Sheffield it's one of a cluster of street names with a Scottish connection. Bill, is a name with many connotations, Dicken's Bill Sykes the thuggish criminal, Bruce Bairnsfather's World War One cartoon character Old Bill,  a world weary soldier with his distinctive walrus moustache (the cadet pub "Bill and Alphie's" at the Royal Military College of Canada is named after him) and the Metropolitan Police are  "The Bill"  Richmal Cromptom created Just William, mischief incarnate, but William grows up and somewhere along the line becomes Bill, and that was the transition I saw as Bill Jardine developed, a poacher turned gamekeeper, his wilder younger days a precursor to the activities and operations he would oversee at The Grange, and the place itself, a grange, historically a farm, a working place with an air of its own identity planted by time in the ground on which it stands. Not pretending to be something it isn't. Grand enough, but not too much. It's about playing with words, turning them around and seeing what happens and I'll leave the last word to Wally Barnes. Here again Wally can mean someone a bit daft or stupid, but he used his own name and the way the school register was called, especially when answering the phone. He wrong-footed people, and catches Steel in What You Ask For (currently a work in progress at smashwords.com), with "Barnes, Wally speaking."

Formally he is Wallace Barnes, a bit of a mouthful, the school register called him out as Barnes, Wallace. Now there's a name to play with, and if you think fiction is strange, imagine trying to sell the idea that a 500lb bomb will bounce along the water like a skimming stone. We can look back and see how it works, Wallace couldn't,  I could not resist that homage in one of the technical crew of the Grange.

Some names work well, others are more difficult to find a character for, and the most challenging one, Azubah, I found it on a gravestone, it means Desolation, Biblically, she was the wife of Caleb.
But then, hmm, maybe there is something...I am going to think about that one!

The Big One - World Book Night

One week to go, seven nights from tonight World Book Night will be with us! 

Have you anything lined up yet?

To celebrate;  Iceline, the first Grange novel is free to anyone who wants to offer it a good home here with NL36S for a 100% discount. Bag Control Escape for half price with VK56T here and take both home. Two thrillers for a dollar and a half, Have a good read.