THE HERO OF THE GRAVEYARD

I was talking to Mike, an old pal of my brother, John, in a pub yesterday and he told me a story about our kid that I can't wait to tell his family.As young men the two of them were on their way to the cinema one particularly foggy evening when our John suggested taking a short cut through a graveyard. The fog was such that Mike, walking just a few feet behind our John, could barely see him until John stopped, to look down at the foggy figure of a woman who looked to have collapsed on a grave, right in front of a headstone.
    'Are you all right?' he asked. No reply.
    So John decided to do the heroic thing and get the woman back to her feet, which he did by grabbing her by the armpits and heaving her upright. At that point the woman's husband, who had been waiting nearby, appeared out of the gloom and explained that his wife hadn't actually collapsed, she was just having a pee!

Since my last blog we've voted to leave Europe and are in the process of getting a new prime minister and I didn't think it was all that long since I did my last blog. Must buck my ideas up. In fact since my last blog I've had two books published...properly published by mainstream publishers. Not that I'm knocking those only publish on kindle, I've got six published only on kindle myself. However I've got another book due for publication by Piatkus in November. It's called Tell Me It's Not True and is set during world War One. The book title is a repeat of words uttered by one of my female protagonists who has been told her husband has been killed in the war only she feels him to be still alive. Is she right? You'll have to read the book to find out.

Right now I'm writing two books in concert. It's OK I've done it before. Perhaps I'm the only writer who can work that way but I find it helps when the ideas stop flowing on the book I'm currently writing and yet I've been piling up ideas for my other book and making notes of them. Right now I'm about 50,000 words into a saga, currently called RUNAWAYS and 40,000 words into a crime called THE DEFENESTRATION OF JOE SANTIAGO. I'm just about to move onto the crime book and add another 30,000 or so words to it by which time I'll have enough ideas stored up to go back to RUNAWAYS. It could be that I'm the only writer who works that way. I'd certainly be interested to hear from anyone else who does.

I've just been writing some stuff "of interest" for my publishers marketing people, and I mentioned the boys comics I read when I was a lad. There were four main ones: THE ADVENTURE; THE ROVER; THE HOTSPUR AND THE WIZARD. The stories were all crammed inside in a tiny font, no more than 7, with around 2,500 words per page. The pages in the comics varied from 15 to 20 which means that on average a comic held around 44,000 words, and, using the schoolboys' swap system, I read all four comics each week. Had I spent that much time on my homework I'd have been a genius.