I finished a draft of London Rains, which is a series of linked short stories featuring a central character, Julien Trent, who is a free-climber and thief, and who occasionally works for the government.
So I’ll put that to one side for a bit and complete the final draft of my children’s story, Border Bob, which is about the adventures of a border terrier called Bob who lives in a kennel at the side of The Big House, on the borders of England, in the 1930s.
Well-known stories retold and reimagined:
Free Amazon Kindle download 11-15 August. Click image for link:
I watched a pretty rubbish-but-fun Netflix movie yesterday called Faster. It starred Dwayne Johnson and Billy Bob Thornton and was an interesting mix of plots and sub-plots, some of them not fully developed, but I managed to get to the end.
One of the characters was an Englishman, played by English/French actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen, but the weird thing was, he had an English accent that to my knowledge has never existed. A sort of Hollywood English. Not quite Dick Van Dyke, but somewhere in that region.
I was fascinated by this accent.
Jackson-Cohen seems to come from a fairly affluent background, so maybe he was attempting to make his cut-glass accent sound a bit cockney, as understood by a Hollywood director.
Imagine Hugh Grant playing Dick Van Dyke mimicking Billy Idol. That accent.
Almost completed the first draft of London Rains, which is a series of 5 linked short stories about a thief, free climber and sometimes-government-agent called Julien Trent.
It’s looking fairly good.
Within its own world, it rings true.
With the help of KW, an English professor and friend from Texas, I’m about to do the first revision of Jago, so that hopefully any anglicisms I’ve made in error will hopefully be eradicated. One comment she made was, as it’s part of a trilogy, I really should get the follow-up out fairly soon.
So I read through the draft of the follow-up, provisionally titled Little Blade, and it seems fairly well written, which is unusual for me, I normally have to heavily edit stuff to make it readable. I think I’m improving as a writer.
Anyhow, more news to follow.
Sometimes when I’m writing I’ll be aiming for a specific finish, I’ll have the ending in my mind, clear and logical, I’ll know exactly where I’m going. But then I’ll get to some other point and I’ll think, oh, I’ve finished.
It’s not what I planned, or what I wanted, instead it’s some random new ending that has its own inner-logic and everything I planned to say has been said.
Endings sneak up on me. Take me by surprise.
My tolerance for direct human contact is diminishing. I need three or four goes to get through any kind of dramatic scene in a movie or book, I abhor making or taking phone calls, it’s taking me a week or more to even look at, never mind respond, to emails, even important emails from people I like.
I thought not being on most of the social media was a positive choice, now I think it was an early sign of some sort of late-onset autism.
I’m becoming a hermit.
I think I like it. Not sure I should though.
It’s not that I’m anti-social. I’m scared.
Scared of what I’ll discover.
Grey skies, heavy rain, 12 degrees, wind gusting to 30mph. And my dog needs his walk.
Whether he wants it or not.
Angus, pretending he’s asleep.
A large part of my mind-palace is a two-masted Brig, the Honey. I can think of no better place to be.
I still love this little story of two people who are lost and who find each other, and then find themselves.
It’s on free kindle download from 3-7 August. Click the image for link or do an amazon search:
