The Bog-Man of Bond Street. Available now in The Obverse Book of Detectives

http://obversebooks.co.uk/product/2-4-the-obverse-book-of-detectives/

The Bog-Man of Bond Street is the first in a planned series of short stories following the adventures of The Albion Club as they battle the insidious foes of the British Empire.

Set in the high-Victorian era the story is obviously inspired by tales of adventure and mystery that appeared during this time in publications such as the Strand Magazine. The Bog-Man of Bond Street doesn’t aim to portray a gritty and realistic 1890s London, in fact it isn’t really set in our London at all. Rather the action takes place in the London of Sax Rohmer and Conan Doyle, a literary creation that is just too vibrant and exciting to let die, even now in the 21^st century.

The Albion Club is a society of gentlemen, sworn to protect the denizens of the British Empire. When a queer little case involving an Irish bog-man rears its head, Lancelot Jones is none to keen to investigate. Surely this is a trivial matter, of little real importance? But for Sir Montgomery Falstaff there is more buried in the bog than a simple body…

Paperback £9.99

Ebook £3.99

Available now from the Obverse Books website.

Death of the Great British Amateur.







Bridgnorth Corinthians circa 2010

If there is one thing I’m good at, it’s not being very good at things. Now some people might think that not being good at things is easy, not so. It takes dedication to be not very good at things.
There used to be a time, long before I can remember when, whilst you may not have been applauded for actually being bad, it didn’t really matter, it was the taking part that counted. Now I’m not going to argue that people shouldn’t try and be good at the things they do, of course they should. But if they try and fail, so what?

For example football (and for my American readers, I mean the associated variety). I have strong views about the dominance of football in British sport, but this isn’t the time or place. I will actively avoid watching the game, on telly or live, and have little respect for the overpaid, under-worked, feckless professionals who seemingly fail to see how lucky they are to be paid for kicking a ball around a field.

No, I won’t go on about the whining, reprobates, who fill our newspapers and gossip columns with the puerile antics of their wasted lives. This blog is about amateurs and given the chance to kick a ball around a sports hall with nine other chaps I’m as happy as the next man. I’m not very good at it mind, but then that is the point of this rant: it doesn’t matter.

With a vague sense that it is good for one’s health to get out of breath every now and again I co-formed the Bridgnorth Corinthians a few years ago. In four years we have failed to finish above any team that hasn’t dropped out. (This year, the fifth season, with me out from injury the Corinthians look to finish second from bottom.) I do actually hold an impressive shot-to-goal ratio of 100%, over four seasons I had a total of one shot. But then that doesn’t count own goals (6 to date).

I never worried, I enjoyed playing and that to me was the point. But then when filling in the match sheet after one game one of the other teams asked: ‘Why’d you bother, you’re never gonna win the league?’ What a sad state of affairs, I thought. Why would we drop out just because we loose? Is the only reason you play to win? Of course when you’re on the pitch you push yourself to do well, you put everything in. But if at the end of the day you finish having lost, is that so bad?

What do you actually achieve by winning a five-a-side league? A shiny cup, but does that mean so much to you? If the primary, nay the only, reason for taking part in an activity is to receive affirmation that you are better than everyone else, I think you have problems my friend. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to win the league, who knows maybe one day we will (though I doubt it), but it is much more important to me to do something I enjoy, as well as I can.

Sadly, I think I am in a minority. There used to be an ethos of amateurism in Britain, a realisation that it was the taking part that counts. You might not win a shiny medal, but you will learn new skills, meet different people and become a more rounded human being. If you only ever do things you’re good at already, how are you ever going to learn new skills?

100 years ago there were regular matches in all sports that pitted Gentlemen vs Players. IE, people who were good at the game vs people who liked it, professional vs amateur. Most people then would have participated in a sport, as well as watched it. Why has that changed?

So if you’re reading this (and I suspect you are) join a team, start an evening class, what ever get out there and do something    



New Years Resolutions

With the Rollicking Tales project having failed in 2012, 2013 is probably a good time to take stock of my writing and give some thought as to its development. It was at the end of 2011 that I really made a decision to give writing a go and the following year was a mixed bag. On the plus side I had two stories accepted for publication. On the other hand my major project ‘Walls of Tamorria’ spluttered and stalled its way through the twelve months, not having made the progress I would have expected or hoped and several ideas for stories dies for want of not actually being written.

With this in mind I’ve set my self the following goals for 2013.

1)      Update this blog more regularly, at least once a month. Preferably with witty and erudite posts, but lets be realistic.

2)      Write 12 stories. Never mind about if they are published or not, just get them written and submitted for peer review.

3)      Develop my settings. This goes hand in hand with goal no 2. I’ve got three settings starting to develop.

a)      Tamorria: a dieselpunk fantasy world.

b)     The world of the Albion club, the Victorian action/adventure/murder/mystery setting for the two short stories I have had accepted.

c)      A Steampunk world, the setting fro my current short story project.

Hopefully I can write two short stories for each of these. I also have a couple of plans for stories in pre-existing settings. That’s eight of my twelve short stories sorted, now all I’ve got to do is not have any more ideas until August.

4)      Write The Walls of Tamorria, in first draft at least. I reckon 12k words a month should see me through. This will be the hardest of the goals but if I can mange it I will start 2014 with a manuscript that needs polishing and some short stories all ready to my name, not a bad place to be in.

I’m confident I can manage 1-3. 4? Well, we’ll see. Check in in twelve months time and I’ll let you know.

News Regarding Rollicking Tales

The dead line for submissions to Rollicking Tales is now closed.

Unfortunately I had some technical difficulties during the submission period which lead to my website, and the connected email going down. Partially as a result of this, I am sure, I have not received the number or quality of submissions I would have liked.

I do not feel it would be productive to have my name, or the names of any writers I did include, associated with a substandard publication. There or I have made the difficult desision to cancel the project.

I shall be leaving the publishing side of things for now and concentrating on my writing in 2013. Watch this space.

The trouble with trying to be clever...

A recent blog by fantasy author Nyki Blatchley on the prevalence of medieval, or at least pseudo-medieval settings for fantasy stories brought back the thought processes that lead to my major fantasy project of the moment.

I was on holiday at the time in Italy, near Lake Como. Wondering through the cobbled streets and winding alleys, ancient through-ways that no longer led anywhere, I was struck by the inherent sense of adventure in the place. I felt an irresistible urge to write something in this sort of setting.

A few days later I started a new book, The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. It was a good read, I had ordered the sequel from amazon before the holiday was over, but it set me thinking. Why were nearly all fantasy books in a medieval setting? Why couldn’t they be in any setting? Futaristic? Victorian? A 30esque Italian setting? Now there was an idea! And so began ‘The Walls of Tamorria’.

However a year and a half and three versions of the story later I began to understand some of the reasons why medieval has become the de-facto setting for fantasy. Whilst twists and turns are essential to a good plot (at least in my opinion) they have to follow some rules. The thing about unexpected events is, in a book they can’t really be unexpected. Of course this doesn’t mean the reader should be able to predict what is coming, but once it has happened they should be able to see that the story had been leading up to that point.

If for example James Bond were to have boarded the Orient Express in the climax of From Russia with Love, only to find it infested by KGB goblins, the reader would be left thinking, what the #%$*? Likewise if Dracula were unexpectedly defeated at the last moment due to a nut allergy, the reader would be left feeling somewhat cheated.

In creating a fantasy world it is essential that the presence of magic and fantastic creatures feels ‘right’. Our sense of the medieval world is so infused with legend and myth from that time, unicorns and giants, evil mages and mysterious damsels, that we are automatically open to the inclusion of such elements in this setting. By setting a story in a later age, one of diesel power and industrialisation, such associations need to be built up from scratch.

My first intended incarnation of the story was called ‘The Book Bound in Blue’ and was a novel  planned to be the first in a trilogy. However when I started writing it something was wrong. I got maybe a third of the way through before I realised that it was the setting. I hadn’t taken the time to develop the world as a coherent and logical backdrop to my stories. It was merely ‘you know fantasy, yeah? Imagine that, but in the thirties.’ The fantasy elements seemed bolted on to the world, not a part of it.

My next step then was to do some world building. I expanded the plot, reworked characters and tried to tie the whole thing together. In the process the story changed from a trilogy to a series of novellas. I wrote the first of these ‘The Winds Awaken’ and it was definitely better. But it still wasn’t right. I realised now that my story, despite all its trappings, was High Fantasy. And as such, it really wasn’t suited to novella form. I had given the main character, Lorenzo, a lot of background which ties in with the meta-plot, but none of this really came out in the first novella. I knew he was a troubled individual, eventually ripe for redemption, but to the reader he was just a cliché. I needed time and space to show the deeper aspects of him, and the other characters around him.

And so I changed again. Now we are back to a series of novels, I’m not sure how long a series yet. By changing form, not only does the reader leave Lorenzo at a later point in the plot, allowing them to see him develop, I can also slow the pace in the earlier scenes, allowing me time to insert some subtlety to his character that was missing from the novella.

So, in conclusion I think I can say that fantasy doesn’t have to be placed in a mediaeval setting. But doing so certainly makes life easier.

       

The Future of Farming

First of all an announcement:
 

I’M NOT DEAD.

 

Things have been somewhat crazy over the past six months or so and this blog has suffered. Never fear though I’m back. The following blog differs from what I originally intended to write, but it is on a subject I feel very strongly about and so make no apologies that it is a meandering attempt at covering a topic that could easily take up a treatise.

As a farmer the freaky weather really affects my life and livelihood. For those of you not resident in the UK I’ll give a brief summary of the past 12 months or so.

Last Autumn: Dry. So dry a lot of the crops didn’t germinate.
Last Winter: Mild. So mild a lot of the autumn sowing finally did germinate, round about December.
Spring: Dry. Hosepipe plans were implemented. Crops pretty much didn’t grow.
Summer: Wet. Really, really wet. We got stuck trying to harvest the oilseed rape (canola), the same crop that we planted into dust the previous year. Disease is prevalent in the already weak crops.
Late summer: For two weeks it didn’t rain. Somehow we managed to get all our harvesting done in this patch. A lot of others were not so lucky.
Autumn: Wet. Again. The ground was already sodden from the summer and so there was nowhere for it to go. Floods around the country.

Well this may make me sound like a winging farmer: I’m not, honestly. The way the climate is going it looks as if the only thing we can predict about the weather is that it is going to be increasingly unpredictable.

I’m not an organic farmer, I don’t think that we should ignore modern science and it is my view that there is a place for it in the future of agriculture. Having said this however I don’t think we have been going in the right direction these past few years.

Cereal verities are bred up by global conglomerates who by and large are the same global conglomerates who sell us our fertilizer and spray. It is no surprise that to achieve the yield potential that these varieties are capable of a great deal of inputs are needed.

The argument for this is that the world’s population is exploding and all these people need to be fed, ergo production must be increased at all costs. This sounds reasonable enough, but to my eyes it doesn’t really hold up to closer scrutiny.

How much food the world is currently capable of producing is hard to calculate but there is certainly enough to go around. That’s not to say people aren’t starving, in fact the number of malnourished people is going up, but this has more to do with poverty and distribution than anything else.

The biggest cause of increase in demand for food is not the population increases in the third world, but a shift in consumption patterns in these countries. It is taken as a given that as a country develops, its population will ape that of the western world. So far this is proving to be true.

But should we just accept this as a fact? 1 in 5 early deaths in the UK are linked to over consumption of red meat. And yet as farmers we are pressurised into producing meat at lower and lower costs. Why? Meat is a very uneconomical way of turning land into food. I’m not suggestion we all become vegetarian. For health reasons the human diet should ideally contain some meat. Some. The western diet is currently wasting the world’s resources and killing its population. Surely to just accept this as fact is madness?

If the world were to move away from an over reliance on meat, and also to reduce wastage (a topic I won’t go into here, needless to say it really gets my dander up) then it would have a realistic chance of feeding the world’s population without resorting to massively yielding crops that rely on massive inputs, for generations to come.

If anything the current system of crop breeding could well lead to more starvation. Essentially we have spent the past two generations producing varieties that yield well in ideal circumstances. The trouble with this that the way the climate seems to be going, we are going to have less and less ideal circumstances. The UKs crops largely failed this year, we had less than ¾ of last year’s yield. America, Canada, Europe and many other countries also had harvests verging on the disastrous. As a result wheat prices have soured. Next year, who knows what will happen.

This wildly varying, unstable market might course the price of a loaf to go up in Britain or the States, but it isn’t us who is really going to suffer. Imagine you are a third world farmer. What do you do when it is a bad year and your crops fail? Will it help feed your family knowing that you could potentially have had a better harvest, had the conditions been different?

And what about when there is a good world harvest? When prices plummet from £200pmt to half that, or lower. What does this farmer do then?

Surely it’s time to stop maximising our yields, and start stabilising them. Let’s not think about what they can do, but what they will do in the real world, were droughts and floods are going to be ever more likely.   

And so the Rollicking Tales Blog Tour is finished. I won't bore you with yet more of my thoughts and opinions, in truth I'm sure sure I have any left. Instead as promised a celebratory cocktail.

Shropshire Sling

This is a version of the famous Singapore Sling as, being intelligent and well-travelled people, I am sure you will have guessed. The main difference is I have substituted some of the gin for sloe gin. This is excellent liquor, easily and cheaply made with the fruit of the blackthorn, simply added to sugar and gin.

Now be warned. This cocktail may be pink and frothy, but it is not to be thought womanly. As easily as it slips down it is prone to leave you with rather a heavy head the next day.

I have gone back to the original Singapore Sling recipe, which is slightly more complicated than a lot of modern versions, but is worth the extra effort.

½ shot Grenadine Syrup

½ shot Campari

½ shot Grand Marnier

The juice of 1 lime.

1 shot Cherry Brandy

1 shot Sloe Gin

1 shot Gin (I used Bombay Sapphire, any decent gin will do)

3 shots Pineapple juice.

Simply add all the ingredients to a cocktail shaker, and shake. Garnish with a slice of lime.