My poem, A Lapse in Concentration is now online at The Pygmy Giant.[link ...]

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This is the title of the book I have been working on. The book is a true to life story and follows the experiences of myself and the men I served with whilst I was deployed on a six months Operational tour of duty in the summer of 1991 in West Belfast. I have always been put of writing this book as there are so many books covering military actions by the SAS and Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan which tend to blot out what happened in Northern Ireland.

What makes this book different form the majority of other military books in this category, is I do deliver a real soldiers account, this story is not a political one I am writing it truthfully about my experiences not just fighting terrorism but battling fatigue, mismanagement, and our living conditions, I also wanted to highlight what affects a failing system had on us all when we returned back home in the November of that year.

This is a trench talking account of a Platoon of men brought together for a six month operational tour, it tells the tale of laughing through the face of adversity, this story shares some moments of complete sadness and heart stopping adrenaline pumping excitement and explains how me and my brother both Corporals serving in the same regiment were nearly killed in separate terrorist attacks in the same week.

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Personally I think the snow brings out the kid in most of us. There is still something of a thrill in seeing your own footprints in virgin snow and there are plenty of smiley snow-people beaming at passers-by from front gardens. And of course I just had to take some photographs of our snow-covered garden and neighbourhood. It looks so pretty and it has this knack of bringing out the community spirit in everyone, with neighbours all waving at one another where, more often than not, we are all generally too busy getting on with our lives to even notice each other.

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I was asked by the lovely folks here at Strictly Writing to write ‘some-thing a bit different’ for them. And as, over the past few months, they’re not the only ones who’ve called my writing (or me!) a bit different I realised I had my topic. So, this is a little piece about me, and about being different.

I’m a writer. I don’t work normal hours, I’m not on a salary, I don’t have a degree, so I reckon that does make me a little different to others. And it’s not an easy ride. I have the grumpiest, and most demanding, boss in the world, I have to work harder and longer than I’d like to and everything I do is down to me. So I’m inventing work every day. Constantly making things up. Other people would get sacked for that; I get paid. If I’m lucky.



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I felt it welling up this morning, although the dire coffee shortage seemed as though it might hamper things. I got dressed - already an accomplishment, already making this day different from the days of the previous month - and went out and bought some. It's sunny outside, it's hot. It's February, no wonder the plants are completely confused. Photos of snow in the UK, and here I was boiling in my cardigan.

I made the coffee, sat outside to drink it, and the welling up became stronger and stronger. With the half-drunk cup, I went back inside and fired up the laptop. The desktop is already on but its purpose is different. The laptop is for fiction. I started something, a new version of a very very old story I haven't found a way to tell yet....

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R, like me, just likes sitting in the warm darkess for a couple of hours. It's a kind of addiction, or folie a deux, without too many dangerous side-effects.

(sorry, you have to trawl down through the last entry to get to this latest posting. I don't know why.)

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BUBU really, but what’s a misspelling between friends? The phonetic version is more fun and laughter is so good for one’s well-being. And, talking of things that are or aren’t good for your health, I like a mean glass of Rosé, adore pizza and Belgian chocolates… Yet I’ve noticed, since writing my first novel four years ago, that in certain literary circles I suffer from only one vice worth talking about: Books Under Bed Unpublished.

It’s the proverbial elephant in the room, with its trunk firmly knotted in case it can’t resist the urge, when you finally get that deal, to trumpet to one at all that it’s a joke, you being called a debut novelist - because, in actual fact, you’ve got two or four or more novels under the bed at home. In fact, “Debut Novelist” is a misleading term. Yes, it’s an author making their debut on the public scene, but to the man on the street it implies that the debut is in terms of actually writing a novel as well...



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Sometimes in the last few days I've thought that my head - my writing head, that is - would explode.

Somehow, in just over a month, I've written longhand two first-draft chapters of Kindred & Affinity and after sixteen hours' sorting-out-and-typing of Chapter Two at the weekend, discovered that I've got 31,500 words. By the plan (which, of course, is never set in stone) that's a fifth of the whole thing, which would make it 10,000 words longer than The Mathematics of Love. Yes, there are already 150 separate notes that will take anything from a minute to a day to resolve. Yes, I don't know how it ends, not exactly, though I know who will be there at the end, and I'm not even thinking about the fine-polishing, not least because I'm still not convinced by one of the voices. But it's there, and I'm reasonably sure that the big bones, the architecture, is right. And because it's there, the remaining four-fifths are feeling much more distinct and substantial in my mind too.

To that end, in lunchtimes, in bed, in the bath, on the train, I'm reading Roy Porter's Flesh in the Age of Reason, which is so brilliantly written (you don't know how witty and erudite can be combined till you've read Porter at his best) that it's only when you sit back that you realise just how densely argued and swift-moving it is.

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As Such. More of an observation. And something I've been pondering.

It's to do with submissions. To do with us writers sending off our stuff to try to be published in good places. In the places we like to go. The mags, journals, ezines we like to read.

And really, it's just one aspect of the process, which I should add doesn't always happen, that I've been thinking about.

It's this.

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I thought I should note down that I did my first book-signing on Saturday, at Waterstones in Chichester, an event which somehow is always now lodged in my head as THE SIGNING (sounding perilously close to 'The Shining'). It was very surreal walking up to the shop and seeing a poster of the novel outside in the street. Sadly the local paper 'forgot' to publish the feature which was supposed to promote the event, so I had to rely on the friendly faces who'd promised to drop by, and a few slightly disapproving-looking mothers who allowed their daughters to pick up the books and then reluctantly allowed me to sign. The staff in the shop were brilliant - friendly and welcoming, and they'd set up a really nice table with displays of the novel and a chair for me to sit in. It's a funny thing, doing a book-signing. It reminded me a bit of my stewarding for the National Trust. A lot of the time I was aware that I was just sitting, being ignored, while people wandered about picking up copies of The Diary of Anne Frank. From time to time somebody came over and gave me a hard stare. And then it all became more worthwhile when a nice smiling person would come over and ask questions and show interest. 17 copies later I was quite relieved to hear that I'd come to the end of my signing. I left feeling - what? Proud? Relieved? Authorly? Mildly silly? Knackered? A mixture of all of those at once. I'm not sure if I'd be keen to do it again. I think I would, and I'd like to meet more of the kids who've read the book - but I'd make sure next time that there was more publicity surrounding the event.