I have said it before – as I am sure you have – that it has been a truly weird eighteen months and the pandemic is still out there.
Cabin fever is us, and all that.
I’ve worked through it all, got a lot of stuff done & hundreds of thousands of words written but ground hog day catches up with us all sooner or later!
Presently, I am forcing myself not to work on ANY project for a twenty-day period in which I hope to get in trips to two festivals. Normally, if I’m jaded I switch to another project but sometimes…one needs not to be working at all.
Abstinence from work can be a problem because I could not do what I do unless I was self-motivated, maybe a little driven (obsessed, I don’t think so but that’s the sort of thing only others can judge) by writing and the whole – of necessity to make a go of it – business project around it. A good day for me is a day in which I have added something significant, or improved the quality and the quantity of a project I am working on and not fallen any further behind the – sometimes unrealistic – schedule I have set myself. Therefore, a day at a festival, listening to music, or idle, watching TV or reading/researching unrelated to a current or planned piece of work can, bizarrely, seem like a wasted day. Yes, I know that’s dumb-think! But we are all dumb in our own way; you isn’t that what we learn from the great Shakespearean tragedies and supporting football teams that haven’t won a trophy for over forty years?
Anyway, I console myself with the thought that actually, for once, I am ahead of myself.
Book 8 of the New England Series ‘The Halls of Montezuma’ is not published. Book 17 of the Timeline 10/27/62 Series ‘Smoke on the Water’ just needs a final polish and it will be ready to go on 27th October. And Book 18 ‘Cassandra’s Tale’ (which will be another of my ‘big books’) is still on schedule for release on 27 April 2022.
In addition, Book 1 of my new EUROPA REICH Series ‘MOONSHOT’ will be hitting the virtual shops on 25th November (with simultaneous audio book, paperback and hard cover releases – a first for me). Book 2 in the series ‘OLYMPIAD’ will follow in March 2022, just to get the series well and truly launched!
EUROPA REICH – idea: the USA did not join the war against Hitler and the Nazis won the Second World War. Thirty years later guess who is about to reach the Moon first? How did this happen and what sort of world has emerged under the pernicious influence of the New Order.
Back in early 2020 I planned to write a fifth book in the River Hall Chronicles series but then the world went crazier than I could possibly make up, so that project is on the back burner, indefinitely at the moment. Even in my most satirical mindset I could not imagine my government being so inept as it has proven, time and again in the last eighteen months. So…perhaps, a sequel to The Honourable Member – which chronologically would have kicked off around the time the first Covid case arrived in the country in January 2020 – sadly, will not be seeing the light of day for some time!
Which only goes to prove that the real world does impinge on a writer’s work from time to time.
In the meantime, wholly on account of the blood, sweat and tears of my partner narrators/producers a steady stream of unabridged audio versions of my books continue to become available on Audible. If you are not already a monthly member invest now. A monthly credit can cut the cost of an audio book by 60-70% and that has got to be good!
To Timeline 10/27/62 and New England Series readers and followers – just because I have started another series (Europa Reich) – I promise I am not about to walk away from them.
I plan to write at least two more Timeline novels (books 19 and 20) before giving the series a year off in which to decide which way to take it in future.
New England series: I have already written Book 9 ‘Islands in the Stream’ (for release in January 2022), and written the first chapter of Book 10 ‘The Gathering Place’, and have Book 11 in my head!
I would go loco just writing one series, living in one alternative universe. So, with Europa Reich, I will have a third ‘other’ world top hide in when reality gets too oppressive!
Back to Covid. People keep telling me I ought to write a pandemic book. NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN! And that’s a promise. It is bad enough watching global misery without living with it in one’s head every hour of every day without respite. When I am writing I am living in the universe that my characters inhabit and we all have our internal grief quotient that we exceed at our peril.
Eighteen months on what have we learned?
That our leaders are mostly Muppets? Yes and no.
That doctors are saints and miracle workers? Yes and no; although many medics are demonstrably both.
That nobody had actually planned – well, other than notes on the back of a fag packet – for a pandemic on the scale of the 1919 Spanish Flu (despite the SARS and MURS scares of recent years)?
Well, if you elect Muppets that is hardly to be wondered at; or that, predictably, dictators and ‘strong men’ from Korea to Russia to Latin America, and others turn out to be useless – and clueless – dealing with the consequences of a world crisis. I mean, isn’t that a lesson of history? Why are we surprised?
On a more positive note. Actually, I think we – humanity – may have learned a lot. For example, that Science is probably a force for good going forward (if the politicians don’t blame to experts for their own manifest failings). There is still such a thing as society; it matters that people stick together in troubled times (a problem in the UK as certain members of the ruling class still don’t think the rules they make apply to them too). And if people are educated, rather than harangued about what needs to be done and why, it is self-evidently still possible to achieve a wide degree of communal consensus dealing with existential threats like Covid, and perhaps, going forward, things like climate change.
In other words, there are reasons to if not be cheerful, then hopeful about the future. Not everything is always uniformly dark; a thing I try very hard to remember when I am writing!
August 2021