Now that evil term at evil college is over I have been working: writing like the clappers to try to finish Dragon’s Wood, and preparing the text and web site for my novel (horror) The Dene. I have knocked out some 38,000 words which I have used to get back into the feeling of the book, get to know the characters again, and although significant disclosures are made I am nowhere near the resolution. Often I have thought my story unfit for the memory of the soldiers who fought in the great war, and I have pause at this. I could have set it anywhere where a group of people are isolated, but I was spurred on by my interest in the war and my discovery of the tunnelling war (long before I had read Birdsong). And so I married the war with the horror plot. However as I have gone on I have begun to wonder if the plot, embedded as it is within its mis-en-scene, is a comment on the atrocities, and in doing so have begone to fashion the responses and motivations of the characters – but alas I have run out of time for soon I am off to France.
This week I have been preparing The Dene, a novel I wrote twenty years ago before I moved to London, and which was kindly received by publishers: “not bad at all, you can write, but not for our list. Send it to so-and-so.” So I did until I ran out of so-and-sos, then I moved to London and it got lost in life. But why not put it up? So on the grounds that you never know what you write I am putting it up on the Amazon store. It reads like an English Dean R Koontz, with Stephen King themeing. And my friend Nicola has done me a front cover.
wandering writer 