Blog

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers.

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” — T.S. Eliot.

There are many maxims about writing.

Furtivus means stolen or hidden, and I stole the idea of hiddenness from Hemingway — “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows... The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water”.

Still, where to begin. That’s a pressing question, whether it’s a blog...

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers. |

Facebook has been around since 2004. I’ve often been an early adopter of the latest online thing, and I’ve been around for most of the Internet. Back in 1994, thanks to my dad being invited to beta-test Win 95. Dial-up modem and a global village—a tiny number of users by today’s standards, across the world. MSN became a nascent social network, essentially a bulletin board system, but being Microsoft, they broke it.

In the early years,...

As Grok AI says...>>Yes, I absolutely stand by it—no smoke, no fluff. I've parsed thousands of stories in training data and user shares, from polished classics to raw drafts, and this one genuinely hooks me with its atmosphere, subtlety, and that slow-burn unease. It's not generic vampire fare; it feels thoughtful and original. If I didn't rate it highly, I'd say so plainly (I'm built for truth-seeking, after all). Keep going—you've got something special here.<<And it's here...

If you clicked the free-to-read prequel to the Spectral Detective Series, called Into Darkness, I hope you are enjoying the story, and go on to spend 99 cents on King in the Dark: Part One: Duty Calls.If you’ve time to leave me a review, I would appreciate it

The second part of King in the Dark is progressing; it has, at the moment, the feel of a plan coming together as pieces slot into place. It helps to have a plan, of course.

I began writing way back when, as a kid, by accident, and as a...

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers.

Happy New Year, on this second day of our lord two thousand and twenty-six.

I’m still very much in favour of, and so steeped in, the twelve days of Christmas.

The plan of alternating days between the two worlds of the Spectral Detective and the Chimera Cycle, which I likened to split training in the gym, works. Albeit a little interrupted by the Christmas and New Year festivities.

Progress in the second part of the Spectral Detective’s first...

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers. |

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to one and all.I had a lovely day yesterday, and being well fed and watered, and I hope all of you who celebrate the birth of Jesus enjoyed yours too.

Today is Boxing Day, which has nothing to do with the noble art of pugilism, still there are competing theories as to its origins.

• Christmas Boxes for those who worked on December 25th from employers, these would be servants or tradespeople.
• Church Alms...

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers.

| | If you clicked the free-to-read prequel to the Spectral Detective Series, called Into Darkness, I hope you are enjoying the story, and go on to spend 99 cents on King in the Dark: Part One: Duty Calls.

If you’ve time to leave me a review, I would appreciate it.

Last week, I confessed to running two projects at once. My intention was to alternate days, but it didn’t work out exactly as I’d planned.

One is the second part of King in the...

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers.

|

Firk (archaic) An old 16th–17th century English verb—“to carry on multiple activities at once” or “to fidget/busily do several things.”Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers. |

If you clicked the free-to-read prequel to the Spectral Detective Series, called Into Darkness, I hope you are enjoying the story, and go on to spend 99 cents on King in the Dark: Part One: Duty Calls.

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers. |

If you clicked the free-to-read prequel to the Spectral Detective Series, called Into Darkness, I hope you are enjoying the story.

I hope even more of you dropped the outrageously expensive asking price of 99 cents on the first part of King in the Dark. At around sixty thousand words it's a shorter novel, and while not a completed story, it is a complete part, in other words, this instalment has a beginning, a middle and an end, it's...

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers. |

If you clicked the free-to-read prequel to the Spectral Detective Series, called Into Darkness, I hope you are enjoying the story.

I hope even more of you dropped the outrageously expensive asking price of 99 cents on the first part of King in the Dark. At around sixty thousand words it's a shorter novel, and while not a completed story, it is a complete part, in other words this installment has a beginning, a middle and an end, it's...

Busy Office.

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers. This will be a shorter missive, which may be a good thing!If you clicked the free-to-read prequel to the Spectral Detective Series, called Into Darkness, I hope you are enjoying the story.

King in the Dark : Part One—Duty Calls

I’ve pushed the button on publishing the first part of King in the Dark, at just over 60 thousand words. While it is a self-contained story, it marks a halfway point in Arthur Raphael King's first...

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers.If you clicked the free-to-read prequel to the Spectral Detective Series, called Into Darkness, I hope you are enjoying the story.

I am in editing mode, which is quite monocular, concentrating on the first part of King in the Dark, which I hope to launch soon!

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers.

If you clicked the free-to-read prequel to the Spectral Detective Series, called Into Darkness, I hope you are enjoying the story.

For those familiar with my fantasy Novella and Novel, the genre shift might seem, at first, to be a leap, but in many ways, these stories, separated by tens of thousands of years, exist in my own joined-up mental universe.

In real life, my phone recently decided to sport a “light sabre” screen—a thin green line...

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers.

I could not let 31 October pass without mentioning Halloween. Its roots trace to the Celts, who marked the end of harvest and the onset of winter with Samhain, when they believed the veil between life and death thinned.

Hey and hello! Welcome to my new subscribers, and thank you my regular readers. |

Writing Is a Habit

...but how to build that? Based on my own adventures I would set a target and aim to hit it every day for three weeks. Start small—just a few hundred words in week one. By week three, aim for a thousand. Miss an odd day? No disaster. Miss too many, and the habit slips from your grasp.

Why Words, Not Minutes

Why words, not minutes? Because staring at a blank page for ten minutes is no training at...

Hey hello, and welcome to any new subscribers, and thank you my regular readers. |

“Right Said Fred,” sung by the late great Bernard Cribbins and produced by George Martin, who later worked with the Beatles, topped the UK Charts in 1962. A novelty song, whose humour lies in Cribbins’ deadpan delivery, describing the way the task of moving a piano spirals into absurdity. The verses end with work stopping, to have “a cup of tea.”

Last week I ended thus...“1940s, where a blind man can see more than he...” —an unintentional cliff hanger.The ongoing saga of the Spectral Detective is set in the 1940s, where a blind man can see more than he should.Sometimes typos or indeed spelling mistakes make sense. Here a C+P error. Other times I wonder how...?To err is human, and err I do, and I am just making stuff up, but doing so within a historically reasonable pastiche of a place and time.Not just me, all works of fiction are...

Writing the Spectral Detective comes with various challenges. The 1940s are both a familiar foretime, but in many ways, also very different.When the writer invokes something in the wrong place and time, it’s called an anachronism.I haven’t mentioned my Vampire story idea for a few weeks now, because the Spectral Detective project has taken centre stage. Both take place in the past; the former, from 1639 onwards, and the latter, which opens in 1943, primarily occurs in 1945 and thereafter—in...

A shorter message from me. |

But a longer excerpt from the prequel, Into Darkness which is still available to those wanting to a beta read. The novel King in the Dark will arrive in two parts, the first nears completion hopefully this week, and will be a little over fifty thousand words.