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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.

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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.

I’m going to float a view on writing about what you know. |

Like many writing advice truisms, “write what you know” is an example of training wheels, helpful for a new writer who has yet to learn to balance—find their style, their voice.

But you might say, Don’t start sentences with but.

And never and.

Or as Churchill said, “From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”Show, don’t tell is a great rule, but applied religiously can bog a story down....

Hi and hello to my new subscribers, and a special thanks to those of you who come back for more.More, who doesn’t want more?

Well, I just took my own advice and started thinking about what the future looks like for one of my story’s plot and narrative.

Writers love to talk about their projects; it’s a bit like parents discussing their family, and nodding politely when they hear about their neighbours’ children, while itching to describe their kids’ triumphs.

Along the way, we do help each other...

When you don’t have a bridge, there may be a ford.

Hello, and welcome to new subscribers.

I have one of these in the village; it doesn’t get a lot of traffic. Some do locally, but fording the river is pretty much a rural thing these days. However, absent a bridge, a place where the river is either naturally or with a bit of help shallow enough to cross is still needed. Once upon a time, it might have been the only route from A to B; still today, a ford might afford a faster route.

As it does in...

Hello fellow travellers and hi to new subscribers.

Welcome one and all to another Friday Newsletter. Feedback Friday.

Feedback is critical, and...

Big news: I’ve finished the prequel novella to the Spectral Detective Series, Into Darkness, and it’s now in beta! I’m inviting you, my fellow travellers, to read it and share your feedback to help shape this thrilling tale.

Into Darkness thrusts a battle-hardened operative into a WWII mission where ancient relics spark spectral chaos. Think Jack...

Hello fellow travellers and hi to new subscribers.Welcome one and all to another Friday Newsletter.I’m busy and I’m at the effective end of the prequel novella to the Spectral Detective Series, called “Into Darkness”.There’s some tidying to do in the last handful of chapters, and the usual check... |

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Into Darkness

Into Darkness thrusts a battle-hardened operative into...

Hello and welcome to new subscribers. I’m fudging the numbers a little. If I start at 0, call my first attempt a Newsletter, sent to a handful of folks, a trial run, or a prologue, I can make-believe this is number 15, on Friday the 15th, which is good enough given my chosen profession—some of the time.

Over the years I hear phrases and idioms, “you can take the man out of the cave, but not the caveman out of mankind” is an example that seems to be a riff on the apt given my oft used Social...