Update

I am working on an untitled novel which I started late in twenty-fifteen. I have a friend in America who is exceedingly successful with a series of crime novels which prompted me to try the genre. I started on 3 September, 2015, with a promising plot based on a crime that was somewhat unpleasant (although what crime can ever be deemed ‘pleasant’). However, as I worked I found I didn’t like where the story was going and so abandoned it. But I liked the characters I had created – they had become almost friends –  and so I made a fresh start; that was in December, 2015, more than a year ago.

I continued to work hard on this untitled novel but was never entirely happy with the plot and so put it aside for a while meaning to come back to it with a fresh look. Meanwhile I wrote and finished the short (34,000 words) and humorous crime novel called A Crook in The Café Arcadia (already referred to); I thought it was a lot of fun but it received universally poor reviews from my group of friendly readers and so I put it aside perhaps permanently never to be published.

By that time –  the end of July, 2016 – when I was ready to resume work on the untitled crime novel I was preoccupied with a whole semester of study of Te Reo at the Auckland University of Technology. And then when that was over I contracted pneumonia/Legionnaire disease from which I have only recently fully recovered but for a mild and lingering pain caused by pleurisy.

And so, only now, January, 2017, have I properly and seriously resumed work on my untitled crime novel which, when it is  finished, will be – I hope – a light, interesting and humorous read far from the nasty plot with which I started so long ago.

Meanwhile I am also working on a daily journal of minutiae which I hope to turn into something useful and interesting when 2017 comes to its end. Who know what will happen in the meantime. 

Success at Parnell craft market

I must say I enjoy working at the markets. I'm doing two now -- Mt Eden and Parnell -- and it's refreshing to meet and talk with real readers. I sell my books online and through Amazon and Kindle and although I appreciate every buyer I never get to meet them face to face. If they buy online at least I know their names but I have no idea who buys my books from Amazon and Kindle unless the write a review or send me some feedback (which I always appreciate). So, yes, markets are good and I'll gradually try others. Next, I hope, will be Kingsland. Meanwhile I'll next be at the Mt Eden Village craft market on Saturday 10 September (from 10.00 am to 4.00 pm) and Parnell on Saturday 24 September (8.00 am to 11.45 am). Hope to see you there. 

The Tapu Garden of Eden. FREE Kindle download for a limited time.

The Tapu Garden of Eden -- one of my most popular books by far -- is now available internationally from both Amazon (paperback) and Kindle.

While it was written for adults, and has been favourably compared to The Whalerider, I have discovered that teens, boys and girls, love it and find that they can't put it down. As a result it has become popular in high schools, and with parents and teachers.

I already have four of my books available from Amazon and Kindle and to mark the addition of The Tapu Garden of Eden I have made the Kindle version available as a FREE download from late Sunday night (30 April) (NZT) until 7.00 pm Thursday 4 May (NZT). (The strange times are the result of converting US Pacific time.) 

To download your copy go here. 

FREE HOLIDAY READING FOR YOUR KINDLE

To mark the holiday season, when people like to kick back and enjoy a good read, I'm making Kindle copies of four of my books available FREE to the first twenty people who email me with their choice. I have written and published ten books four of which are available from Amazon (paperback and Kindle). Choose one of these four from my website, email me your choice, and I'll send you a Kindle download voucher by return email. Sorry but I have to limit it to the first twenty (20) responses.

A lovely coincidence

On Saturday, at the Mt Eden Craft Market, I sold a copy of The Boltons of The Little Boltons to a dear lady who bought it because she 'got married in St Mary The Boltons in 1971'. The Boltons is the posh street in Kensington, next to The Little Boltons, and we could see the spire of St Mary The Boltons from our bedroom window. 

A couple of relevant extracts from The Boltons of The Little Boltons follow: 

"The Boltons, running parallel to The Little Boltons, was one of the most elegant avenues of the record reign. Its houses were mansions, on land more generous than the properties in The Little Boltons, with driveways and stables and detached cottages for servants set in spacious gardens. At one end, in the measured middle of its width and within a courtly iron-fenced ellipse, stood Saint Mary The Boltons, the little church whose grey spire we could see from our top-floor room across the ways. There was a chipped and faded sign wired to the church’s black iron fence. This fence was a relatively recent replacement for the original which was removed during the war by churchly patriots as a contribution to the country’s drive for metal. Who knows into what great machine, armament, ordnance, ship, aeroplane, weapon or missile went that iron in the cause of war? And did anyone care, I wonder, that church materials were used for such an awful purpose?

"There was only one window, much smaller than those on the other floors, but it looked down over the back garden — the same garden I had been looking at from the ground floor — from a great height providing a long view across the neighbouring gardens, through a forest of leafless trees, to the sharp needle steeple of Saint Mary The Boltons. I paused there: it was a beautiful and tranquil scene. Beside the window stood a porcelain sink, with old brass taps and exposed plumbing below. But the room was spacious and yet had an intimate and friendly atmosphere, quite different from the other rooms in the house; I felt comfortable in it at once. 

"This was the time, too, when I most appreciated our high position looking out over the garden, and those adjacent, to The Boltons beyond. Although at ground level the garden walls were high, they appeared insignificant from our great height. By ignoring them it was easy to imagine being in the country, looking across and through a lightly wooded coppice to a street of houses in a sleepy but prosperous village. The effect was heightened by the sharp needle of Saint Mary The Boltons which pierced the leafiness of the tall horse chestnuts; on hot still days it looked like a pretty picture of Nutwood from a Rupert Bear book."

The Boltons of The Little Boltons is available on my website here. It's also available from Amazon and Kindle. 

Mt Eden Village Craft Market

 

Had an enjoyable and successful day on Saturday (28 November) at the Mount Eden Village Craft Market. It's good to get face-to-face with real readers who enjoy my books. Only two more Mt Eden markets before Christmas: 5 and 12 December.  

Catching up in London with one of the most important characters in my book 'The Boltons of The Little Boltons'

In 1992 my wife Kath and I spent a little more than six months working as servants in a posh house in South Kensington, London. I was the cook and Kath was the lady's maid.

In a remarkable coincidence the house was in a street called The Little Boltons; it was an amazing experience which I recorded in my book The Boltons of The Little Boltons. 

I have included the book's prologue below but if you have read the book you'll be familiar with the lovely Mariana, the Portuguese house-keeper who became a special friend and adviser. Well, many years have passed and we three are all twenty-three years older. But we have remained friends ever since and during a trip to London this month (November 2015) I was thrilled to catch up with Maria (her real name) again.

Here I am catching up with dear Maria during a trip to London in November 2015

Prologue to The Boltons of The Little Boltons

This is a book of small portraits of some of the many people my wife and I met in the course of a job we shared in a small corner of London for just a few months in nineteen ninety-two. There is no plot. There is nothing in it that is particularly dramatic or exciting. On the contrary it is concerned with the mundane; the daily routine of people who were interesting only because their way of life was strange, unsustainable and all but extinct. I could see that — surely any outsider could — but those concerned, the living subjects of my little portraits, clearly could not. To them everything in their world was perfectly normal. To me living there with them was like being in a dream based not in the present, nor even the past, but in some insubstantial, ethereal other-world that seemed to be fading away even as I lived in it.

Things in this curious other-world appeared perfectly normal. There were always plenty of normal people in busy streets lined with modern cars; red double-decker buses wove patiently through the thick traffic of the narrow Fulham Road and the King’s Road, and black cabs rattled along the side streets taking clever shortcuts to Brompton Road and Cromwell Road. But to me, a visitor from distant and oh-so-different New Zealand, the busy streets felt empty and eerily haunted. Their tall, oversized black-brick houses, looking old, cold and damp, loomed and leaned over their mossy undersized gardens, evoking only the Victorian past. Ordinary, everyday events seemed to move with a purpose now obsolete and meaningless towards a non-existent objective. Some of the little shops looked quaintly old-fashioned and even some of the people in the streets seemed to belong more to another time, another era, like ghosts somewhat bewildered to find themselves disconnected from the place and out of joint with time.

The real names of the people I met are inconsequential and so have not been used; what’s important is that they existed at all and that I chanced to glimpse their ghostly images just as they were fading away. It seemed I was present at — and part of — a sad and somewhat surreal and shabby end of an era, unmarked by history; a metaphor for the demise of what was once the greatest and richest city in the world, the capital of the world’s most powerful empire.