On the beach in Fiji

The title might sound entrancing, unfortunately the truth is in attempting to enter Suva harbour early last Monday morning (23rd) I put the boat up on a reef. She is still there as attempts to float her off have been unsuccessful thus far. There is a 'bigger tide' at the end of the month when we may meet with success. More on my sailing blog http://blog.mailasail.com/troutbridge.
In the meantime......let's see what adsense makes of me being in Fiji instead of in New Zealand.

A cracking good read

An old friend (about three months older I think) has written a cracking yarn which he has published as a Kindle ebook. Sea Skimmer is based on his experiences as a pilot in the Falklands conflict and there may be more truth in this than is officially admitted! Be that as it may, I thoroughly recommend it. Enjoy!
If the link doesn't work check out 'Sea Skimmer' on Amazon.

A small, slow step forwards

The 'reading group' liked Dr Augustus Pierre LeMesurier and subsequently so did Emma the Agent. A final proof read then after the Easter break off to a couple of publishers. As always a slow process, I'm told that it will take three to four months to get a reply. First up I think is a publisher in Australia who has international links (so published and marketed world-wide ~ I hope:), they will accept electronic submissions. In tandem three chapters will be sent to another publisher who will only accept hard-copy (and a maximum of three chapters, initially).
A long drawn-out process. In the meantime 'DCI Karno' is busy solving several murders and is proving fun to write. Provided I don't get too distracted in Fiji (setting sail from New Zealand in about ten days, weather allowing) I should finish the book in about three months.
Still desperately searching for Susan, John, or anybody who can 'do' cartoon-type drawings to illustrate Tim. Oh yes, and I see that people are reading the blog (in some rather unexpected places) so please do take a moment to tick one of the boxes or post a comment and let me know what you think.

Grass does not grow under my feet!

Do I do anything else apart from writing? Well that would be telling! Be that as it may, a taster of the latest 'tome'. Let me know what you think.
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A beautiful early evening in late August; the sort of evening that middle-aged people think that every evening in late August was like when they were young, only usually of course they weren’t. Mind you those same people looking at photos of themselves taken at the same time as those misremembered beautiful evenings in late August always seem to remark that somehow or other they miraculously look slimmer, chicer and altogether more attractive than they felt themselves to be at the time the photos were taken, which only goes to prove that either most middle-aged people need to visit an optician as a matter of some urgency or they missed an awful lot of opportunities when they were younger.
Sitting on a quaint but uncomfortable and guano-encrusted wooden bench in the trying to be family friendly garden of the “The Cocked Pistol’, an old Cornishire smuggling pub situated in a picturesque small river valley surrounded by gently rolling heavily-wooded hills and built in the 1950’s complete with thatched roof, authentic oak-type beams and a tourist-attractive history that was total bollocks but nevertheless highly imaginative and vaguely entertaining, a slightly rotund pixie-like figure five and a half feet tall, not athletically built with a bald pate and a one inch wide band of hair running around his head starting from his temples and meeting at the back was taking a reflective sip of his pint of ‘Fetid Old Socks’ and looking at just such a photo, taken on just such an evening. Detective Chief Inspector Leon Karno, inevitably ‘Fred’ to his schoolmates and contemporaries at Hendon when he joined the force, ‘Guv’ to those detectives who worked under his somewhat quixotic direction in the Cornishire CID and ‘bastard’ to a fairly impressive number of local and not so local villains in Cornishire saw that the photo revealed a much younger but still recognisable Fred Karno and a mate, William Hiscock, whose cremation he had just attended. He and ‘Wild Bill’ had been quite the local lads, able to out drink all of their contemporaries and still stand up after six (occasionally claimed to be sixteen) pints of the local cider known as scrumpy; they had all the best chat-up lines, most of which Karno fondly remembered as starting with a cheerful ‘ello my luvver’; he also remembered that usually the hoped-for romantic encounters ended with a friendly riposte of ‘my friend says why don’t you fuck off and stop bothering her!’ Bolstered by this early success with the opposite sex, Karno had got a haircut and graduated from the police training college at Hendon eventually to join the CID; Wild Bill had graduated from the local scrumpy and eventually became a fully-fledged alkie and professional ‘gentleman of the road’, although they kept in irregular touch whenever Karno’s beat took him past whatever hedge Wild Bill was currently residing in. Middle age respectively found the two old pals a DCI and a DOA, Wild Bill having been found under a chic hedge in a more upmarket part of Cornishire clutching a half-empty bottle of meths, his preferred tipple of later years.

Job Done?

Well, "Doctor Augustus Pierre LeMesurier, Incomplete Case Histories" has been dispatched to Emma the Agent. It's a strangely empty feeling once you've finished a book, I feel that I should be doing something, but what? Well, I had the answer yesterday, we (Cadey & I) went off to a nearby hostelry and had Sunday lunch, six days shopping (in monetary terms) in one meal! Hey ho, it was a celebration.
Now the waiting begins again of course. Firstly will Emma think the book is a 'sporting proposition', will it need some re-writing or is it back to the drawing board? In any event I suppose I'm now on the lookout for new ideas. One problem with that of course is fairly soon we'll be off North, back to the warm weather (well, we are in the Southern hemisphere you see) and who knows what internet access will be like? It's an amazing tool, the internet. Whilst there's no guarantee of the accuracy of some of the information you look at (unless it's 'attributable', in which case I think you can be a bit more confident) but for getting directions to/from a location which appears in a story or taking a look at locations on Google Earth it's just the ticket!
Well, that's it for now, I may post a taster of Augustus in the next week, but I'll wait for feedback first.
PS
Why incomplete case histories you may ask, well a chap has to hope for a shot at a second book in the series, hasn't he?

And the search continues

It's REALLY difficult to find an illustrator for 'Tim'. There are several very talented artists out there who produce really good work, but not what I (and Emma the Agent) have in mind for Tim. So, a plea.
"Anybody out there who fancies themselves as an illustrator?" I'm looking more for cartoon-type characters more than strictly accurate real-life representations of animals, and that is what is proving to be the stumbling block, which I must confess I have found surprising.
No artist myself, I realised that it wasn't simply a case of a few quick brush strokes and strange humming noises a la Rolf Harris but I didn't think the search would be this long or this difficult. Maybe something along the lines of the old 'Rupert the Bear' cartoons or even the Winnie the Pooh or Toad of Toad Hall type of illustrations? Any suggestions/samples gratefully looked at. It wouldn't be so bad but most people who have read the 'entire Tim' seem to think that the stories are a winner (including Emma the Agent!).
Hey ho! Thank God the Tsunami didn't pay a major visit down here in NZ and life aboard Troutbridge continues at it's usual serene(ish) pace. As predicted, I haven't finished the new novel yet, I was in bed for a couple of days with the 'dreaded lurghie' and am not quite 100% yet, but I'm almost there!

Formatting, formatting, formatting

I have been taken severely to task by Emma the Agent for my (lack) of formatting expertise, but all is now well, he wrote with hope in his heart and fingers/toes/eyes/other unmentionables crossed!
Augustus's Case Histories should be finished by the middle of March (now there's a real hostage to fortune, but I didn't mention which year lol). It will be a little shorter than originally envisaged, which hopefully will allow for a follow-on book. All of the research has been done, so 'Further Case Histories' should not be too onerous a task.
No real news about the search for an illustrator for Tim EXCEPT, I'm waiting to see some ideas from an artist who lives in the North Island, here in New Zealand, I have a lead that I stumbled across here in Whangerei (North Island, NZ) and there is a 'somebody' in the UK, a friend of my daughter, who is also taking a look at the manuscript to see if she might be able to do something. Emma the Agent continues to be enthusiastic about the project and in fact she put me in touch with Trish Lacey (the artist in North Island) who she has also taken on as a budding author.
I will post a few 'chunks' of Augustus for your delight and delectation in the near future, in the meantime autumn is coming to NZ, it's a drizzly, dank sort of morning and all on Troutbridge are looking forward to heading back up to the Tropics in the not too distant future.

Creativity, Research and chance

The chicken or the egg, creativity or research, setting or plot, which comes first?
In my case I find more and more that research modifies what begins as an idea for a story. Of course, chance plays its part as well. To avoid being totally enigmatic but without giving too much away about my latest 'literary effort', I'll use the current endeavour as an example.
First came an idea, let's call it chance meetings. In my mind a vague plot begins to form. I need to do some research and the local public library here in Whangerei seems a good place to start (it's free!). During the first afternoon of research, all fascinating stuff, the feeling grows that whilst the subject matter is interesting it\'s going to be a fairly monumental task to write, say, 150,000 words, but I don't want to abandon the idea because I think it's got a lot of potential. Leaving the library, chance takes me (us) past a second-hand book shop, which Cadey suggests we go into to look at who publishes children's books. Not a bad idea, remember I'm still trying to move the 'Tim Project' forward. Incidentally on the subject of Tim, I'm very happy with the first sketches of some of the characters in the stories and have a good feeling about things happening. Anyway, once inside I get side-tracked (as I often do in second hand book shops) and wind up talking to the shop owner about local illustrators. That conversation, although interesting, didn't lead me to the illustrator who I hope to be collaborating with, but it did lead me to reminisce about times spent browsing the various bookshops in Winchester when I 'were nobbit a lad'. I hadn't intended to buy any books (got to keep the weight down on the boat, y'know) but I spotted a couple of shelves that were labelled 'unusual books' or something similar. I couldn't resist taking a quick peep and after a mere forty five minutes or so unearthed a couple of finds.
One of them involves the finding of the memoirs of an Ottoman secret agent; a fairly well used literary device. On reading the book (not bad, a sort of Flashman-type yarn I must do a Google search and see if there were any follow-up stories) my original idea became slightly modified; the book about chance meetings could have been written by a third party, or at least the rough notes were written by a third party which were then discovered some years later and turned into a book at the behest of one of the third party's descendants (enigmatic? Moi?). Who wrote the rough drafts? A doctor in Victorian London of course (where the hell did that come from?).
It turns out (and this was a total surprise to me) that these notes, discovered in the loft of an old cottage in deepest Hampshire, in fact form part of an unfinished autobiography. If there was to be any auto-biographical element to the story, I firstly had to 'invent' the previously-unsuspected character, which involved amongst other things inventing a family tree, both of his ancestors and as it soon turned out his descendants. I also needed to research how one became a doctor in Victorian times, which in turn led to research into medical knowledge and practice in Victorian times. This, for reasons that will become clear once the book is finished (and published!) led me into the study of psychiatric treatment in Victorian times. More scientific than one might have thought, incidentally. I then suddenly discovered that the manuscript was in fact a collection of case histories and 'my man' had an interesting, if secret, history.
So dear readers, let me introduce you to an unsung and hitherto unknown hero of the Victorian science of psychological profiling (amongst other things),
Augustus Pierre LeMesurier.

Promising

I'm in contact with a great illustrator, who's based in Auckland. He likes 'Tim' and having read all the stories is going to commit some ideas to paper. Things are looking up. Watch this space.

Whangerei

An interesting small town in the North Island of New Zealand. Actually, to be strictly accurate, it's the largest town in the Northland area, but be that as it may.....
It turns out that it's a hotbed of arts and craft shops, second-hand book shops the like of which I hadn't seen since I 'were nobbit a lad!'and 'am-dram' companies. A fascinating place which may provide another lead for an illustrator for 'Tim'. I'm emailing a lady in South Africa at the moment about illustrations and am feeling quietly confident that one way or another Tim is about to become a finished project.
Browsing a second hand book-store I came across a small tome, written somewhat in the style of George Mcdonald Frazer's Flashman novels, about the exploits of an Ottoman secret agent. As with the Flashman novels, the memoirs of this agent were discovered in a chest in an attic......funny where you get a sudden idea about a plot, isn't it? Nothing to do with secret agents or adventurers, but an idea that I had just started developing suddenly turned completely around. More in about three or four months when the novel 'should' be finished or at least well on the way. In the meantime, my companion on the boat has discovered somewhat to her horror that when I write I get up about 0600 and work for a couple of straight hours. A cup of tea is welcome but conversation is not!!