When I’d written and published (via an assisted publishing route with AuthorHouse) Provenance, I wondered… ‘Okay. You’ve written the book you always wanted to write. So, what’s next?’
One or two friends vocalised the same question.
What was next? Going back to work, back to the unremitting grindstone of deadlines, stress, professional competition, commercial survival and zero work/life balance?
I’d discovered a simpler, more enjoyable way of life, the soft rewards easily outweighing the loss of income from what had been a well-paid job. This new, improved, quality of life was preferable, and I knew I wanted to write again. But write what?
An idea for a story began to take shape, this time flowing from my love of the guitar and the engaging, romantic music written for the instrument in the Victorian/Edwardian era by English composers. I’d been working on the guitar part of Ernest Shand’s First Concerto Op.48, and the score, together with the rather enigmatic portrait photo of the composer on the cover, really got under my skin, transported me back in time. Just as had been the case with Provenance, I thought there’s a story to be told here, and so ‘Novel Number Two’ began to stir. And that’s as far as it got, because something elbowed it into touch.
A friend said to me, “Why don’t you write a vampire story?” Everything vampiric was in vogue at the time, tv series like Twilight and True Blood, and the novels that spawned them, hugely popular; so it was, I suppose, a reasonable question to ask. And I like a challenge. The gauntlet had been thrown down.
I spent the next four years writing A Kind Of Infection, a vampire tragedy. It’s a huge story, and one day I might even publish it.
Then, in 2015, Michèle and I went to the USA to visit her daughter and American son-in-law, who at the time lived in Louisville, Kentucky. Before visiting them, we had six days in New York. New York had such an impact on me that I felt I had to capture my impressions of the city, my memories of that brief stay, in a story. I spent the next four years writing A Neat Execution, a story set, in part, in New York, made a couple of failed, half-hearted attempts to get a publisher interested and then tucked it away alongside A Kind Of Infection.
So what, you may ask, of Concerto? Well, Concerto followed. It’s the story that would have been Novel Number Two, if a vampire challenge hadn’t muscled in. It took four years to write (there’s a pattern here), and it was published in 2023 through The Conrad Press, via a subsidy publishing model.
As I’ve already said, I like a challenge. I’d recently read a novel written entirely in verse, and I wondered just how hard it would be to versify a story. So, I set about finding out. I opted for writing each verse in a sonnet form, similar to the rhyming pattern of William Shakespeare’s sonnets but with a slightly different metre.
What a labour of love it turned out to be!
It’s a story of ancestral intrigue, music and cold case murder, with a bit of internet dating thrown in.
There are snippets of my autobiography in everything I write.
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