After four months of 60-hour weeks, finally, over the past two weeks, I have been reminded of why I moved to Dorset three years ago... 
Yesterday, I spent a few hours at Kimmeridge Bay - I regularly go back to my (many) favourite spots along the Jurassic Coast as they always look and feel different... 

Tomorrow, work resumes on my third novel, The Right Place. 
For inspiration, after having finished Amy Liptrot's stunning The Outrun, I have picked up Roger Deakin's delicious Notes From Walnut Tree Farm. I am immersing myself in the story of landscape and nature... 

I was reminded recently that Nine Inch Nails' album The Fragile was 20 years old.
When it was released, I had just arrived in London from Cornwall and hadn't even started my "career" as a music journalist. I just wanted to go to gigs, write and, well, have a life. London was still the "old" London, where everything was possible for anyone, even if you didn't have any money (I didn't).

Nine Inch Nails has been one of the most important bands ever in my life and I regularly come back to Trent Reznor's early works - I am not enamoured of his most recent output and acceptance by the mainstream. I remember when you could just go and see NIN at the Astoria... 

My own copy of The Fragile (which I personally consider a masterpiece) is very bashed but still playing. It has survived over 16 moves, most of those around North London - and a series of dilapidated flat shares and tiny single-occupation studio flats... 
The Fragile has been part of the soundtrack to my new life in the capital and for many reasons, it still resonates today as I haven't really changed and hold the same values and goals as 20 years ago.

I am not one for birthdays and anniversaries, but as everyone is talking about the past decade and as my 2020 plans include further developing my Arcane Publishing venture, I thought I'd go back over one of the most important moments of the past decade for me as a writer and book lover...

Exactly ten years ago, I starting working on my first novel, I Am a Muse. As stated in the FIRST EVER BLOG I wrote on this website back in the summer of 2010, the plot for I Am a Muse came to me almost overnight and perfectly formed, and I remember explaining it for the very first time to my partner whilst sitting in a cafe somewhere on the Essex coast overlooking a very grey sea... 
In December 2009, I had resigned my full-time publishing job in Oxford and left the tiny London flat I had been living in for two years or so (extreme commuting anyone?) - I was moving to Southend-on-Sea and starting a self-employed "career" (not a career, a stint at freedom!). This was a momentous move: I was leaving London after ten years of crazy metropolitan living, with all its elating ups and crushing downs...
I had been writing for a long time (actually since I was a child, but in London, I had been a music journalist for a decade by then) but I had decided that enough was enough - reviewing other people's work was indeed exciting and rewarding (free gigs and CDs!) but I was going to have a go at what I thought was the best (non-paying) job in the world: being a fiction writer! 
First came I Am a Muse. I wrote it then spent a whole year editing it and sending it to agents... 
Which led to nothing. 
​
And then, in 2013, Arcane Publishing was created - I registered Arcane as a proper publishing imprint and published my first novel! 

​When Arcane was officially created, I had already started working on my second novel, The Book of Thoth, which was published by Arcane in early 2015. 
And since then?
Since then, I have found it difficult to work on my third novel, The Right Place. "Real Life" has a knack of taking over and distracting you on your path to publication... Unfortunately, writing and publishing books doesn't bring in any money - indeed, Arcane Publishing's budget is very, very tiny indeed, and I use my own money to get the books published... Therefore, other - mostly boring - things have taken priority over writing. 
In January 2017, I moved Arcane Publishing's towers even further from my beloved London: to Dorset, for its inspiring landscape (and the opportunity to acquire a much bigger-sized HQ!). 

It's been quite a ride, and in 2020, I hope to make things change a bit: the second-hand books side of the Arcane Publishing business will hopefully develop further with an online presence by the end of the year, and I am determined to finish the first draft of The Right Place - which will demand some sacrifices along the way, but I feel that I cannot wait any longer to finish this project, especially as I have two more really exciting books planned already - I genuinely cannot wait to get started on Hell Lane: A Barton Stacey Mystery.
I will be posting both on here and on the Arcane Publishing website more regularly in 2020... 
Watch this space! ​

I am really looking forward to seeing Knives Out next week. It's all purely for research purposes, you see... 
My fourth novel, Hell Lane, will be a (hopefully) fun "Rural Noir" detective story written as an homage to two of my favourite authors: Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes).
Hell lane will have a charismatic London detective, a gloomy vicarage and an ensemble of characters that will include a creepy butler, an airhead actress and a writer fighting writer's block - and many more... All stuck in a Dorset village by the coast in the 1940s with nothing to do!
What can possibly go wrong...

I haven't read a book since September, which is unheard of, but today, I have started Joanne Harris's Sleep, Pale Sister, a dark Victorian Gothic tale - just what I like. 
I will be going back to The Right Place, my third novel, at the end of the month, once I am free again. My intention is to publish by the end of 2021 and to crack on with my Agatha Christie/Sherlock Holmes-inspired rural noir detective novel Hell Lane. 

There's been a change of plan and I can announce that I will be back to writing and dealing with Arcane Publishing business in early 2020! I cannot wait... 

Oh dear, I haven't been on here since September! This is probably the longest I have been away from my websites since I launched them a few years back... 
The truth is, I need to raise some much-needed funds for Arcane Publishing and Arcane towers, and in order to do this, I went and got myself a "proper" job, only it's not really the 9 to 5 kind (more the 60-hour a week kind) and basically, it's taken over my life... Unfortunately for my creative pursuits and luckily for my bank account, it's a one-year contract and I won't be free from it until July 2020... I hope that this will enable me to complete The Right Place next year and publish towards late 2021; it is also my intention to develop my second-hand books venture, and go back to organising events... Watch this space! 
In the meantime, I'm afraid I will only be able to come on here sporadically to post a blog from time to time... 

This week, I would like to tell you about some lovely books I found in late August - I just had to buy all four of them as I felt I couldn't leave them behind...
They led me to discover an artist I had never heard about before, Helen Bradley. 
Hers is the extraordinary story of a girl born in 1900 in the north of England whose thwarted artistic ambition was finally achieved when she picked up her brushes at the age of 65 and became an internationally renowned artist. Some people have called her the female Lowry!  
For a student of English history and society like myself (Victorian to early 20th century), her narrative paintings of Edwardian childhood are intriguing and fascinating. Her paintings are populated with many characters taken from real life - humans and animals - and the colourful scenes are incredibly evocative. They describe the artist's Edwardian childhood through the eyes of a curious and happy child who observed the world around her with innocent and eager eyes. The paintings themselves could be described as naïve art and are accompanied by an autobiographical narrative written by Helen herself reminiscing about her life as a child in Northern England, a time of societal conventions, god-fearing family members, frequent funerals, amiable servants and pleasure derived from all the small things in life... Helen Bradley's four published books are a delight and have been a real discovery for me... They are now part of my own personal collection!
​You can enjoy some examples of her work below...  

I am an incorrigible collector of illustrated books. I have shelves full of vintage volumes from various countries dating from the 19th Century to the 80s full of gorgeous illustrations... Obviously, my budget is minuscule and I have often had to put back on the shelf/stall the books I was dying to buy but couldn't afford...
I have now ran out of shelf space and am thinking hard about what to do about it... If I had the money to commission a carpenter to install built-in shelving all around the house, I would... Alas, it is not to be! 

One of my favourite illustrators is Norman Thelwell, and I am in love with all the animals he has drawn - especially the plump "Thelwell ponies". I do have quite a few books full of them, and intend on acquiring more in the future! His illustrations, if often hilarious, do make serious points about society and human (as well as animal) behaviour. 

Last week, though, I came across "The Effluent Society". As I flicked through the pages, I was struck by how modern it all felt; the book was published in 1971 and it is really shocking - and sad - to see that with all our talk of beach cleaning, river pollution, overcrowding and overbuilding, we cannot pretend that we didn't know: it was already happening 50 years ago!