My fourth novel Hell Lane: A Barton Stacey Mystery will have a more or less pronounced whiff of the supernatural and will be set in Dorset - I envisage something like an homage to Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes.
​I will most certainly be using the section dedicated to the South West of England... 

As I cannot acquire any new stock for my Arcane Publishing shop/stall - and I am not able to sell online at the moment, I have decided to post about the beautiful volumes I have collected over the years... 
I am the very proud owner of this book, a copy of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and other poems beautifully illustrated by Florence Harrison, circa 1920 - first edition of this version (Goblin Market was originally published in 1862).
​It is not in pristine condition and no longer have its dust jacket, but nevertheless, it is a very precious item of my collection...  

Our daily exercise walk takes us to the beach huts near our home...
As we slowly meander among the colourful huts, we have started to notice bits and bobs we had never spotted before...
Like this big, rusty old anchor... 

Scandal and beauty - Mark Gatiss on Aubrey Beardsley was a rare treat for me, who has been an Aubrey Beardsley fan for many, many years (I have had a tattoo of his art on my arm for almost 20 years!). 
Like many people, I was so looking forward to the Beardsley exhibition at the Tate, which I had planned to visit in May... I guess they cannot extend it or reschedule it, and therefore I will not enjoy the original art of one of my favourite artists...
​I am genuinely heartbroken. 
I am the lucky owner of a copy of the first volume of Beardsley's controversial quarterly literary periodical Yellow Book. It is an incredibly fragile item and my copy is not in the best of conditions, but I do cherish it immensely... 
​I do have quite a few rare and beautiful books on my shelves, and might share them with you in the next few weeks.. 

Isn't it ironic? 
I moved to Dorset three years ago in order to be able to walk around the actual setting of my novels and find inspiration in this ancient of landscape. Now, I can no longer jump in the car and wander around the countryside and let it inspire me... 
Therefore, I am back to the books I have bought about the county and its secret places, myths and legends...
The problem with it is that I will not be getting the smells, the noises and the feel of the air...
I will not be able to live the countryside. 
I only hope that I am going to make a reasonable amount of progress on my first draft... 
​

I do need to get back into the novel and its world before I can resume writing. 
So I am starting with a small edit of the first 10,000 words I have written of the "official" first draft: I have discovered to my horror that I haven't touched the manuscript since mid-July 2019...
I wish I could say that I'm in a position of giving a pub date of late 2021 (I do have a new set of pencilled-in dates for each stage of the publishing process) but I no longer schedule anything these days. With the current situation, who knows what is going to happen in the next few months? And of course, I need to be able to fund the printing... 
All I can do at the moment is try and make as much progress as possible on the first draft... 

In order to work on my books properly, I need to be inspired and in some kind of "zone" - not for me the "writing in a cafe or at the kitchen table" set-up (I don't have a kitchen table anyway!).
I have to admit that anxiety is making it quite difficult to concentrate these days: our income has (hopefully) temporarily disappeared, we are all being stalked by a silent and often invisible killer, and any hope of  wandering around the glorious Dorset countryside in spring has all but vanished. 
I have now come to terms with quite a few things this week and now need to concentrate on my own projects which had been neglected lately. My calculation is that I have at least three to four months to dedicate to my books before I have to start thinking about working again... 
I am trying to nail the narrative for The Right Place and have been jotting down quite a few ideas for my fourth novel, Hell Lane. 
​I will post more about my progress in the next few weeks... Just don't expect to see many pictures of the Dorset countryside in bloom, as I had planned to do. 

Oh, and one more thing... The Arcane Publishing online shop, which will be rebuilt at some point late this year, is now closed until the lockdown is lifted for admin reasons... 

I work in education via an agency and schools are now closed, which is good, as I had decided to stop working anyway - I really, really don't fancy catching any virus, thank very much. 
Meanwhile, all the events I was going to attend with Matt ArtPix (some of them incredibly exciting) have all been cancelled and therefore, we will not be going anywhere in the foreseeable future. 
Therefore, it looks like both Matt ArtPix and I will be spending a lot of time at the ArtPix/Arcane Publishing towers over the next few weeks/months. 
I will be resuming writing my third novel, The Right Place. 
On Monday, not knowing that this would be the last day in a while we would be able to admire the stunning Dorset countryside, we went to Abbotsbury, where most of the action in The Right Place is set. 
I had promised to post pictures of lambs - the fields around the chapel are usually teeming with them at this time of year. It looks like we might have been too early: NOT ONE LAMB IN SIGHT ANYWHERE! 
Every year, it is just a joy to walk in the Dorset countryside as you are bound to bump into a few herds made up of of bouncy lambs and protective ewes. I feel crestfallen that I won't get to see any this year... 
​Look: no lambs... :-(