Back to Lisbon

To celebrate the first birthday of my debut published novel "In the Shade of the Sun" and the forthcoming release of book #4 in that series, I decided to do something a little bit different.

It's the school holidays here now, right after 4 months of lockdown-enforced working from home, online teaching and learning and some small group bubble-teaching back in the building itself, but I'm never one to rest. It ought to have been just a few short days before my planned summer holiday - another epic road trip across America to celebrate my fifth wedding anniversary - but as that's been scaled back to a cosy trip to the Welsh valleys, I have more time to focus on my writing.

So I'm currenly editing book #4 (it's a slightly more complex narrative this time as it's a murder mystery-style story, it's on a cruise so has multiple locations rather than one central city and it has a HUGE cast of characters compared to my other works which revolve around a small core usually, sci-fi epics not included), but also trying to focus the main narrative of book #5 (which takes in three different holidays and three time periods and I may abandon in this style as it's complicated even for my tastes and also burns through source material with no overseas holidays on the horizon!) and then there are new characters who keep popping up in my head and a new detective series in the making with Mash, Pres and Gina on the horizon (more on them soon, I promise!).

But for now, it's all about book #1, set in that warm October of 2017 in the beautiful, vivid, labyrinthine Portuguese capital where Palmer, Stuart and Jon Scott Campbell as well as the Marujos, Celia, Gerry and others first came into focus. I always wanted to get published, but am often crippled by the anxiety of being in the spotlight (strange for a teacher/writer/actor etc) and so self-publishing made sense, and set myself a deadline of doing it before I turned 40. Well, that came and went last December by which point I'd published two novels and had three more in the works.

So, thank you Lisbon, for inspiring me, along with Hitchcock and Highsmith, my favourite purveyors of thrills, guilt-trips and globetrotting, and if you fancy dipping into the Palmer and Evans waters, then the river Tagus is where I would recommend beginning...