Work in progress and planned

Books, in progress

Disappointing Parsnip - follows the lives of young twenty somethings who are growing up in the mid 1980's.
Hag, Doggit, Lentil and Pedro share a house on a council estate. Hag and Doggit spend most of their time with Mouse shooting things. Lentil is a vegetarian with a bag imprinted with the Saffron Walden turf maze. She believes that the mystery of the Isle of Avalon will be resolved once she discovers the message cut into the swirls of the maze. Pedro is the smoothy, olive-skinned, clean cut and well trimmed; he lives for the next chick.
Did I not mention Doggit? He is a dog of miscellaneous and uncertain pedigree (if pedigree is the right word). He is probably half wolf, half mammoth, half lurcher and he is more than the sum of his parts.
Doggit likes Russian stout, kebabs smothered with chilli sauce and getting stoned with everyone else.
Into these lives comes the mysterious John Smith. All we know about John is that he is lonely and has a fear of water.

Books, planned

• WITCH! - will be about the eighteen month campaign carried out by Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne to root out all the witches in the Eastern Counties Association during the English Civil War. The Eastern Counties Association was made up of Essex, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Huntingdonshire. It was a puritan stronghold during the war and included the important power base in London.
  Hopkins and Stearne went about their work with a cold ruthlessness that is normally the preserve of serial killers. With the law of the land, sort of on their side, they embarked on a crusade to eke out all those women (and sometimes men) that confessed to the crime of witchcraft. Hopkins and Stearne did not act purely out of their wider passion for the upholding of religious values as they charged the towns they visited a fee for every witch that was brought before the magistrates. In a short time they had earned for themselves a rough equivalence of a sum of money somewhere between three and five million pounds. This estimate is based on the fact that the country was at war, taxes were at an unprecedented level leaving very little spare cash to be frittered away on luxuries.



• Across The Pond - will be a political thriller about the enduring relationship between Britain and America.



• The Last Drop - will be a novel about the cataclysmic world events that will face the world when the oil finally runs out.



• Bernard Baker 4 - summer of 1900 and the first book completely away from a military theme. Bernard and Sam are requested by Lord Oakham of Rutland to protect his daughter against the curse laid upon the Oakham family by Mother Clarke some three hundred years earlier.



• Bernard Baker 5 - 1902 and the blockade of Venezuelan ports. Now I have to be careful as something that was given to someone else in Pekin Tom is used to go in search of abandoned Spanish treasure in steaming jungles.



• Bernard Baker 6 - 1904 and the British invasion of Tibet. Yes it is true, it did happen. Bernard and Sam go on a spiritual as well as military journey. They encounter yaks, yetis and goodness knows what else.



• Bernard Baker 7 - 1905 and the last year of Bernard and Sam's army service. Now, not to give too much away. The thing that was given to someone in Pekin Tom that was used in book 5 once again causes problems as the owner comes back and wants the thing back.
  Apologies for the ambiguity but I need to reserve the surprises for when they happen.



• Tales From Planet Erf - a comedy fantasy novel set on a medieval planet called Erf where the heroes dress in white, have gleaming teeth and perfect hair. The baddies dress in black and do nasty things. There is a promiscuous princess under an ice cream cone hat and a magician who makes unreliable fireworks.

Plays, planned

• A Dark And Stormy Night - a comedy about a group of dysfunctional paranormal investigators and their complete inability to see ghosts.



• Amateur Dramatics - another comedy, this time set in a village hall. The play follows the trials of a group of well meaning volunteers to bring the performing arts alive to an otherwise deaf audience.



• A Jabberwocky Cometh - a youth theatre adaptation of the poem written by Lewis Carroll and taken from THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS.