Category: Social commentator

Blog – Frankenstein: The True Story

The Ice Boat – Lost Manuscript

I published Volume I of The Ice Boat in April, 2010. It was the first novel I ever wrote and I wrote it in long-hand. I didn’t realise just what a pain in the ass it was going to be to type it up. In fact, a friend typed up nearly half of it for me – free – which is the only reason I published Volume I when I did!

Writing it up in long-hand did have some advantages; I could write in the relaxed environment of a holiday apartment in Spain and I could get my thoughts down as fast as my pen-hand could write. The latter, in my opinion, has made the manuscript more like a stream-of-consciousness than any of my other novels.

Continue reading “Blog – Frankenstein: The True Story”

Blog: How to Commit the Perfect Murder

This week: How to Commit the Perfect Murder, Rant about Adespresso, updated bio, book price increases.

How to Commit the Perfect Murder
There is no Sneak Preview this week because I am still only slowly progressing with the latest book. If I excerpted every week you would soon have read all of it. 🙂 Instead let me write about something which has preoccupied me this week and does for some time during most books I write. There is often a murder and one often has to think through just how the murderer in the book is going to handle it. There are many ways of murdering somebody so that it is unlikely you will be found out but very few people can or actually, do it in cold blood. It is more often done out of passion and on the spur of the moment ( it is more commonly state-sponsored executions that are planned). Serial Killers I won’t count here because they are not generally sane, usually psychopaths and don’t think rationally about what they are doing.

So my main character finds himself with a knife in his hand and the means, and motive, to kill somebody. It is war-time and you might think nobody will notice a missing person, or will care about a body in the street. But you would probably be wrong. Apart from cleaning up the crime scene (if he or she can do the deed) as best they can, the murderer will next have to consider either how to dispose of the body or how to conceal the act and make the death look natural. In my case (ie the character in my book, not me!) the latter is not possible, nor does the character need to fake his own death, but he does want to take the place of the deceased for a while. Therefore he needs to dispose of the victim. Continue reading “Blog: How to Commit the Perfect Murder”