Thraxas Book 12

It's taken me longer than intended to write Thraxas book 12. I think the Covid crisis interfered with and delayed everything I've been doing. Still, I've finished a decent draft and am now revising it. I hope it will be published around March/April 2022.

Suzy, led Zeppelin and Me

 My novel Suzy, led Zeppelin and Me, 2002, reprinted in 2019.

Amazon

'You know Manx, if anyone had said to me when I was at school 'Led Zeppelin are terrible, you should listen to Elvis Presley instead', I would have mocked them. So I'd never try and tell anyone that Led Zeppelin were better than their favourite band of the moment. You can't go around listening to music that your parents liked. Anyway, I like to hear new music myself. But I must admit there have been times when I've been watching some bunch of fumbling indie kids droning on about nothing very much on stage when I'd have been pleased if a huge time warp had opened up and the mighty Led Zeppelin had marched into the auditorium.

'That's what a fucking guitar is meant to sound like,' I'd say, and dare anyone to contradict me.

Simulation Bleed, Collected Serial

Simulation Bleed. My published version of a serial I wrote on my website. Recently corrected of various typos, my arch nemesis.

When writing this serial I had several topics in mind. Things from my life that I wanted to write about but not in an autobiographical way. Memories, some good, some nagging. Good memories about all the gigs I saw, late 70s and into the 80s, punk and post-punk. And not so good memories about therapy on the NHS, sitting in some uncomfortable classroom with a therapist whom I knew was never going to help me with my agoraphobia.

So I folded these memories all into the story, not making it about myself. I took inspiration for this from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, in which Vonnegut dealt with his experiences during the firebombing of Dresden by writing about it in a rather oblique manner. Admittedly that was a far weightier topic than my experiences at punk gigs but still, I did take inspiration from that book. And then I added fairies, which does seem to happen in my writing quite a lot.

Paperback and ebook –– Amazon UK – Amazon US

First edition of my first book, Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation, from 1987. This copy's looking very worn now. I wrote it on an old orange Olivetti portable typewriter with a broken carriage return. After typing each full line, I had to manually push the carriage back to the left side of the page. It took me four and a half weeks to write the book and it was never revised much after that. It was the third novel I'd completed but the first one that was any good. I posted it off to a literary agent I picked at random from the Writer's and Artist's yearbook and surprisingly she accepted it right away. However, it took her three and a half years to find a publisher. I never liked the cover very much but I was so pleased to be published I didn't care at the time.