Author: dfburrows

Book 2 has been formatted ready for printing and also for the e-book version.

The next stage is to put in the meta data with the distributors and set a date for release.

Meanwhile I am a good third of the way through writing book 3: Bullington Castle, which is set in Cornwall and revolves around a family of seriously eccentric aristocrats. I will tell you more later on once book 2 is up and running.

The cover, the spine and the back page of the second book have been put to together by my daughter Melissa. The art work designed again by Steve Royce Griffin. I am in the process of writing the blurb for the back page having already written the synopsis for the two novella length + stories: Jack the Flasher and The Blue Diamond.

The stories are very different with Jack the Flasher, set just before Christmas, centering around the rich and privileged in the more affluent areas of London. There are a wealth of eccentric characters in the tale who seem hell bent on disrupting the detectives investigations to cover up who exactly Jack is.

While Jack the Flasher is a crazy but light, feel good,tale, The Blue Diamond is very dark and sinister without compromising on the comedy aspect. Brutal and bizarre murders occur within this tale. The story travels across London and incorporates the good, the bad and the truly evil.

Book 2, with free reads, will be ready to publish, we estimate, within the next two months by which time it will be spring in England. Hooray!

It may seem that I’ve been neglecting my website because of the lack of blogs. in truth I’ve been swamped with stuff to do for the launch of my first book this coming Monday.

I love writing so much it rarely stresses me out, but striving to be a self-publisher is daunting, there’s so much to learn and so much to do if you want your work to reach beyond family and friends.

One of my biggest problems has been learning how to navigate around my laptop, learn to type and make use of all those little tricks that assist you in making life easier. The transition from longhand to typing on a laptop was painstaking and I often lost it to the point of drowning that ‘vicious brute’ in the water-butt or taking a sledge hammer to it. I was convinced the thing had been invaded by an alien troll that was hell bent on destroying me; and the only thing it was helping me with was how to string hundreds of expletives together while jumping up and down and waving my arms about like a demented crow scarer for several minutes at a time without taking a breath.

Those who have already been down the self-publishing route assure me that it all gets a lot easier after that first book, and I believe it will. So, if you’re thinking of writing that book and publishing it yourself, go for it. It won’t be easy and may not be worth it but you’ll never know if you don’t at least try. You’ll be amazed at how many lovely people will offer you their help, especially on line and from all over the world.

Christmas greetings to all and a special greeting to both of my followers.

Writing blogs can be very challenging. What do you write about? Have you anything worth saying? If you’re an expert on the love life of a frog you would be expected to have extensive knowledge on the subject to pass on to all those followers who are obsessed with the love life of frogs. Your followers would be eternally grateful to you for pointing out and explaining all those facts that have alluded them over the years, despite endless hours of clandestine spying missions on ponds while armed with a camera, a pair of binoculars and a note book and pen while wearing a green wax jacket and floppy hat so they might blend into the background.

If your followers background doesn’t have suitable flora,you, being an expert, may suggest they take a billboard with a picture of a wood on it wherever they go to fool the frogs. Failing that you could advise your followers to just go for it and hope the frogs don’t click that it’s not a tree creeping up on them while they’re in the throes of passion.

I hope this made you smile. This silly little passage popped up in my head and I thought I’d share it and explain why I put it on. One of the most often asked questions to a fiction writer is ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ Usually a single thought pops up in your head that could have been generated from anything at all. Fish Bone Alley popped up in my head two years ago and I thought that it would make a good title for a book. I then reasoned it sounded like a seedy place in Victorian London. Perhaps I could write a Victorian set crime novel? Great, except I’d be competing in a well-established genre already mastered by a host of authors past and present. As a new old kid on the block I needed something different, something I could put my own stamp on. Why not combine a Ripper Street style of story with black humour? From that I began to develop characters and scenarios to build foundations. The rest is imagination.

Have a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year.

I was brought up to believe that providing you had a roof over your head, a full belly, were loved, and had washed behind your ears, life was pretty good, even if you didn’t have much materialistically. So long as you could laugh, look on the bright side and make the best of everything you were practically home and dry. For entertainment as kids we had a TV of sorts, colour by the time I was about ten. TV was brilliant but I preferred reading books, often having as many as five on the go at once from factual history to fiction in several genres. Heroic tales, mysteries, westerns and anything that made me laugh; especially P G Wodehouse. All helped me to escape into many different worlds while feeding my emotions.

Love and laughter are very important to me as I believe we all want to love, be loved, and enjoy a good laugh. Love and laughter are also spiritual healers that lift you up thus empowering your psyche to face the world with more confidence.

The Fish Bone Alley Series was written with the primary intention of making the reader laugh. But that isn’t all it offers. A wealth of characters frequents these off the wall tales, from lovable rogues to loathsome rogues, the poor to the rich, the young to the old. Drama, suspense, intrigue, murder, mayhem and naughty bits are all woven together in a web of pure black humour that is very different from anything you’ve read before. It isn’t always easy to escape for even a short time from the trials and tribulations of everyday life to instantly unwind, relax and enjoy. Allow my addictive tales to assist you. Designed for easy reading, they will exhilarate you, make you smile and even laugh out loud while still allowing you to join in on the chase: Who killed who and why? What’s going to happen next? Can I solve the crime before I get to the end of the story?

Detectives Potter and Head will take you with them into the vibrant madness of Victorian London, through the chaos of the slum areas to the very different world of the rich and privileged. Wherever you are you’ll often find that very little is as it seems. If the detective’s callous indifference to life and death are judgmental you’ll realise that this is how those who operate in extreme occupations cope with what they have to face on a daily basis rather than allow their true feelings to emotionally crush them.As D. I. Potter quotes: ‘It doesn’t pay to feel sorry for anyone here, because while you feel sorry for one, another will pick your pocket or knock you unconscious and strip you bare.’

I enjoy a good glass of wine but I adore a good book, which in truth works out a lot cheaper, lasts a lot longer, and can be kept forever and reread for no additional charge. So please support your story tellers before they become an endangered species.

Good luck and front up to your demons with a smile unless confronted by that escaped lunatic bricklayer whose armed with a drill and believes he is a dentist on a quest to fill every tooth in the world with builder’s cement, and is currently headed your way.