When I published my memoir 'Me Neither' in 2018 I started a blog in the hope of drawing attention to it. Ha! As if. Even then no one wanted yet another blog or website or tweets about your latest book. The focus had already moved on to Instagram and Pinterest, both studiously averse to textual matter. Now even those sites are old hat and all the action has moved to TikTok and, for the purposes of promoting books, to its offshoot BookTok. Stranger things have been known to happen, but somehow I doubt that Gen Z influencers are on the whole enthusing about Boomer memoirs devoted to the world of work in the 1970s and 1980s.
After a few posts I abandoned the blog and let my little book make its own way through the world. In the absence of any publicity or reviews in the public prints, sales were distinctly modest. I was not surprised, but it was hard not to feel a little disheartened. Perhaps memoir was not my forte. What about writing a novel instead?
Four years later I seem to have written not one, but two novels, 'Who Was Nightshade?' and 'Event/Horizon'. Looking around for a vehicle with which to launch the novels I found that my neglected blog had been patiently waiting out on the Internet for just this moment. A quick change of blog name and I'm ready once again to bother an unsuspecting world with the occasional post advocating the merits of my new books. And who knows, even 'Me Neither' might find a new generation of readers.
Stylistically 'Who Was Nightshade?' is a mashup of John Le Carré, P G Wodehouse and Judy Blume. It is set in the East Hertfordshire countryside of summer 1963, the era of the first Beatles LPs and James Bond movies. Youth culture is taking over, but the shadows of the Cold War still loom large. The plot involves the hunt for a will (Wodehouse strand), but one of those hunting for the will is a Soviet double agent (Le Carré strand). Things develop in expected and unexpected ways when a couple of teenagers (Blume strand) get involved. Behind it all lies the identity of the double agent codenamed Nightshade.
'Event/Horizon' on the other hand is an immersive reconstruction of 1974 Cambridge. It follows the trials and tribulations of Steve Percival, recently graduated from the University and at a crossroads in his life. If Steve were sensible, he would be moving to a well-paid job in London, or committing to Angie his lovely and clever girlfriend. But instead, he contrives to get a job as a milkman, so that he can spend the summer months writing a long poem. In consequence of this, he falls in with a very different set of people from his college friends. His new social circle is altogether racier and more dangerous. To Angie and his mother, he seems to be throwing away all the advantages an Oxbridge degree would normally be expected to confer. But unexpectedly an influential figure in the world of poetry is given sight of an extract from his poem and offers to publish it. Maybe he hasn't been quite as reckless as his family and friends first thought... But nothing is quite so straightforward in Steve Percival's life.
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