As I’m always up for a challenge I’ve agreed with Glengoyne to produce a crime short story in serial form on the run up to the Bloody Scotland festival. This will be published on their website on a weekly basis. This necessitates a visit to the distillery before I kick off and potentially a grueling lunch and tasting of their fine whisky – well someone has to do.

We launched the Bloody Scotland Glengoyne Short Story Competition today at Blythswood Square  - see http://www.bloodyscotland.com/competition/

We announced the main sponsor for the Bloody Scotland festival and launched the website at www.bloody-scotland.com today. Even had my photo taken with Alex Gray and Lin Anderson.

After further digging around in the bottom of the old suitcase I’ve unearthed another half finished story. While waiting for feedback on the latest novel I’ve taken to tinkering with the new find. A kind of therapeutic thing. Strange how words written years ago take a life of their own. I’m struggling to remember when I wrote most of it – or why? The main characters are all over the age of seventy and dysfunctional in the extreme. The setting suggests that I was living in England at the time but that could just be a trick of my fading memory. Certainly the village it is set in has more than a passing resemblance to one I used to live in.

Time to tinker on and maybe even finish it off.

I took the Christmas break as an opportunity to do a bit of early Spring cleaning. And failed. Not through lack of effort but through a surfeit of distraction. This distraction came in the form of old stories that have lurked in a pile, buried in a suitcase (well more of a flight case really) and hidden from view for more years than I can figure. My first ever attempt at a novel lay at the bottom. A book that starts out on a sliver of paper nicked from a local Greek restaurant, while on holiday in Crete, and finishes in a blue hard back jotter. Hand written in far neater script that I can now achieve it was the original point and shoot manuscript. No planning, no idea of destination and no fear. A simple thought. A stranger hauling a back pack through the scrubland of an island gave rise to the impulse to write.

I remember the moment I saw him. I was standing on the back of a rented jeep; enjoying the wind and sun and unable to communicate with the others in the car. The back packer flashed by and given we were so far from civilisation I began to wonder where he had come from and where he was going. A drifter. An innocent drifter about to find his life on the line as he stumbles into the wrong town at the wrong time. Classic western stuff but with a Sci-Fi twist. I haven’t reached the end yet and I can’t remember what happened but I’ll let you know. After this one there are three more to be unearthed and I’m now wondering if it’s ok to get excited about reading your own work????

After twenty issues of the local magazine Fiona, the person behind, My G76 has decided to call it quits. As such A Brown View on Life is no more (see elsewhere on the site for the published ones). Ah well all good things come to an end but if the mood takes me I may just pen one or two for the hell of it.

Waterstones have chosen ’59 Minutes’ as one of their promotional books for Christmas – good news.

The following is the synopsis for my next novel – if it ever sees the light of day – I’ll publish the first chapter soon.

Set in modern day Iraq and the USA, THE CATALYST is a 77,000 word thriller about Craig McIntyre, ex US military turned bodyguard, who has a powerful and uncontrollable affliction: his mere presence removes people’s inhibitions, transforming their darkest thoughts into action.

Craig discovers he’s the unwitting catalyst for violence when a prostitute murders a diplomat he is guarding in Iraq.

As the violence around him escalates Clive Lendl, the head of a clandestine US agency, discovers Craig’s curse. Seeing the unique potential to create the ultimate assassin and backed by a US senator, Lendl captures Craig and Craig’s wife, Lorraine. While torturing and drugging Craig, in an attempt to mould him into a lethal weapon, Lendl forces him to witness Lorraine’s murder.

Craig is rescued by Charlie Whyte, an ex Navy Seal when an attempt to assassinate the head of an African state goes badly wrong. Distraught at the death of his wife and mentally scarred from months of torture, Craig vows to kill Lendl and the senator and bring an end to their depraved scheme.  But he has to act fast because Lendl has ordered the agency to hunt Craig down and bring him back: dead or alive.

The launch of Bloody Scotland took place today. the following was posted up by Stirling University – one of our partners in the festival:

A starry line-up of crime writers gathered in Stirling’s Smith Museum & Art Gallery today to launch Bloody Scotland, an International Crime Writing Festival which will take place in Stirling on 14-16 September 2012.

Writers in attendance at the launch included Ian Rankin, G J Moffat, Stuart MacBride, Anne Perry, Lin Anderson, Allan Guthrie and Craig Robertson. Ian Rankin took to the floor to applaud this, the first Scottish literary festival to celebrate Scotland’s most popular fiction genre. And to prove how Stirling is a perfect location, he revealed that his next novel reaches its finale here…

The festival has support from Stirling Council, Creative Scotland, and will work alongside Stirling’s existing Off the Page festival, which we reported on last week. Excitingly for us, the festival is also organised in collaboration with the University of Stirling’sCreative Writing courses and the Centre for International Publishing and Communication.

We’ll be working with Bloody Scotland on Creative Friday, hosting masterclasses, workshops, and a publishers’ and agents’ forum. More details to come… and don’t go down any dark alleyways in the meantime!

This summer my family and I decided to take a holiday on Mars. Red rocks, miles of desolation, mountains, no plants, – you know – Mars. As a result I can confirm a few facts and clear up a few misconceptions.

Firstly, there is life on Mars. In the main goats and donkeys.  There’s no fresh water – although there’s a ready supply of beer and Indian food. The currency, should you choose to visit, is Escudos but they will accept Euros. The only practical mode of transport is a moon buggy (although at a push a Toyota Land Cruiser might suffice). It can get hot during the day – 100+ Degrees Fahrenheit (to use old money) is not uncommon. It’s also a fair hike to get there from Glasgow and, at the moment, there is only one flight a week.

Interested?

Ok so maybe we didn’t go to Mars but if someone ever wants to shoot a movie about the red planet they could do far worse than film on Boa Vista in Cape Verde.  I defy anyone to spot the difference between the southern half of the island and Mars (apart for the goats and donkeys.)

I also predict that Cape Verde will be one of the hottest tourist destinations for Europeans in ten to fifteen years. Ten islands a few hundred miles off the coast of Senegal. Miles of beaches. Caribbean sunshine and, in the main, un-spoilt.  It’s probably what the Canary Islands looked like in the 60’s.  Watch this space.

A tip if you do go – don’t hire a car. Unless you are a world four by four expert, in need of rattling every bone in your body, don’t do it. The best way to describe the roads, save the new one one built for the hotel we were staying in, is to imagine a badly cobbled lane that someone has taken a jackhammer to and that’s the M8 of Boa Vista.  Outside of this you are talking full blown, hard-core off-roading. I should know as we hired a Suzuki Jimny – look it up – the world’s smallest four-wheel drive car. It had wheel wobble that made me fear for my life and the sort of suspension that I used to fit on the skateboards I made when I was eight years old.

We enquired as to what there was to see on the island and were reliably informed that we needed to visit the site of a shipwreck in the north. The fact that the island is only twenty miles long and it took us two hours to get there is testament to the lack of maps, roads and directions.

We eventually arrived, courtesy of a very patient local lad we bumped into at the petrol station and the help of a German family who had hired a proper off road vehicle and driver, to find a stunning beach, resplendent with a decaying ship.

The ship was beached in 1968 and had been carrying food stuffs, general merchandise and large quantities of adult magazines. I had a quick hunt around just in case some issues of the aforementioned literature was still to be found and, as I flew home, I was left wondering at what an island with such a tiny population would have done with said magazines especially since, according to one resident, there was in excess of two tons of them.

Two tons!

Maybe I should have looked harder.