Welsh Thunderstorms

Today I heard a single clap of thunder. I wondered if we were due for more so I checked Netweather’s lightning strikes map. The strike I heard was the one shown in orange, just to the south of Edinburgh. We seem to have got off lightly – look at the thunderstorm over Wales!

New teen paperback at Amazon

Many thanks to Charlotte for reading and commenting on three recent rewrites and edits of Keewatin. The novel is finally in paperback (there is also a Kindle version).

Don’t click on the pic above to look inside! Click the Keewatin link here instead.

Keewatin is an adventure story set in Canada in the 1980’s. I wrote an original version for my son when he was eleven – though this published version bears little resemblance to the original.

To save you clicking on links, here is the book’s description:

Alex Mackenzie’s father disappears while on a visit to a mine in the Canadian north. Search parties fail to find him. When school breaks up for the summer, Alex’s friend Suzie invites him to fly with her to Toronto to stay with her aunt. It is a plan by her parents to get Alex’s mind off his missing father. In Toronto things go badly wrong. Will they be allowed to stay with their aunt, or will they be sent back? And what happened to Alex’s father? Keewatin takes the reader into the Canadian wilderness accompanied by an anxious Alex, a feisty Suzie and a truck called Mog. An adventure for older children and younger teens. Parents: A safe adventure story! Read and enjoyed by 8 to15 years.

No reviews yet… My first published novel, Playpits Park, had several 5-star reviews (see here). A few years ago I put a draft of Playpits on the Harper Collins Publishers website ‘Autonomy’. Here are the peer reviews.
Unlike Keewatin, Playpits is NOT a novel for children. Playpits Park has been downloaded for Kindle more than 5,600 times

 

BBC’s Jamaica Inn – excellent stuff!

Am I the only veiwer in the UK who liked BBC1’s recent production of Jamaica Inn? True, I could only understand about two-thirds of Joss Merlin’s (actor Sean Harris – see photo) mumblings – but the drama was set in Cornwall, for goodness sake! Have any of those that complained actually been there? I have Cornish relatives and I spent a lot of time there when I was younger. Also, the last firm I worked for had its head office in Falmouth. My recollections are that I only ever understood about two-thirds of anything the (real) locals said. I made up the rest. It’s amazing how agile and inventive one’s brain can be when faced with strong accents and dialects.

Private Eye (Eye No 1365) seems to have hit the nail: ‘…the main location is a drinking place – with the result that the characters are often pissed – and that many of the people featured are smugglers and murderers who are terrified of being overheard.’ Also, Sean Harris ‘…accurately re-creating the sound of a pissed Cornishman whispering out of the corner of his mouth as a precaution against being rumbled.’

I wasn’t as concerned with the mumblings as I was with the flintlock pistol that fired at least three shots without being swabbed and reloaded in between firings. Now that really was inexcusable…