It may be of interest for some to learn that a book can start from the smallest and silliest idea. For me, the following brief and almost non-sensical notes began the process for what has now become my latest book, Milo Moon. From memory, I wrote these notes more than ten years ago, and then found the notes again a little over a year ago.

How they transformed into what is now a finalised book is still a mystery to me. However, you never know what a flower will look like by looking at a seed.

If you have read Milo Moon, good luck in finding the connection.


Spinning disks. Colourful. Falling from the sky. Floating, yet spinning. Coming closer. Full of children. One slamming into a roller door of a suburban garage at a racetrack located in the back yard of my grandmother’s house. Children killed.

Retiring to the garden at the side of my grandmother’s house. Watching our handbags being used as sprinklers. Deciding to walk home. Upset at the tragedy. Walking miles. To the house I lived in as a child. Two doors away from my grandmother’s house.

An old friend who I had never met (yet!) was already at home watching TV. Waiting for us. I approached the door with my wife, and entered the house of my childhood. Also with my other wife, who I had never met, but knew she was going to be my wife.

Three parallel universes. In the same place and time. Created to increase the economic output of Earth, as it was not meeting galactic quotas. Developed and implemented by the Central Galactic Economic Advisory Committee to accelerate the technological and economic output of Earth, so it could join the Western Orion economic zone, 7 million years ahead of schedule.

Life forces were in limited supply. Stories of souls by monks and priests were not far from the truth, but were used to explain and pacify ‘crossovers’. Heaven was used to explain re-bodying of life forces. Three parallel universes of Earth made better use of life forces as bodies were easy to produce but life forces were governed by a strict galactic quota.

Earth humans were way behind the rest of the universe. Third world like. The oligarchy were in charge of the plan. A ‘get rich quick scheme’ with many tax incentives.

Three way division of life forces had drawbacks. Only one third of each personality could be used in each universe. So each individual was incomplete. Hence no one was completely balanced as elsewhere in the universe. Leading to a breakdown in society values and behaviour. Needing new strictures and supervision. Police, military, government, churches. To control the inevitable lack of discipline one third of a human psyche could attain. There was no need for these controls in a single universe. It was hoped that three universes could be merged back into one in three or four million years once economic performance and technological evolution had been attained.

Dreams were crossover points. Ones that were impossible to eliminate because of the strength of a single life force. But were explained away as just dreaming. Occasionally a life force would wander too far from this dream state and realise the reality of the situation. In a three way split state, all dreams, fantasies, odd thoughts and déjà vu feelings were just consequences of the reality. Simple crossovers. The results of not being able to completely split a life force into three.

I was being briefed by Nimrod Kwic on a small hill overlooking Jerusalem. Why here? And why me? And why now?

Like him, I was a rare revert. The merging of my three split forces had been gaining pace in recent years. This was monitored by the authorities and any such occurrences were sent here. And where is here?

The fourth dimension. A holding reality. Where life forces exist on hold until the eventual merging back of the three spilt universes (Earths). Only a few million years to wait. But we had no actual reality. No bodies. We are complete and balanced, as there is no such thing as an imperfect life force. But because life forces are in limited supply, we are not to be wasted. Just kept on ice per se.


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This may seem like a silly ‘sour grapes’ attitude, but I have my reasons for being happy and content, plodding along on my own.

Many reasons in fact, but most of them revolve around the fact that I react very badly to doing what someone tells me to do. Or in other words, I am hopeless at deadlines, appointments, regimentation, work hours, discipline and generally behaving responsibly. This said, the single most important reason for me is that I can write what I want to write, and not what I am told to write, or what is saleable and marketable to write.

My current work in progress novel has me scratching my head at the moment trying to decide what genre it will fit into. It is sort of a cross between adventure, sci/fi, medical, romance, political, drama, comedy, satire, historical and allegorical. The only thing I think I have left out are car chases and cowboys. Now this follows on from my previous four books which were absolutely nothing like this at all. Poetry, essay, historical fiction and life drama.

My long winded at arriving to point here is that if I had achieved any success with my previous books, and I was guided by a publisher, I would probably have to recreate something similar to my previous success. That’s what marketing is about. Recreating the recipe that worked. Thinking Angels & Demons and Da Vinci Code here.

But I am not that capable, talented or disciplined.

You may call it ‘sour grapes’ but I am very happy writing what I want to write and trying my hand at a number of genres before I curl up my toes. At least it will hopefully give my grandchildren some variety to read.

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I was toying with a silly idea a few weeks ago, and started clacking away on my keyboard. At first I thought it might be a fun 500 word blog, or a start on a little essay to store away and forget.

However, for some silly reason, I looked at it, read it, and then decided to re-write it in the third person. Don’t even bother to ask why I did that. I do silly things like that very often. I even fell over a silly name to give my character. So after -re-writhing it, I started to add, play and develop more very silly ideas.

Now, some weeks later it has developed into a work in progress novel. No planning. No carefully crafted synopsis. No research. Nothing. Just vomiting words out through my fingers and seeing where it takes me. At a couple of junctures, I have had to stop and think. What the hell happens now? But after a beer or dinner or a good night’s sleep, something pops into my head, and away I go again.

I have no idea where this story is going to take me. At the stage I am at, I don’t even know if I am ten percent or eighty percent through the story. As for an ending? Well, that is still a mystery. I have no idea whatsoever of how it will end.

Should it happen that I do find an ending, it may well eventuate into a new novel. I’ll keep you posted.

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For nearly forty years I have had a story in my head. One of those stories that never leaves, and continually seeks answers to mostly unanswerable questions. A childhood friend who had such an influence on my life, that to this day, my memories of him are as vivid as the day they were made.

He was a complete mystery to all who knew him. Especially me. Whatever he told me always needed to be thought about, imagined, dissected and half believed.

Twenty years ago, I had my first real thought about writing his story, but for one reason or another, there was never the opportunity or time. Again, ten years ago, I began to make notes in preparation, but alas time moved on yet again.

Finally, a year ago I started again. Slowly at first. Researching, noting, organising, wracking my memory and generally making a lot of messy notes, files and filling space on my hard drive. The more I investigated, the further I was away from starting to write the book, as I kept finding one answer that led to a whole bunch of new questions.

So today is a very big day for me. I wrote the last words in the last page of the last chapter of my first draft. The most surprising part for me was that I almost had tears in my eyes as I wrote the final paragraphs. Emotions not connected to myself in finishing, but emotions I felt for the characters. The combination of sadness and joy I felt was quite overwhelming.

Hopefully this is a sign that I may have got the story out right. I didn’t have this feeling with my previous books, so hopefully it is a sign of a good read.

Now is the time for the hard work to begin. I really appreciate the comments to my previous blog entry about editing and correcting, so I will approach it with a lot more enthusiasm.

For now though, I am so relieved to have finished what has been forty years in the making. A truly wonderful story, I hope.

Time for a celebratory beer!

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I’m afraid my title to this article is way out of date. It should read, the power of the keyboard. But that doesn’t quite have the same majesty or alliteration now does it?

Currently, I am in the post-latter middle stages of the first draft of my fourth book. What this means is that my head has been living each day with my main character for over six months now. He has become a rent-free boarder in my mind for so long, that I look forward to the time I can ask him politely, to leave.

It has reached a point where I can almost smell his body odour late in the day, and have to remind him about his personal hygiene. Without my encouragement, he tends to drift into laziness and just hang about my head doing nothing, waiting for my input into his life. The responsibility is starting to become tiresome.

I do have one small piece of solace though. He is going to die, but I haven’t told him about that yet. So at least I know he will, one day soon, fall off the perch and then move out of my rent free head.

In my previous books, I haven’t really killed anyone. Well, not violently anyway. I did have one character who had the misfortune of being shot dead. But I never quite got around to the details. I just sort of left the responsibility to the reader to decide if it was murder or suicide. Quite irresponsible on my part.

But in this current book, I am really having some murderous voyeuristic fun. There is nothing quite as satisfying as giving a character the skill to aim and fire a rifle so accurately that the victim is caught totally by surprise when a bullet blows out his right eye from its socket and continues its path and vitamisers his brain.

Equally exciting is having my hero shot in two places, and after taking sadistic pleasure in describing his excruciatingly painful injuries in full gory detail, I have the decency to let him survive. Well, maybe not decency. Maybe laziness on my part. It saves creating a new main character. At the moment I am working diligently on a bayonet stabbing. Trying to teach my character about upward thrust and wrist action.

So is there a point here?

Yes, there is. As with everything else I have done in my life, I am in the learning curve stage. I don’t think I will live long enough to pass this stage, but hopefully long enough to feel a slight upward tendency in the curve. Until then however, I will enjoy my learning, and have fun with murder.

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Blog writing has become a relatively new passion for me. Mainly because it fulfills three selfish needs of mine. One, to write away happily. Two, to be read, and three, because it is easier than slaving away on my novel that has been driving me crazy for the last six months.

When I set myself the task of completing a five or six hundred word blog post, I somehow, and with unerring surprise find a topic that tickles my fancy and off I go. A quick read after thirty minutes and poof, off it goes. Normally with a spelling mistake or two, but I prefer to call them talking points more than careless errors. My blog was designed specially to be finely tuned and focused on the uniquely singular topic of life, the universe and everything as a tribute to my hero, Douglas Adams. I am one who has a tendency to stray from a subject, so this narrowly designated topic keeps me right on track.

Unlike my new novel. Which should be called my old novel now as it feels like it has been with me forever. I promised myself that I would complete this story before I die, because it is a story that I want to tell and believe needs telling. That doesn’t make it any faster though.

My original and now almost ancient two page synopsis was absolutely brilliant and has kept me close to the storyline. But is is amazing how many words it takes to turn a synopsis into a story. My original plan was to have the story set, told and concluded in around 120,000 words. As I am not one to concentrate on a word count, I didn’t realise until this week that I have just about finished setting my main character and have now run up over 40,000 words.

I wonder if this is how Tolstoy got lost and needed the equivalent weight in pages of two bowling balls to finally get the story finished. My gut feeling right now is that I might be on that path.

When I make a quick calculation of how far I am into my original synopsis at this point, and the number of words used to get this far, I come to an uncomfortable answer of about 280,000 words. Damn. This will probably take my original deadline for completion from early 2010 to late in the life of my great, great grandchildren.

I’ll keep you posted.

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I am sure we all have our mind’s eye image of a spy. I have included a few of my favourites to add a bit of pizzaz to this blog entry. But back to reality.

Writing a historical spy novel is proving to be a monumental challenge for me. The idea was great, but the execution is taken me a very long time, with frequent moments of complete blockage. In fact, I have walked away from it for a week or more on a number of occasions as I try to refresh my thinking.

As it happens, I have not chosen your stereotypical spy character, so it is taking me an age to define the main character and of course, re-define as time passes.

Luckily, I have a very clear mental image. However this needs constant reshaping as the story covers a complete life time in multiple cultural environments. My original character list has grown so much, I seem to be returning to re-write earlier sub-plots continuously to keep the story tight. Of course, as it is historical, I seem to lose days and days to research of the most trivial details trying to keep my story line and historical situations accurate.

My original plan was to complete this novel towards the end of this year. At the rate I am going, I might need to move that deadline forward by a few months, or years!

After this project, whenever that will be, I think I might return to a new satyrical essay to clear my brain. Either that or concentrate an clever Twitter utterings. But that is all some way off.

Back to the grind for now.


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After many years, my new novel is finally available. As you could imagine, getting a novel into print needs patience. This is not one of my better qualities, so it is a relief for me to finally let it go and get the manuscript off my desk.

The story is dark and bitter and reflects the difficulties faced when love goes wrong. It is about contained grief and our natural instincts for revenge.

Here's the blurb from the back of the book.

Nobody’s Fault

Three men, David, Tony and Steve come from three different, but very average Australian upbringings. Each with a different set of values and morals learned from their childhood and teenage years. Each could be described as typical or average. The story of these three men revolves around a period of one year when their attitudes and reactions to life are tested by pain, upheaval and dislocation. When these men are stripped of their family, home, love and security, the essence of each man is uncovered. David and Tony become friends at a time of loss and bitterness, as they suffer the trauma of marriage breakdown. They share their bitterness with Steven, who has been striving to reform his life after a prison term. He has the new stability of job, and a woman who loves him. A court dispute between Steven and an old girlfriend, regarding maintenance payments, reignites his past attitudes towards women and life. Steven uses the dispute as an excuse to return to his comfort of a selfish and criminal past. In his attempts to help his new friends, Tony and David, he entangles them, by finding them work with his new employer. A man suspected of involvement in theft, drugs and murder.

Previews of the book are available on Google Books and also Look Inside on Amazon.

Available today from Amazon.com

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