For many years I wrote scripts for a local amateur dramatics group, comedies similar in style to an English pantomime, but never from the traditional ‘fairy-tale’ sources. My tales were based on familiar stories and characters, although those which had never received the ‘panto’ treatment before. Jason and the Golden Fleece (The Greek myths), The Scarlet Pimple (The French Revolution), Cleopatra, Geronimo, Hadrian and the Wall – all stories to a degree within the public consciousness, but – to my knowledge – never previously performed as a pantomime. There are more details of these on the ‘Plays’ page.
After these comedy plays, I wondered if I could, or should, attempt a novel. Having had the bare bones of a story taking shape in my mind for quite a time, a couple of years ago I started to commit these thoughts to paper – well, to electronic paper. As I started to write more fully however, it soon became apparent that the story I had in mind would be too long for one book, so the project grew in size – first becoming two books, then as the story progressed three books, and finally resolved itself into a series of four.
As the writing continued, I soon found that I needed to do further research into some of the issues encountered by the characters. While I can clearly remember the time period when the story starts – 1989 – I found that most of the historical details which needed to be verified could be checked online. For more specialist information on topics about which I knew virtually nothing, I tended to use the non-fiction section of the county library.
Having finished the first draft of the story, several friends were pressed into reading it, and their comments and advice were helpful during the editing process which followed. Listening to an audio version of the books – via a computer-voiced program sounding a little like a female Stephen Hawking – was very useful in spotting those ‘typos’ missed during the initial visual edit.
Returning to re-read each book after a gap of five or six weeks produced many further changes. Each time I went through the books – still at this stage on the computer as ‘Word’ documents – I continued to make alterations and to find mistakes. However I realized this process could go on for ever and it was time to call a halt to the editing. If I was ever going to publish the books, this was the time. In fact, there are still some changes I would make now, to the published versions. Perhaps I will incorporate these if and when the books ever progress from e-books to ‘real’ paper books.
The series title is ‘The Desolate Tree’, and all the books are available now in the Amazon Kindle Store. The titles are:
‘The Desolate Tree: Book One – Union and Reunion’
‘Location and Relocation: Book Two of The Desolate Tree’
‘Action and Reaction: Book Three of The Desolate Tree’
(You’re beginning to see a trend in the titles here, aren’t you?)
The final volume in the series, with the unsurprising title
‘Generation and Regeneration: Book Four of The Desolate Tree’
was published in early December.
Remember, you don’t need to have a Kindle to be able to read the stories. There is a ‘Kindle for PC’ program freely available on the Amazon site to download for the computer, and a Kindle app for all tablet formats and also for Apple products – Mac, iPhone or iPad. So no excuses, then, really.
The Desolate Tree 