Thank you, Jacqui Pack, for nominating me to continue this Blog Tour. I am an intermittent blogger at best, both here and at my garden company website http://www.greenspacesussex.co.uk . Here I put thoughts and sometimes poems and stories, also garden stuff. On the website I blog about plants and gardens, and I have Bertram and Agnes Green, who are fictitious Greenspace customers, and unsurprisingly think that Greenspace is the best gardening company since, well, for ever.

What am I working on?

I am writing a novel about Gloria Cloke. Gloria stepped onto my screen on November 1st 2011. She was heading out of the door of her marital home and away. Gloria has a sharp intelligence, is an artist, is attractive in a French sort of way and she has been married to Jack for two or three years. She is thirty-seven years old. Jack found her on the Isle of Skye at the end of a protracted period of mourning for her first husband which involved conquering almost every rock face in Northern Europe, mostly without ropes. They fell in love and married, and then almost immediately Jack stopped noticing her. Gloria is a self-sufficient woman, and Jack’s emotional absence did not really become apparent until July 2011, when he accidentally included Gloria in an email correspondence he had begun with Belsizio Andranticlaw, a psychopath he had recently met on a self-development course. It quickly becomes clear that Gloria has no place at all in his inner life.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

I have absolutely no idea. The story is about internal lives and their effect on other people. I hope it is not like anything else. I am not interested in fitting in anywhere, which may prove a problem later, but for now I must just write it.

Why do I write?

I’m 62 years old. I can remember writing an essay on Attics for my O level English Literature in 1968. I remember being disappointed that I never got any feedback. I have exercise book beside me now from that time and there is the beginning of a story about Carl Barret Leiter. He was probably related to Felix. It is half a page long, unfinished, as are almost all my stories – until now.
I don’t know why I write. I always have and I always will. Maybe I will write something that resonates with other people. I hope so, but even if I don’t I will still write. When I write everything else recedes into insignificance. When I write I cease to exist in the ‘real’ world and I inhabit another world, just as real, where anything is possible.

How does my writing process work?

When I am writing something new I write every day, usually about 500 words, although with Gloria it was more like 1500. I write whatever the weather, whatever mood I am it. In the past that has generally been as far as I have got. However I am now in the process of shaping the story into a novel, a process I have never managed before, and a process I am only managing now with the help of Chichester University and their MA programme. I am good at deadlines, but without them nothing happens after the initial daily outpouring. Which means I have many unfinished stories. But Gloria and my colleagues on the course are changing all that.

And next…

I’m passing the baton to Helen Beal, http://www.helenjbeal.com . Helen has published three novels and a book of short stories (contemporary fiction) but is a little distracted from her writing at the moment as working on lifting off Ranger4 – a new IT endeavour. Everything is sprouting and blossoming in the back of her mind and soon fingertips will hit keyboard…