There has been a long gap between my last post and this, and it is quite a while since I published volume 4 The Flautist. There are two reasons. The first is COVID. Somehow during the worst of the pandemic I was rather inactive. I have still really to understand this. Perhaps it was because we seemed to be living in a fictional world so I did not need to create one. More likely is that I was not travelling and interacting with people. Somehow those activities lubricate the brain and get it thinking. I never sit down to write to some sort of daily timetable. I know plenty of good authors do. I only turn on my computer when I have something to say. During the pandemic, that did not happen so often.
The second reason is that just as I got going again I was suddenly taken seriously ill. Thanks to the wonderful people in the Intensive Care Unit at St Peters Hospital I am still alive. They operated and eventually coaxed me out of a month long coma. All of this I have no memory of, which feels very odd. As far as I was concerned one minute I was sitting down to eat a meal with my family. The next minute, actually six weeks later I woke up in hospital strapped up to all sorts of technical kit that had been keeping me alive. I had sepsis and it had attacked all my major organs. Recovering from this took a while longer and with persistent memory problems, writing was not a feasible activity.
I am back in action. The first draft of Volume 5 is now complete. Next week we will be off to my favourite place to write, Penang. If you want to know more about Penang read Volume 3 Fatal Practice. Drake is enchanted by the place. I shall be doing a certain amount of editing and correcting each day. When I return I will get down to the serious business of turning a draft into a published novel.