Mirror Mirror on the Window - Post#3

Well the book has been out for nearly a week and sales are going well. I've even sold a copy in Japan through the Amazon Japan website which is great.

Mallory, his vessel Aspatria and his misfit crew have been going through my head for four years and it feels good to finally get them down on paper and out there. It's strange but when you live with characters for so long, they really become like flesh and blood people.

People keep asking me do you really know people like that and I answer with the same answer as I've written in my authors biography spot on Amazon:

'When I wanted to go to sea, my teachers at the nautical college filled my head with stories of runs ashore and jolly japes. At 16, this largely fuelled my enthusiasm for a career in the British Merchant Navy. At college, the closest we got to any of this was nearly hanging a very irritating student off a rotating radar scanner one day and electrocuting ourselves to varying degrees on a regular basis.

When I finally got to join ships three years later, it was the 1980's and things were already changing. Of course when they told their stories, my teachers had been thinking about when they had gone to sea thirty years earlier. This hadn't really dawned on me at the time. Can I sue for a mis-sold career ?

Now thirty years later, I've seen a lot of places and met a lot of interesting people and I still work with the sea - in fact, I can hear it now, gently lapping on to the beach as I type. Many of the characters I've known are dead, alcoholic or run greengrocers shops, but they will always live on in my books'.

People that know me and have read the first book are now asking me when the sequel will be ready. They seem quite disappointed when I explain that I cannot just produce another 150 pages next week. I guess we live in the video age - an age of instant gratification, but I am starting work on a sequel to 'The Pull of the Tide'. There are a lot of people and experiences that I just could not fit in the first book, so I still have some stories left to tell.

By the way, following the theme of adventure and intrigue in the book, the photograph above shows a prismatic mirror which resides in a shipowners office used around the 1930's when the book is set. The mirror allowed the shipowner to see who was walking up and down the street outside without peering out of the window. Who he was looking for, I have no idea....perhaps he was watching for one of the shady characters that Mallory encounters ?