All my work starts with an image, like a photograph. It arrives in my head, then starts to run like a movie, and the story builds from there. Sometimes the image is from the end of a story, and I have to run it backwards, but everything is done visually at the start.
A while back, I came across a lighthouse on an island.
Over thirty years ago, I was on Lundy Island for a mate's 30th Birthday. We had a great time in the wee local bar, appeared on Channel 4 who were there at the time with us pretending, stiffly, to be locals, and stayed in a converted lighthouse set next to a burial ground and a neolithic chambered tomb. Much fun was had negotiating a piss off the top of the lighthouse while drunk after midnight, and dealing with the wailing banshee that lived in the stairwell.
I have a deep love of old places, in particular menhirs and stone circles, and I've spent quite a lot of time travelling the UK and Europe just to visit archaeological remains. I also love what is widely known as weird shit. I've spent far too much time surfing and reading Fortean, paranormal and cryptozoological websites. The cryptozoological stuff especially fascinates me, and provides a direct stimulus for a lot of my fiction.
I lined up the photograph to have standing stones in the foreground and the lighthouse in the background. Then I started to wonder who would live in the lighthouse and what was under the standing stones, and a story began to run. That turned, eventually and more than ten years later, into my first novel, "Island Life" and, as a bonus, the publisher agreed to my picture of the lighthouse being used on the cover, so it went full circle.
I love monsters....especially black and white ones with the zips showing. Treat this novel like a fifties monster flick and you'll have a great time with it.
The book was out of print for many years, but is now available again in print, ebook and audiobook from Gryphonwood Press.
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