Sleigh bells ring . . . are you listening?
It is very nearly Christmas, ladies and gentlemen, and I am hanging up my keyboard and battening down the hatches in my own “Winter Wonderland” in Kent until 2025. If you try to get in touch before then I may not respond, so don’t be alarmed (or offended). Normal service will be resumed on Monday Jan 7th. And speaking of January, did you know that it was named after the Roman god Janus – the two faced god, who looked both forwards and backwards? In keeping with the closing of the year, I thought I would look back at what has happened in 2024, and look forward to the anticipated events of the coming year.
2024
It was a year of two halves, as they say. In the early part of the year, from January to July, I worked my socks off writing two new full-length books, more or less from scratch, and spending long hours every day at the keyboard (I have developed carpal tunnel syndrome, my doctor tells me, which is something of a bummer). I published The Broken Kingdom, the first book in a King Arthur series, in small segments or episodes in the first few months of 2024, starting with Episode One: Arthur’s Bane. Each of the five episode was short – six or seven chapters, and about 20,000 words in length – eBook-only and very cheap. Each episode is only 99p. It was an experiment and, to be honest, I’m not sure it worked. People didn’t like having to wait a month or so between the episodes. They forgot what had happened. However, I still think the story is pretty good – King Arthur tries to mend a broken Britain but is plagued by incoming Saxons and a race of dragons that menace his kingdom from the north. So in July, I published the whole thing as an eBook, and paperback called The Broken Kingdom, see cover below, and the audio book deal is done and will be out in the new year (February, I’m told but watch this space for an update).
I had also been working, between episodes of the King Arthur book, on the last of the Fire Born Viking novels, which I finished writing in May. I really enjoyed creating that series, about two young people who desperately wanted to become berserkers, and if you are interested it starts with The Last Berserker (Fire Born 1 – now just £1.99). But that series was drawing to a natural close, if you read it you will see, there was nowhere for Bjarki Bloodhand, who is inhabited by the spirts of bears, to go. So I ended it (leaving room for more stories, if necessary) with Blood of the Bear (Fire Born 5), cover below, which was published in October 2024.
The second half of 2024, after that hectic first six months, was more sedate. I wrote a TV sitcom for children in a month (and was knocked back by the professionals, who said it needed a lot more work). I did a major rewrite on the first book in a new Mongol trilogy which will kick off next year, and I started work on a new Robin Hood novel.
2025
The Mongol book will be called Templar Traitor: The Englishman Who Fought For Genghis Khan and Canelo, my lovely publishers, will be bringing it out “in the summer, or possibly in September”. Sorry to be so vague but Canelo was bought out by a massive publisher called DK (Dorling Kindersley) a few months ago and there is major shake-up of schedules, practices and possibly personnel going on now. You can pre-order Templar Traitor on Amazon, if you like, but it won’t be out in April as is advertised on the site. Again, watch this blog space, I will post the Mongol cover and publication date in due course.
What I can tell you about the coming year, is that there will be a new Robin Hood novel coming out. The working title is Robin Hood and the Heretic Prince, and it will be the 11th book in the Outlaw Chronicles series. After some shenanigans in Sherwood and medieval London, Robin and Alan go to the south of France and are swept up in the Albigensian crusade – a brutal decades-long campaign by the Christian (ie Catholic) knights of northern Europe to destroy the heretic Cathars (who also called themselves Christians) of a region with a very different culture and language called the Langue d’Oc. That book, I can tell you because I am writing and publishing it myself, will be out in the spring. Probably in April.
There is one more thing I did this year, and which I will be doing a lot more of in 2025, is making short videos about some of my favourite topics. What I am saying is that I now have a YouTube channel called the History Cupboard and there are already a couple of offerings posted there, one about Thomas Blood and the theft of the Crown Jewels in 1671, click here for that one, and another called 10 things you didn’t know about Robin Hood, see video below.
And that’s about it. 2024 was a pretty good year and I have high hopes that 2025 will be even better. It only remains to wish all my readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And to promise that I will reconnect with many of you, I hope, in 2025! Now I’m off for a large festive G&T. Cheers!