Daft Ideas

One of which might work

You may have heard the phrase, I’ve got a novel in my bottom drawer.’ I’ve got a feeling that phrase is very dated in 2026 (Happy New Year BTW) but I suspect you’ve got the gist.

I’ve really been trying not to, but I’ve had another daft idea. I should just let it slide and forget about it but it won’t let go.

This is what I experienced during lockdown in 2020, the idea for The Ghost Camera, it’s daft, I’ll be the first to admit it, but I was driven to write it by an unseen force of immense power.

My bottom drawer is like the warehouse in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are hundreds of daft ideas that never came to anything, packed in sealed wooden crates and piled as high as a 2 story building.

To be brutally honest, some of my books that did actually get published are less than dazzling. But enough of that self deprecation, I do occasionally meet people who have really enjoyed reading them.

I’m confident many readers of this niche substack are not aware my published novel and autobiographical output. For those of you with the slightest interest here is the list to date:

The Man in the Rubber Mask (1994)

Thin He Was And Filthy Haired (1996)

The Man on Platform 5 (1998)

Punchbag (1999)

Sudden Wealth (2000)

Brother Nature (2001)

News from Gardenia (2012)

News from the Squares (2013)

News from the Clouds (2015)

The Ghost Camera (2025)

When I list them like that it does look like a lot of effort but these were written and published over a 32 year period. There are also long gaps in output, for instance after writing Brother Nature in 2001, I stopped coming up with daft ideas, I didn’t publish any fiction again until News from Gardenia in 2012.

More recently I had another long gap between News from the Clouds
which came out in 2015 until last year, and the rather messed up publication of The Ghost Camera. The reasons behind that catastrophe have been reported in previous updates on substack last year, but at least 90% the people who supported the book now have a copy, I’m still working on getting in touch the last few.

What I now wish I’d done is write detective stories, where there is on protagonist, the same character in all the books I’ve written. That’s what sensible people do who write a lot of books. Damn, how come I got to be 70 before I worked that out.

But I do like to try new things, new ways of doing things. I know that 95% of my various attempts at books, plays, lectures, TV series and interpretive dance concerts have failed and evaporated without trace, but I quite like the notion of having a go with a new medium and new format.

For about 28 weeks last year I published a chapter a week of a kind of contemporary science fiction story called:

Time&Money

About 120 people who subscribed to the substack feed read what was very much a first draft, mistake ridden rough version which I’ve just finished re-writing and editing and I’ve updated the first 4 chapters which are absolutely free to read.

The bad aspect of releasing an unfinished work is you are allowing people see a work in progress. It’s a really dumb idea but I loved doing it. The discipline of releasing 1 chapter a week for 26 weeks was really motivating. I think I missed a couple of release dates due to other work commitments but I was as consistent as possible.

You’d think that if any sane person did that, with, as yet, no chance of publishing the story or equally importantly actually earning something approaching a living, they’d give up and do something useful.

I am not that sane person, I have an idea for another novel and I plan to do roughly the same thing, release the story week by week on substack.

I would appreciate any feedback on the sense of doing this, I think I will make this next story free to read. When I actually get around to starting to write it, I’ll post a big fat link here.