I'm SO excited!

I've uploaded new chapters of my new serialised novel on my NEW substack

Okay, forgive me for being a little over excited, but I’m really enjoying this experiment.

As some of you may know, and some of you have even read the first 4 chapters of my new serialised novel, Time&Money and as I said when I started releasing chapters each week, I’d give the first 4 chapters away for zilch and then set up a paid substack account for the remained of the book.

I am quite proud of the fact that at my age I have managed to set up the paid account and it’s now open for business. The first 4 chapters are there in one post, the 5th chapter is also now available.

The link is below, I hope it works, I may have to do a bit of rapid updating and editing.

This book was inspired by my landlady in London, 35 years ago. I rented 3 houses from her in Islington, North London. All of them a little shabby but adequate, and by today’s standards amazingly cheap rent. I know I paid £30 a month for one of them, a two bedroom apartment with a small garden, and I shared the houser with my oldest friend Christophe, so it cost me £15 a week, which even back in the mid 1980’s was dirt cheap.

My landlady had bought all these houses in the years immediately after World War 2. Many houses in the area had been either badly damaged or destroyed in the Blitz, but most had survived and if they were sold, they were cheap as chips.

The story is also partly inspired by my experiences at Bletchley Park. For those of you who don’t know, it could be argued that this once top secret facility is the home of the digital computer. You may have heard of Alan Turing, often called the father of computing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2014 movie, ‘The Imitation Game.’ I was lucky enough to spend time at Bletchley after it was opened to the public in the early 1990’s and the stories of the enormous mechanical ‘computers’ they built and used to crack the Enigma code fascinated me.

And thirdly, I have been inspired by the eye watering expansion of the wealth gap between the richest people who have ever lived on the planet, and the rest of us. When I was born nearly 70 years ago, the gap between the richest and poorest in the Uk was relatively modest, now it’s literally offensive.

So that is the background of Time&Money, a novel exploring all these ideas, however, this is the important bit.

I know from previous experience (I have published 15 books over the last 32 years) that when you start writing a book you really need to know how it ends. I cannot tell you how many books I have started and they are real humdingers, but they didn’t have a story, they didn’t have an ending and the whole thing just fizzled out.

With Time&Money I have an ending. I know what the ending is, I haven’t written it yet, but I know what’s going to happen and that makes the journey to get there all the more pleasurable. Pleasurable for me to write, but hopefully even more fun for you to read.

So please consider subscribing to Time&Money I have set it as cheaply as Substack will allow, a mere £4 a month, and you get 4 chapters a month so that’s a pound a chapter. Cheap as chips!

Also, even if you are not in the least bit interested but know someone who might be, please let them know. And also, if something isn’t working please let me know.

Time&Money