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I have realized after a long time of trying, that as a writer I can’t write novels, so I have stopped writing the novel that I have spent the last umpteen YEARS on. The project actually began as a short story but like Topsy it just grew and grew. It started one day in 1986 when I was travelling on a train from Newcastle to London when I got it into my head to write a short story about a vampire so I penned a few pages and worked on it for a few months after I had got off the train. Then I put it aside for a while, too long a while as it turned out. I hadn’t written ‘The End’ at the completion of the story (a habit I later adopted to tell myself to not write any further) I decided that the story needed a prologue so I wrote one as an introduction to the action, the prologue took the reader back 500 years to the birth of the vampire and then from a short prologue it grew into a life story. It wasn’t a full biography but a series of episodes from the vampire’s life concentrating on 100 year intervals. 

The premise of the story was that a vampire was not the debonair lovable rogue that hung around with his blood sucking chums as portrayed in modern occult novels but was a lonely despicable parasite that fed on the life force contained in human blood.

The story was about the final days of the vampire as he finally faced his mortality, something he had been trying to run away from for years. I would explain more about it but it is an episode that I am working up into a short story so there’ll be no spoiler here!

My forte as a writer was/is in short works, flash fiction, humorous satire/piss taking and essays and so that is what I am going to get back to doing on this blog and other selected sites.

My novel is not dead, I shall strip out some of the good scenes and rewrite them in other formats; flash fiction, essays and the like which I hope you will enjoy. So watch this space folks!

To be continued…