What have I been up to over the last month? Mostly, I’ve been hard at work on the new novel. This is the second in a supernatural mystery thriller series that I started last year. I’m working from a thorough outline that I planned during the last few months of last year, and the manuscript is proceeding at a decent pace. I’m now at about 78,000 words, and I reckon by the end of next month I’ll have a first draft clocking in at around the 100,000-word mark, possibly a little over. That would make it a slightly longer book than the previous novel.

What’s this one about? It’s still top secret, I’m afraid, as are the events in the previous novel of this series, the first draft of which I wrote this time a year ago. But I can tell you it involves an ex-police officer protagonist and her young assistant. Their relationship (which is not a romantic one) is, I hope, what will sustain the interest as this series progresses, as each character evolves in interesting and unexpected ways, amid the baffling and sinister scenarios in which they are caught up. Each novel will feature a standalone mystery, but there’s a bigger mystery that gradually emerges in the background. At first, it hides in plain sight, but soon it becomes impossible to ignore. I must confess I’m having a blast writing this, and when it is finally unleashed on readers, I hope you will enjoy it too.

In the meantime, I’m running some horror short stories on Substack for paying readers. However, as a teaser, I’m making part one of this short story, Surrogate Sensor, available completely free. This story was inspired by a recent medical research breakthrough involving helping paralysed people regain feeling in their limbs. Naturally, I imagined a way for this technology to go horrifically wrong, and this is it. I hope you find it suitably gripping. Check out part one for free here.

(Image created by author in Canva.)