Anyone who knows me, and I mean really knows me, will be wondering what I am doing all this for.  The answer is very simple.  To try and sell more plays.

I started writing in 1975 to try and stay out of the NAAFI, when I was stationed overseas, it didn’t work. The next time I took up pen and put it to paper was in 2003.  It didn’t last long.  Then, in 2008, I joined a theatre group and thought that I could write plays just as good and interesting, big headed ain’t I?  Well the first two plays I wrote, the Con and The Medium, were performed by the theatre group as part of their Christmas program 2008.

In 2010 I had given a friend a play which I had written, he suggested that I try to get them published, I suppose I should blame him.  I looked on the internet for publishers of plays and came up with three which sounded all right, so I e-mailed them and asked them if they would read my plays with a view to publishing them.  They were Playwrights Publishing Company.  Comedy Plays.co.uk.  And Lazy Bee Scripts.

Tony Breeze of Playwrights answered my mail and I sent two or three plays to him.  That was in the May. in July he wrote and asked for my address because he wanted to publish.  The other two were the same.

In 2011 I sent Tony a play, I’d been working on, and he came back saying that it just wandered.  He advised me to make one of the characters central.  I re-wrote the beginning and sent it back to him.  His response was, ‘it is like a ship without a rudder, there is no one steering, it just drifts about, there is nothing for the audience to relate to.  Try reading this book, if you can get hold of it.  The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vougler’

I managed to get a copy through Amazon and started to read it.  By the time I had reached the end of chapter one an idea had formed in my head so I started to write.  Harry the Mouse had been born.  I sent the finished the story, because that is what it was, to Tony who came back telling me that it was very readable but he didn’t know how I would turn it into a play.  I did and called it The Mouse’s Journey.  I then converted into a pantomime, writing the song lyrics but not the music.

That story is called, believe it or not, The Mouse Who Wanted a Whole. Having written it I felt that it needed to be illustrated so I looked around for someone who would do the drawings.  Pamela came up trumps yet again, and suggested a friend of hers called Ann Inwood.  I contacted Ann and she, thankfully, said yes.  This is the cover of the first story.

Sometime later I was preparing to go for a walk with the dog.  Now when we moved down here we could see a ruin on a hill top up in the distance.  We called it the fairy tale castle.  As I was leaving the house my family asked if I was going up to the fairy tale castle.  I told them that I was.  When I got home two hours later, Little Harry and the Fairy Tale Castle had been written in my head.  I sat down at the computer and started to write.  It took me two weeks to put the story down on ‘paper.’  Then of course I had to come up with a filler because I had suddenly gone from Harry the Mouse to Harry junior.  So I wrote Wendy’s Rescue.

I wrote four more Harry stories and eventually published them as one book on, firstly, Kindle and then on Create space as a paperback.  The above pictures are the covers for the stories.  They are, from top left.  Wendy’s rescue. Little Harry and the Fairy tale castle, Little Harry finds his Princess, Little Harry saves the day.  Bottom left, Little Harry’s battle and Little Harry to the rescue.  Below is the real fairy tale castle.

I wrote two more books that first year, Neville (Jock) McLuskey this is your life.  This is about a chap, who when a child of eight, along with his best friend dream of entering the Miglia Milia motor race and beating Sterling Moss.  Jock leaves school and gets a job in a garage, but fulfils one of his dreams and races in the Isle of Man TT races on a 125cc BSA Bantam.  His life is straightforward until, he reaches the age of twenty two, his friend walks into the garage one day and asks Jock if he want to realise his childhood dream and drive a racing car at the famous Le Mans twenty four hour race.  They build the car and go to France to race, but are stopped because the rules have been changed.  Thirty years later and Jock receives a ‘phone call asking if he wants to realise his dream of racing at Le Mans.  They renovate the car and set off for that historic circuit.

A threat to National security.  Montague is an ex-serviceman, his wife has died and he is left to bring up his very young daughter, until a chance meeting in a pub changes all that.  He takes his little girl to his sister, who lives in Australia, and enters a rigorous training course.  He passes with flying colours and embarks on a 007 life style.  The idea for this story came to me at about three one morning, you know what it’s like, you wake up bursting and rush to the loo then gat back into bed, but you spend the rest of the night in that half asleep, half awake sort of state.  That is when I had the vision for the book.

Montague smiled inwardly as he watched his twelve year old daughter skip across the car park towards his hire car. 

“That’s the one!” he called when she reached the car.  He glanced down, then back up just as his car erupted in a ball of smoke and flame.  He threw himself to the ground covering his head with his arms to protect it from the blast wave and rolled three times to his left.

That is how the first draft began.  It changed when I showed the story to a friend and he asked about Montague’s boss.  What sort of woman was she?  Was she neat and tidy or scruffy?  Was she smartly dressed or in jeans?  etc: etc.

That original opening scene ended up about halfway through the book.

When I moved to Spain in ’05 I left behind a young lady I was rather fond of, but these things happen.  We still keep in touch via Christmas and Birthday cards.  Christmas ’13 she wrote, in her card, that she had got a little dog, not a real one, for Christmas ’08 he had had lots of adventures and could I write a story with him in it.  He is called Dudley Dylan.  I was just finishing a story called ‘Max and the golden orb’  So I changed Max to Dudley.  However Max falls into the underworld, now Dudley came from China, so I had to come up with a name for him, a Chinese sounding name so that when Christine finds him in her back garden she can call him Dudley Dylan.  I came up with Wang Tsing,  So all the way through the story he is Wang Tsing until the last page when Christine finds him and renames him Dudley Dylan.  I wrote six more stories about Dudley and published them in one book called ‘The adventures of Dudley Dylan.’  The picture above is the front cover of the book.  I changed the name of the first book to ‘A little dog who finds the golden orb and a home

The second story ‘Dudley the astro dog.’  In it Dudley gets kidnapped by a crazy professor and shot off to Mars.  Here he brings together the two warring tribes and brings peace to the planet.  The Martians take him back home, but give him a collar which, when stroked by his people, implants a small transmitter into his people’s hand and transfers some of their DNA into the collar so that they can never be separated again.

The third story is ‘Dudley to the rescue.’  Here Dudley, Christine and Paul are on holiday in Scotland when Christine is kidnapped.  Dudley leads the police to her.

In ‘The case of the missing teaspoons,’ Dudley’s home is visited by spacemen who need a specific metal which they have detected in the cutlery in Christine’s kitchen drawer.  Dudley helps them and as a thank you they upgrade his collar which enables him to talk to Paul and Christine.

‘Dudley’s secret’ sees our intrepid hero at the Isle of Man TT races where he races a motorbike round the famous mountain circuit.  When his people find out, after four years, he thinks that his racing days are over.

‘Dudley meets Nessie.’  Once again Dudley journeys to the underworld and is reunited with his friend Melvin the dragon.  Together they journey across the underworld to find a little girl who was taken from a boat on Loch Ness and down into the underworld.  They have to fight a mighty warrior who is half man, half dragon.  Together they return to the Loch with the little girl safe and sound.

The final tale in this book is, ‘Just an ordinary day for a pet.’  Here Dudley takes on the guise of a James Bond figure and saves the world from the ‘Iceman.’

Another book I wrote at this time was ‘The legend of the dragon people.’

This is in two parts, it is the basically the same story, but one story is told by the people.  These are two young Indians who have been cast out of their tribe because, no matter what their parents did, they would always find a way of getting together.  This caused friction, so much friction that the tribal elders tell the families to banish the two children, this they did.  The children wander far looking for their true home.  They eventually find it in a deep valley in the mountains.  They have a daughter, but when she is five she is dragged into the lake by a huge creature, her mother screams for her husband, who is hunting in the forest.  However a dragon who is flying overhead hears her scream and sees what has happened, he flies down and rescues the girl.

The second story is told by the dragon.  He tells of why he is flying over that land and how he hears the girl, then the rescue.

The next book was in fact the story of a play.  Most writers pick a book and write a play based on that book.  I wrote the play first.  It is called ‘Inheritance.’  The theatre group I was with weren’t doing a play in 2015 so I decided to stage my play.  I managed to get some actresses interested and we put the play on for charity, not without some difficulty.  One person in the theatre group went round telling people that it was rubbish and I couldn’t act.  We had small, but appreciative audiences.  I hadn’t had the play videoed so, as a keepsake for the actors, I wrote the book and included two more stories.  ‘The mystery of Pine Tree Mountain’ and ‘To the victor the spoils.’

The cover of ‘Three tales of inheritance.’

Inheritance is about an accountant who inherits a house in the north of Yorkshire.  He travels up to see the property, but all is not what it seems.  The book, obviously, goes into more detail than the play, which can be bought from Comedy Plays,

Pine Tree Mountain is also a play, two plays in fact.  The first is a one act play, the second is a full play, which is available from Playwrights Publishing Company.  It tells the story of a young lad who, together with his granddad and friend of his granddad’s climb Pine Tree Mountain, in the midst of a storm, to stop a mythical beast from going down to the local town and killing more people.  When the young lad is in his twenties his granddad dies and he is charged with telling the world with what is at the top of Pine Tree Mountain.

‘To the victor the spoils,’ is about a chap who inherits a large house from his grandfather.  When he and his wife go to look at the house, something tells him to look upstairs first.  As he mounts the stairs one of them gives way beneath him and he plunges down a ramp and into a room where he comes face to face with the grandfather he has just buried.  The old man tells him that he must win through a number of challenges if he wants to keep his wife.  He then drops through a trap door into an underground, shark infested sea.