My very first blog!

Welcome to Max Gordon’s world. We are just about to see my first book published, called THE DEVIL’S BREATH, which I hope everyone who reads it will enjoy.

I know I am going to be visiting bookshops and schools in June but not too sure yet which ones they are, but in the meantime I am supposed to be writing Max’s new adventure.

Well, that’s the idea but I keep doing other things.

Writing is a bit of a funny thing to do all day and I wish the words would just go down on the paper out of my head and I could throw my keyboard away. And just when you think everythng is going well you remember you haven’t attended to the problem of the leaky tap. My house is a bit of a wreck, so I have to keep fixing things, which I do in a hurry because I want to get back to Max and his story! And I can never find any tools, mainly because I don’t have any. Well, a few – wherever they are.

So write this blog, the lovely ladies at Puffin told me.

How?

Sit down, stop writing the next book for a while, and tells us something.

Like what?

Well, where do you write? That kind of thing.

That’s easy. I am sitting in the attic in the big old red chair with a cat on my head. Almost. She has a blanket on the top of the chair and we spend our days together. She is an extremely intelligent cat and I sometimes feel she’s looking over my shoulder. Every time she stretches out and digs her claws into my head it’s just about the time I’ve written something that doesn’t make sense.

There’s a small window overlooking an untidy field but it’s difficult to write when the cock pheasants are fighting for their territory, the wood pigeons are all of a flutter and the neighbour’s cat, which is about the size of a small lion, is stalking rabbits. Now the old black Labrador in the house on the hill is barking at anything it can sniff on the wind.

Actually I know lots about this field. I spend every day looking at it. But I’ve got a horrible feeling someone will build a house on there one day and all those lovely creatures will disappear.

Anyway the whole thing about my new hero is that he takes risks – I have been a soldier and a firefighter, and I have also been in some dodgy places – but I suppose writing The Devil’s Breath was also a bit of a risk. I had no idea whether I could write a full-length book, but I really wanted to try and tell Max’s story.

Now, I must get back to writing the next book because I’ve got him in so much trouble I don’t know how to get him out of danger …

Now there’s another pheasant trying his luck.

I reckon he’s taking a bit of a risk.