I’m confining my thoughts about the new year ahead to what I’m hoping will be happening with regard to my books. Although I have some thoughts about what I would like to see happen in 2021, I think that I’ll keep them to myself for now. I recently read an article that listed a bunch of people making their predictions at the start of 2020 and, of course, they were all way off the mark.

All I’ll say is that I hope that the new vaccines get rolled out as quickly as possible and to the people who need them most. I also hope that competence in the governance of a country is no longer a cause for derision. The move to government by populists has been a disaster as they have proved that they are about as much use in a real emergency as a chocolate teaspoon.

So what about Mac? In his last book, The Eight Bench Walk, Mac was on holiday in Cyprus when he becomes involved in a murder. This book was published in November 2019, so 2020 is the first year since I started writing seriously that I haven’t published a book. This was in partly due to the pandemic but that was just the last straw on top of a lot of other things that went wrong last year. Writing seemed to be a fairly low priority for much of the year which was just as well as I got my first real taste of writer’s block. Thankfully, towards the end of the year I managed to pick up the reins again.

What helped me was having a Plan B. I started teaching myself slide blues guitar and, somehow, this helped to kick start my writing. I’m hoping to complete the first draft of the next Mac Maguire mystery this month and then publish it in March. The working title is A Concrete Case of Murder but this may well change. You can see my first go at a cover on the left. Like the title this will probably change too.

When I got really stuck, I started off another book. This one, working title The Blood Moon Murders, is set around Halloween and will hopefully have some ghostly elements to it.

I’m setting my sights no higher than getting both of these books published this year because, if 2020 has taught me anything, it’s that you can never be sure what’s waiting for you around the corner. However, it is my fervent wish that all the surprises that come at us over the next twelve months will be good ones.