I had high hopes for last year but it turned out to be quite a frustrating time for me. In the end, I did get a novel published but only just. Mac’s Christmas Present was published last December and, somewhat to my surprise, seems to be doing quite well. However, while I am outlining some goals that I hope to achieve this year, I am always aware of the many life events that can blow one off course. Anyway, here goes.

I would like to write yet another Mac Maguire mystery set at Christmas this year. Mac’s Christmas Present is around forty thousand words which is somewhat shorter than my other novels. That’s the reason that I set the price so low (currently $1.19 in the USA and £0.99 in the UK). I plan to keep the price low throughout this year. However, it would be nice if I could write a companion piece set at Christmas one year later on. This should bring the word count up to eighty thousand words or so and more in line with my other books.

I have already started on the fourteenth Mac Maguire mystery and the working title is A Murdered Crow. Of course, starting off a book does not mean that one will get to finish it but I have high hopes for this one. It is centered around a case so cold that Mac had considered it to be frozen. However, a second murder means that Mac and his old sergeant, Peter Harper, need to look again at the unsolved case, a brutal stabbing of a young woman in West London that had happened nearly thirteen years before.

In this book Mac works once again with DI Peter Harper and we hopefully discover a little more about how they worked together over many years and many cases. The cover shown here is my first attempt and may well change.

I would still like to add a second novel to the Ghost Field series. I published the first book, The Black Vaults Experiment, early in 2018 in the hope that a sequel would soon follow. However, I’ve got around half a book written and, like much that I attempted last year, I got stuck. However, I quite like the main characters and I’d like to see what might happen to them in this new adventure.

So, hopefully, I might get some inspiration this year and at least complete the sequel. It’s my feeling that there might be a lot more to come in this series so I can only persevere and see what happens.

So, if my hopes are fulfilled then I might write two and half books this year. Here’s hoping. However, as I try to be a stoic, like everyone else I will just have to accept whatever alarums and surprises that the new year might bring. Let’s hope that all the surprises are good ones. Happy New Year!