Here in sunny Lewes, UK, I’m feeling guilty.  I’ve been disloyal to this site for a few days – sorry about that – but I’ve been recovering from last week’s highly social diary.  What with my novel’s London launch, my regular poetry events and a dinner party on Friday, I felt like hiding under my covers for a bit.

As I’m getting better I’ve returned to my study sensibly wrapped up in wool.

I’m on a frantic rush to finish my self-imposed deadline of finishing the second draft of my new novel before Christmas so I’ve kinda disappeared. It’s good, however, to talk to you all again.

If you don’t know Nicolaj Rimsky-Korsakov’s short (15 minute) single movement Piano Concerto, take a listen. It was written in 1882, my current year of study and I think you’ll agree, it’s the right music for this time of year:

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My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

The post Wolfie’s been lying low – and enjoying it. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

When the sun set last Sunday, I felt it was time for a relaxing evening in front of the log fire.

Time too for a dry martini and some escapist television before the busy week ahead when my novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love receives its official launch on Tuesday at the The Phoenix Artist Club in London.

I had recorded two episodes of ITV’s Hercule Poirot dramas starring the splendid David Suchet shamelessly and gloriously hamming up Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective in his final performances in this his signature role. I watched the first of the two, The Labours Of Hercules -perfect escapist drama I thought and perfect it was.

The Labours of Hercules was the second Agatha Christie book that I read as a child (I’d started with The ABC Murders, another Poirot story) and I soon devoured all of the Poirot books – never quite liking the Miss Marple stories as much – and as a serious-minded but seriously ignorant nine year old, I thought Agatha Christie and Charles Dickens were the two greatest writers that had ever lived. I’m frightened of reading them again as an adult in case I disappoint fond childhood memories.  Well, this is true of Agatha Christie but not Dickens whose David Copperfield I read last year ensnaring myself once again in Dickens’ mastery.  Maybe I  should give Mrs Christie another go too. The Labours Of Hercules is a collection of twelve Hercule Poirot short stories where Poirot sets out to solve twelve murders, each connected to one of the legendary labours of, well yes, Hercule’s namesake, the ancient hero Hercules. This TV show was based on just one of the stories, the fourth labour, The Erymanthian Boar, and it was terrific fun with its cast of eccentric villains and those things that went bump in the night. In one of the commercial breaks I went upstairs to the study to check if my website had gone up after crashing earlier in the day but it still wasn’t there so I returned to the world of M. Poirot for the last half hour.

Going back into my study when the show was over,  I turned on the light and was temporarily blinded by four lights shining directly in my face from a shadowy presence in the middle of the room. A murderer? A burglar? Or maybe Monsieur Poirot himself, I thought.  But no, it was much more sinister. It could have been a story line in one of Agatha Christie’s novels. Where I had been sitting, half an hour earlier, on the chair in front of my desk, was the potential instrument of my murder. The overhead light fitting with its sharp metal corners had crashed down from the ceiling onto the precise spot where my head would have been.

Who could’ve loosened those screws and why would anyone want to murder me? And who do I know who is clever enough to do it Christie-style when I would have least expected the attack? Nobody probably or, yes, it’s a possibility, that dastardly perpetrator of perfect crimes, the mysterious murderer from my childhood dreams.

My study has a high ceiling so the drop of the light would have been like a guillotine’s blade. A lucky escape, perhaps, but I’m now alert to the threat – I just wish Hercule Poirot was still around to help me solve the mystery.

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My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

The post Hercule Poirot and that dastardly attempt on my life. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I was young in 1967, probably a lot younger than I realized. I was moved by the so-called Summer Of Love but I’m sure I can’t have understood the half of it. I felt it though and some of those feelings must have made it into my novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love. I suspect a small part of me is there, hidden somewhere between those pages hoping not to be discovered now that the book is published and Stephen Dearsley, formerly “my” Stephen Dearsley, is out there with you all or with any of you that decide to read about him and his momentous young man’s summer.

I might know Stephen a lot better than I know the moody young man in the photograph at the top of this blog. Who I was then or, maybe, who I was trying to be then in the Summer of 1967 may have to remain a mystery to me as well as to the rest of you. I do remember though that even then I wanted one day to write a novel and to get it published as a paperback. That was very clear to me, as The Beatles sang that summer about love, it was easy. Young ambitions are not the mountains they look like from a distance. Those youthful summer days were for dreaming dreams. It would all be fine, it was easy. Well nothing’s quite that easy and a lot of years have passed before that sultry summer dream came true.

I remember the ambition just as I remember a song from that year – both were vivid, thrilling and, yes, I guess, erotic dreams and both, I was sure, would come true. It was easy.

The song, of course, was all You Need Is Love by The Beatles, first performed on the first ever simultaneous live international television relay on the 25th June 1967 to an estimated audience of 400 million people. It was, naturally, the answer. Love really was all you needed if everyone agreed to go along with that thought or so it seemed that day.  I was excited, maybe even more than that,  to be there as a witness to a moment of revelation. Then came the new Beatles album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and, for me at least, life was never to be quite the same again.

It wasn’t, as we all found out, that easy after all, love or people agreeing that love was all you needed, but it turned enough of us on at that time to make a difference. It wasn’t just the music but the whole counter-cultural shift that those records revealed to my innocently voracious eyes and ears. Even though The Beatles split up, became disillusioned, some of them died, were even murdered and the others grew old, I still can’t listen to that song of songs without the same thrill of optimism and the spirit of delight that awoke in me then and has never fully died.

When I think of Stephen Dearsley, I often say ‘poor Stephen’ and hope that he forgives me for all I have done to him. If you do decide to read my novel, be kind to him and try to think well of those idealists and dreamers who once thought achieving the sublime was easy.

It was a sublime moment too this afternoon when I first laid hands on a copy of my book. There’s no other feeling like this one.

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My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, is published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

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We’re not meant to enjoy undiluted pleasure very often in life and yesterday was no exception to that miserable truth. First the good news: I’ve finished the first draft of my new novel which is coming in at around 80,000 words. I will now put it aside while I get on with a batch of poetry events and submissions which have had to take a back seat while I was in prose writing mode. So, undiluted pleasure hit just where I like it. I hope to finish another draft at least before my first novel comes out in October.

So what was the sting? you ask, confused by the photograph above. Or maybe not so confused. Maybe you’ve guessed already. Yes, I mixed writing with washing and ended up putting a pair of shorts into the washing machine along with my iPhone. The shorts came out well but the phone, as far as I can tell, have given up the ghost.

That was yesterday, today will be dedicated to finding a replacement. Meanwhile, if you have my number,  it’s probably not worth ringing it.

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The writing goes on.  Sorry to pop in here so briefly again but I’ve just one chapter to write before finishing the first draft of a new novel. Tomorrow should get me to the end but until then I shall just have to keep my quill sharpened and inky.

No wonder writers are such a weird bunch. It’s sunny outside, and there’s a pub round the corner but I’m stuck in here writing another lousy book.

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As you can see, I’m frantically writing at the moment and today’s blog has got a bit over-looked. I’m  galloping towards the end of the first draft of a new novel – I should get there either tomorrow or the next day. It’s such a strange mix of feelings reaching this stage: relief, exhaustion, frustration, optimism, pessimism, mental fatigue and a wonderful sense of release. Hmm, I do love writing, honestly. After the first draft, straight into the second draft or, as I like to think of it, the first correction of the first draft.

Anyway, loyal readers, forgive this hasty blog, I’ve used enough words for one day. I’ll let you know how I get on.

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My novel is about to be published, the date is yet to be announced, but last night, ahead of its “Real World” launch it was launched in the virtual world of Second Life which is also a virtual haven for writing and writers. Apparently I am the first novelist to be contracted by a publisher in this way – Ward Wood Publishing is breaking new ground here at a time when all the publishing rules are being rewritten.

I am told that my book, in its hardback edition and then in other media, will be available very soon but you can check on the details on the Ward Wood Publishing website

(see Links in the right hand column). It is called Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love (credited to my real name, Colin Bell) and, let me admit this, I am very excited.

I have been writing and doing poetry readings in Second Life and other online sites as well as here in the UK and recently in the USA for several years now but it was appropriate that my first novel should be celebrated in Second Life where I have a lot of friends and where I have learnt a lot about writing and performance.

Whilst I was recovering from my brain haemorrhage, which I suffered three years ago this month, my animated avatar, who is also Wolfie, was much freer to mix in the outside world and he enabled me, here in “reality,” to stop going crazy confined to my house in Lewes. He is allowed to smoke too!

So after all the writing, the book is allowed out of its closet. It is a strange experience when a large writing project leaves the protected world of your own imagination for the broad bright light of the World.  I hope you all will be kind to it.

Last night was special though as it was not only a wonderful and well attended event but it was also the moment when my real and virtual selves got to meet in public. Thanks to everyone who turned up and supported me.

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