Hello Reader,
From Author HQ
Trish and I have called our tiny houseboat study in which I write Clatterbridge stories, and from which Trish publishes and markets them, Author HQ. It’s the business hub of a project that we’ve been working on steadily now for going on two years. What’s most thrilling about this to us is that it’s an enterprise whose business is the product of the imagination.
Two years ago, James and Inky Clatterbridge were not even figments of my imagination. Now, six books, a novella and a handful of short stories later, they’re as real as … well, as I am, particularly if all you know about me and the life Trish and I live here in our houseboat on our marina, is what you’ve learned from my weekly blogs.
These newsletters – one a month, no more – will add a dimension to your knowledge of us, and, I hope, both of James and Inky and their world. That world, despite the fact that a few names have been changed, is essentially the world Trish and I inhabit.
The Wildlife of the Marina
Take the wildlife that surrounds us here, the swans and Canada geese, the herons and coots, the terrapins and otters. That sometimes deafening world – you should hear a hundred geese in full cry during mating season! – is the reality that James and Inky are very familiar with, as you’ll learn in the series.
Breeding season is over for the year, but we were reminded yesterday that its consequences live on. A family of geese steamed past, dad in the vanguard serenely leading the way, followed by seven goslings paddling frenetically to keep up, and behind them, mum, vigilantly eyeing me as they passed by.
An essential part of our world is our allotment, just a short walk down Barkers Lane. (I’ve moved it in James’s world to make it closer and more accessible.) Trish and I are busy at the moment nurturing the seedlings we planted weeks and months ago, and which will yield produce that will see us through the summer, autumn and winter. Last year we bought no vegetables at all from mid-June to the end of January. The field of allotments is home to a fox and vixen, as well as thousands of butterflies, slugs, snails and birds who subsist on the easy pickings available.
Trish and I have just played a game of cribbage on our deck overlooking the water. Below us schools of fingerlings glide through the vegetation rising from the floor, eight or nine feet down. Damselflies, flashing blue, chase each other from lily pad to lily pad.
Story Seeds
These are all seeds from which my stories grow. Not directly, but suggestively. I haven’t mentioned the species that dominates the marina: the hundred-plus humans who either live on their boats or take them out for weekend jaunts on the river that feeds the lake – the River Great Ouse. A different set of humans occupy the marina in the books, but they’re driven by the same appetites, the same fears haunt them, the same pleasures delight them.
What sets the fictional boaters apart from our genial neighbours is of course their propensity, from time to time, to do in someone or other. And it’s that decision that gets each of my cosy murder mysteries going.
One feature of my protagonist, James, is something that we share: we are both disabled (polio in my childhood) and we both get around town on a mobility scooter. James has called his Rocinante, to honour Don Quixote’s bony stallion. Rocinante is so essential to James’s life that he – the scooter – will be found on the cover of every story.
Story seeds are scattered everywhere: in the local pub, just beyond the gates of the marina; in gossipy sessions with our neighbours on our pontoon; on walks round the large lake just a stone’s throw from the marina; among the thriving population of dogs and dog-walkers.
Clatterbridge at Large
I thought that in each Dispatch from the Water’s Edge I would include a short scene culled from one or other of my stories – scenes that didn’t ultimately make it to the page. Here’s the first:
