Happy New Year!
I sincerely hope you all had a great Christmas and that 2022 will be a good year for you.
I know you've all received your copies of A Hundred Years to Arras and I'm so humbled by the reviews and messages I've had from many of you. But that leaves a lot of you who I haven't heard from. If you get the chance, it would mean an awful lot if you could leave a review on Amazon and/or GoodReads, as they are the two most prominent sites where potential readers might go, and every little bit helps. It wouldn;t have got published at all if it wasn;t for your support, so I would love to know what you think. If placing a review on the internet isn't your thing, then by all means feel free to email me at jmcobley @ gmail.com. Today being the last day of my Christmas break and a bank holiday, I took the dog for a walk in the woods. Coming across this (see below), a coffee cup balanced and abandoned by a previous walker on a fungal growth on the side of a stump, seemed to be a perfect emblem for the world today. Our civilisation, full of its plastic and corporate homogeneity, grafting itself onto nature, cut back by us and struggling to hold on but persisting. This, of course, is one of the themes of A Hundred Years to Arras. The land knows no time.
It seems quite appropriate, as I'm in the early stages of drafting the next novel. I've had a couple of false starts, and I have some solid ideas. One is a novel set in schools, which I'll probably wait a few more years to do (Ha!), but the one that has coalesced is also a literary historical novel. It's to be set around the time of the Tonypandy Riots in 1910 in South Wales, where the military and police from all over the UK were sent in to break up the miners' strike. People in Wales still haven;t forgiven that. It will also have some links to other time periods. You can expect that trademark meditative description from me, but also delving deep into character whilst keeping the action paced briskly. At least, that's my plan.
So, how will it be published? Going the Unbound route is of course a possibility, but it would be interesting to know how many of you would be interested in pre-ordering again. I'm very conscious that for some of you there was a long gap in time between pledging, meeting target, editing and finally publication. But the results have been great. Seeing my book on the shelves in bookshops has been wonderful, but we can still get it to reach further.
Please let me - and, if you can, Amazon and Good Reads, know what you think.
Jason 04/01/22