This year can surely only be better than the last two as we strive to get back to a new normal if nothing else.

This year I have the third in the Ballad series of books published, Ballad of a Shooting Star.

What is exciting for me is that I am revisiting the first in the series, Ballad of Joshua Tree, which is going to be republished with a new edition and cover, and it is also being adapted as a limited series for television.

For years when asked what do I consider myself, I’ve always replied that first and foremost I’m a songwriter, but the truth is that I started to write stories before I wrote songs.

The first story I really remember writing was in primary school. I was about ten or eleven and we had been given the first line of a story and had to write the rest. I was already influenced by Enid Blyton and her books about children investigating mysteries. There was the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and the Five Find-outers and dog amongst others.

I wrote the story about a cave on a beach, and of course there were smugglers and bad guys and picnics with egg sandwiches and ginger beer and the children in the story solved the mystery of course!

By the time I was twelve or so I had over two hundred books by Blyton. I had always loved music though and started playing guitar at around that time and started to write songs. I love story songs but I think writing and songwriting has kept me sane, or relatively so, all these years; writing was an outlet for my teenage emotions.

I don’t consider that I have a dark side, but my stories do as they explore the darkness of some humans.

There’s another new book coming this year, but it is a screenplay.

The Killing Rain is something of a departure for me as a storyline goes. I think everyone should know their strengths and weaknesses, and I’ve certainly got weaknesses! I’m relatively lazy for one thing. My strength is dialogue and characters and I think The Killing Rain is perfect for this.

Finally there’s a new collection of poetry this year, Sunrise Sunset.

Blyton had well over six hundred books in total so I’m a long, long way from that!