New book is hospice fund-raiser in memory of daughter

Nanotales, published by Rob, is £8 plus postage where relevant. You can buy it either from https://ko-fi.com/s/19f8a3feeb, or people local to Ringmer can get it for £8 if they email [email protected] with their full address.

Rob, aged 73, said: “I had a number of short stories kicking around doing nothing, and I decided I needed to get them out of the house.

“It’s now three years since my daughter Sarah died. That was in 2022 after five years living with cancer – multiple myeloma, which cannot be cured but can be kept at bay. The NHS managed it for five years.

“She came home to live with us, and during that time got a great deal of help and support from St Peter and St James Hospice. So one day the idea occurred to me that I might repay the hospice a bit for what they did for us, by selling a book as a fundraiser for them. So all the profits from sales, after necessary expenses, will go to them.

“I’ve dabbled in writing for quite a few years, actually decades, but without any success at being published. Sarah also enjoyed writing, in her case mostly fan fiction. 2018 was a pivotal year, when I was inspired to write several of the stories that have ended up in Nanotales.

“One day I spotted an advertisement for a cafe writing group at a local cafe in Ringmer. Cafe writing groups are a great idea; there’s no rent to pay, but enough people buy coffee – and in my case cake – to make it worthwhile for the cafe. So Sarah and I joined that group together and that inspired a few more stories.

“The group was run by Helen Stockton (https://writethistime.com) who helped me with the concept and who also ran classes for StPJs, so Sarah continued working with her for a while after 2018.

“In terms of inspiration, I think I’d be a terrible teacher of writing because I’ve no idea how the stories start off. A good prompt will do it; for a few years there was a bunch of people called The Literal Challenge who did prose writing prompts every June. Every day that month they’d give you a prompt and you had to submit a story by the end of the following day. That was a very fertile time.

“A Good Death, and Love at First Sight, a Bad Story were among those. Otherwise, things, usually just a scene, pop into my head unbidden, and many of them turn into stories. The Desert was one of those; I was gritting my teeth about AI one day, and it just developed out of that frustration.

“I write what comes to mind, and that is really difficult to pin down. Some of it is realist (A Good Death, UXB), quite a lot is fantasy (Simon and Sharon, The Drum, The Gentleman Werewolf), some is futuristic (The Ninth Planet). I’d say it’s mostly in the science fiction and fantasy bracket, broadly conceived.

“I’m a story-teller rather than an analyst. I write to entertain; there’s little meaning beyond that. One of my friends, having read Nanotales, said ‘wacky and entertaining’, which is a very good description.

“This is the first one published. I wrote four books during the 1990s, none of which ever got near to being published. Then I had to start working for a living again so writing took a back seat until I retired. I’ve been working for a while on a novel set in a small town remarkably similar to Ringmer, but which contains vampires and werewolves. And on another in which the main character is a fairy biker. And another which is an updated version of Jonah. And one about a stoic Roman noble in the third century CE.”