Here is the new cover for ‘Blood, Mud and Corpses’, the first book in the Royal Zombie Corps series.
The book is currently uploading on Amazon and will likely be available within the next day.
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New Book – Blood, Mud and Corpses
I’m just finalising the artwork on the new book, ‘Blood, Mud and Corpses’. The book should be released before the end of this month. I’ll upload the cover sometime over the weekend.
‘Blood, Mud and Corpses’ is the first book in the Royal Zombie Corps series. Book 2 is at the proofreading stage and book 3 is in final editing. A teaser for the new book is below.
“No one knew when the endless bloodshed and grindingly futile toil of the trenches would ever end. Then a miracle came from a source totally removed from even the most fantastic of dreams.”
The series is set during the First World War, following a group of soldiers as they are conscripted into the British Army during 1916. The brutality of the war becomes far greater during their first experience of combat as they stumble across something unexpected in no-man’s-land.
Teaching – holidays and coming up to the surface
Teaching always reminds me of swimming. You sprint up and down the lengths of the pool, barely pausing for breath at each end. Once you have do your set of exercises, you stop and pause.
As a full time teacher, I perceive each term as being like a set of exercises, the weekends being the gulp of air taken at the end of each length before you plough on with another stretch. Eventually you get to the holiday, and you need it.
So I’m now a couple of days into the holiday. The stress is beginning to bleed off, I’m beginning to relax. It helps that I’ve left the books I’ve brought home to mark in the car. There are over 100 of them, each requiring upwards of 5 minutes attention. I’ll need to put aside a long day to deal with them before returning to work.
While I enjoy teaching, the paperwork and marking is excessive. While I love being busy, the workload does take it’s toll. The holidays are lovely, but they don’t compensate for the stresses of term time and the total focus on the job. Having worked in the commercial world, I had much more of a life with 20 days annual holiday.
So why do I stay in education? I may write a post about that sometime.
Dave Gorman Gets Straight to the Point
For many years I have followed the work of Dave Gorman, possibly the only comedian in the world you can get me to roll around the aisles laughing at his use of a pie chart. Yesterday, for the first time, I saw him live at the Royal Festival Hall on his Gets Straight to the Point* (*The Powerpoint) tour. For years I have told students about ‘googlewhacks’ and his astrology experiment. It was finally time to see him in the flesh, and thanks to an old friend, I got the chance.
To avoid specific spoilers – there’s a book, there is an amazing section on knees, his usual mischievous ideas about researching his material, and the usual amazing use of data in visual forms. Trying to breath was a problem by the end of his second ‘found poem’, which really puts a different slant on comments at the end of news articles.
As the final show in a tour that started in 2014, so something like 90 shows, it was slick and perfectly timed. Yet, it did not suffer from such a long run, with much spontaneous laughter from the stage. Nick Doody, as the warm-up act and pianist, was hilarious, although the highlight was when he set Dave Gorman up by playing the Muppet Theme.
Teaser for work in progress – RZC
“The war had been going badly for the Allies. The great offensive on the Somme had been a disaster.
The casualty rates were horrific for both sides, one advancing into a hail of machine gun bullets, the other crushed under the weight of artillery.
The Battle of Arras was meant to be a turning point in the war. There were stories, rumours even, of strange events. Stories that circulated among us Tommies, of a phantom battalion that battered through a hail of machine-gun fire, falling upon the Germans within unheard of rage. They called them Tigers.”
Oliver Gill. Captain in the 1st Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry. Interviewed post-war for an unpublished research paper on the Battle of Arras, 1917.
I’ve been working on a new story for the last few months. In fact, this work in progress comes from an idea I was playing with a year ago, partly inspired by a series of interviews with World War One veterans published by the BBC History Magazine. The teaser above, from this new book, is actually the opening section, a fictional aural history interview.
I’m just working through the first draft of the first story. Provisionally the series has been titled RZC – wonder if anyone will work out what the initials stand for without any extra clues? The story is clearly set during World War One, introducing a new group of characters and a secret weapon known as Tigers. There are a variety of inspirations for this story, but I’ll keep them to myself for now or the teaser will give away too much.
Available now! The Butcher’s Funeral
Now available on Amazon, the full story of The Butcher’s Funeral, available from Amazon, is released for the first time as a single volume compiling all the different episodes of the series The Butcher’s Funeral.
The butcher is dead and his wife is the chief suspect. Yet Col Butcher had many enemies, who killed him and why?
Follow Law and Judd as they try to resolve the death of the butcher in Medieval England, there intent to deliver justice to the killer. Could the murderer be the Carniter, who had been pursuing the butcher for his corrupt business practices. Or maybe the Barber Surgeon, a traveller to the city? Could it really be true that the butcher’s wife was the killer? Who is the murderer? Find out among a backdrop of medieval crime and punishment, a world of food adulteration, sharp business practices and the traditional medical practices of the period.
Previously published as a series of short stories during 2014 and 2015, The Butcher’s Funeral is available now as a complete and single volume for the first time. This volume contains all the individual parts, each also available on Amazon. Originally written as it was published, the book is the first extended piece of work published by C. M. Harald.