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Coming Attractions

John Payne

It seems an appropriate time of year to announce some of the projects I’ll be working on in 2019. First up will be finishing off ‘A Fifth Visitor Or How Scrooge Kept Christmas’. I’ve been working on this for several years now and I was planning on releasing it this Christmas, but due to one thing and another (mostly another) I’ve not been able to polish it off. It’s mainly just grammar and punctuation I need to work on, and, due to the extra time I have now, I’m going to add some illustrations to the mix.

Speaking of illustrations, I’ve been toying with the idea for a while now, but I’m finally going to put a book together of the first fifty Still Life cartoons (a cartoon strip about a bloke called Jeff and his sofa. It’s more interesting than it sounds). There’ll be some rarities in there as well, including some old strips from Jeff’s original creator Mike Chapman.

If you read yesterday’s blog you’ll already know that I’m working on two new sequels to my short sci-fi story ‘Bright Future’. The working title for the first one is ‘Shutdown’, and it’s set around thirty years later. I won’t spoil the plot, but it involves a teenage girl who doesn’t fit in to the technology enslaved world around her. Will Cooper from the first book will have an influence on the plot, but whether he’s dead or alive remains to be seen. I’m quite excited about this one, so hopefully I’ll have something for you by the end of the year.

Another ongoing project is ‘The Badger Helper Watcher’. This is the very first book I started many moons ago. It’s aimed at young teens, and it’s set in the fictional and too good to be true town of Valleyvale. I started working on it just as the culture of internet shopping was starting up (quite a while ago then) and the plot is a commentary on that. Until recently, I was thinking that the message of getting whatever you want when you want it, has consequences was a little dated, but considering the state of the highstreet now, maybe it’s the perfect time for me to finish it.

And that’s it for now. I’m sure other stuff will pop into my head along the way and I’ll keep you posted when it does. All the best to you all for 2019.

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Published by John Payne

I write novels and short stories and draw and write cartoons. The main cartoon I'm working on at the moment is Still Life. It's about a man who sits at home on his sofa all day and yet bizarre things still happen to him. At the moment him and his sofa are stuck on a desert island. Check out Still Life Series Five: Beyond the Sofa on this site. My debut novel is out now. It's called 'A Fifth Visitor', and it's a very unofficial sequel to 'A Christmas Carol'. The story picks up five years after the events of Dickens' classic, and we see how Scrooge is getting on with his promise to always keep Christmas. A new spirit pays him a visit and convinces Scrooge that he's not doing enough to redeem himself, so they both travel to the future to save a young nurse called Grace, but there's something big that this new spirit is keeping to himself. I'm developing a website dedicated to my writing, so watch this space. One of my short stories is available on amazon kindle. If you want to check it out, it's called 'Richmond's Rarity'. It's about a late night hospital radio DJ. I've written it under my author name of John D Payne.

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