I’m going to be starting/continuing work on another long term project very soon. An early teen book called The Badger Helper Watcher. It’s the one I was working on before A Fifth Visitor, but I’d been writing it for so long I needed a break from it, which is where the Scrooge sequel came in. The Badger Helper Watcher (or BHW for short) is about a couple of kids called Sam and Sally who live in a town where everyone gets whatever they want on a Friday. Sam is new to the town and finds it and the townsfolk quite odd. They both start to uncover the truth of it all and decide that change is needed.
I started writing it just as the internet (or more specifically, internet shopping) was taking off, and it’s a kind of cautionary tale which by 2020 has proved me right. It needs a bit of tweaking and modernising, but now that we’ve had some time apart, I think it’s time for me and BHW to resolve our differences and get our story out there. Oh yeah – it’s part of a planned trilogy, so there’ll be a couple of loose threads dangling by the end. Keep checking this site and my Facebook page for updates. Ta ta for now.
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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JOHN D. PAYNE IS WRITING 