More PhotoShots of Totteridge

Having some huge problems getting online and uploading stuff, but here are another couple of photos I’ve recently taken.   I edited them in GIMP.

Totteridge, North London.

New PhotoShots: Totteridge

Some new shots I took the other afternoon on my way to work.   I edited them in GIMP.

Totteridge, North London.

 

Popular Theme In Children’s/Teenage Fiction: Running Away

Here, central character Wayne (14) runs away from home following a campaign of bullying.

The last bus drops me off at a junction, and I retrace the route. Yeah, I was here yesterday as well, searching for Max. Things were bad then, but they quickly got worse.  I pass the familiar sites, keeping my hood up and my head down to avoid drawing attention to myself.  Muddy brown buildings.   Swimming baths.  Petrol pump. Supermarket.  Street after street of low rise housing.  Church on corner.  Rows of terrace houses.  Boarded up windows.  Rainy puddles.  Litter.  I continue on to the crumbly brown pub by the play area, the pub where Max conducts his business dealings.  

It’s too early on in the day to try the pub.  Just after nine.  I decide to go directly to Max’s house, even though he’ll be furious with me for turning up uninvited.  He doesn’t know I have his address.

‘What are you doing here?’ he says when I arrive there roughly ten minutes later.

I tell him what happened last night.  Brick through window.   The threats.  Running to Uncle Graham’s house.  The huge row that followed.   ‘You promised you’d text,’ I remind Max.

‘Yeah, sorry about that.  Busy night.’  He shakes his head.  ‘What are you planning to do, kid?  You can’t stay here, you know.’

 

Meanwhile, Meanwhile, my debut novel – Secrets by Lawrence Estrey – is available on Amazon.    Reviews

Out Of Action For A Few Days

Got a lot going on at present, but will be back in a few days.

A Knotty Problem

Experiencing some difficulties here with my latest novel EggHead, a crime thriller.  In the original version, the 12-year-old protagonist takes drastic action to deal with bullying and suffers the consequences.   Aged 19, he struggles to rebuild his life in a bleak northern village.  I don’t see anything wrong the general premise.  However, basing a story on increasing feelings of isolation and pointlessness means there’s nowhere to go…no excitement, no development of relationships, just bleakness.   It is certainly depressing for me, the author.

I’m redrafting the sections told through the 19-year-old’s viewpoint and continuing in a new 14-year-old perspective to allow the entire drama to unfold in a single time frame.  For instance, boy runs away from the bullying and finds kindness in a remote sea bay.

Meanwhile, Meanwhile, my debut novel – Secrets by Lawrence Estrey – is available on Amazon.    Reviews

EndGame

I’m in the final stages of my novel EggHead, a crime thriller focusing on a boy at the ages of twelve and nineteen.   The twelve-year-old gets into serious trouble when he faces up to bullying.  As a nineteen-year-old, he is struggling to rebuild his life in a remote village on the north east coast (England, UK).   

The atmosphere inside the pub is rising.  The mood is ugly.  Again, I sense the hostile stares, the silent accusations, the thirst for revenge against the monster who killed the missing lad. 

The locals think that I or one of the other men at the Halfway House played a role in whatever happened on Wednesday night.  Worse, I can’t account for my movements that night.  I don’t recall any of it, apart from coming to in a groggy state shortly after midnight in an unfamiliar squat less than a quarter of a mile from this pub on the promenade where the lad was last seen.  I stumbled back home.  Someone must have seen me approaching the Halfway House in the early hours of the morning and passed on the information to the teams of villagers patrolling the area.  That would explain why the teenage boys and men stopped outside the Halfway House in the middle of the night, lingering by the front wall, talking in quiet voices. 

Because they suspect me of foul play. 

They must know my background.  They will have lifted it from the internet.   The anonymity required by law wouldn’t stop people in my hometown identifying me

 Meanwhile, my debut novel – Secrets by Lawrence Estrey – is available on Amazon.    Reviews.

The Novel, Secrets

http://n0tice.com/report/3757/local-musician-publishes-debut-novel

A local musician has published his debut novel Secrets, a psychological thriller set in Lancashire. Lawrence Estrey, a classical pianist, grew up near the Pennines but is now based in Muswell Hill, North London.

“I really wanted to keep many of my childhood memories alive in the novel,” he says. “Even though I’ve lived in Devon and Wales since then, I’ve always had a nostalgic feel for places like Rochdale and Oldham and Bury. I wanted readers to experience this world through the novel. To meet the people and hear the accents and view the landmarks. ”

In Secrets, the central character, a web designer, has to leave London and return to his native Lancashire when his marriage collapses. However, as the title of the novel suggests, the character has a secret of his own and he is quickly forced to face his secret past when events in his home town spiral out of control. The novel is a mixture of psychological thriller and serious crime.

Lawrence trained in music at Dartington College of Arts in Totnes, Devon, and later came to London to take up a piano scholarship with local pianist and teacher Vera Yelverton. “The early days were amazing. One year, I ended up catching an overnight coach to Edinburgh to give a recital in the Fringe Festival, and that was during a heat wave. The same week, I performed another three concerts in and around London. I used to love the buzz of it all.

“I also used to write on and off, but often it would come and go in bursts. I only seriously got interested in creative writing about 2003, shortly after I moved to Muswell Hill from another part of London. Then I ended up at the local novelist group.”

Lawrence originally approached agents and publishers with a couple of proposals about three or four years ago, both of which attracted considerable interest, but he decided to go it alone, largely due to the recession and the huge difficulties new authors often encounter.

“It’s interesting…after Secrets, I wasn’t sure I could go through the lengthy process of writing another novel, yet I’m more than two thirds of the way through my next novel EggHead, a crime thriller about a boy at the ages of twelve and nineteen. The process is very similar. I expect I shall release EggHead early next year. Meanwhile, I’m concentrating on the piano and releasing recordings and short videos through the internet.” Lawrence Estrey’s debut Secrets is available from Amazon in paperback and in Kindle.