Emergence Launch & Horden Field Trip…

Hey folks, so Emergence has been out almost a month already. On it’s first day of release it climbed up to number 29 on UK Amazon’s best-sellers chart for British Horror! How cool is that?

On Saturday, just gone, I hosted an event at Hartlepool Central Library. Thanks to those who turned up, I enjoyed speaking with you all!

For those who weren’t able to make it, I read a couple of excerpts from the book and talked quite a bit about my influences and inspirations for the story, quite a lot about main character John Gimmerick and I covered parts of the writing process itself.  I’m more than happy to discuss any of these points on a one-to-one basis, so if you have any questions you can contact me and I promise I’ll get back to you.

John Gimmerick’s hometown is Horden and it’s no coincidence that it’s also mine. It was a great place to grow up and I always wanted to weave it into one of my stories. My parents still live in Horden and although I visit them often I hadn’t been to some of the places mentioned in the book in years, so I felt this in itself would lend Emergence a sense of honesty and realism, that by me going back to visit such places as the beach and the dene and the cundy, I would see things as John would see things on his return.

Here are some of the images I took during my field trips, while in the planning stages of Emergence:

Horden beach (taken from part-way up the beach banks, when I went for a climb to see if the machine gun turret was still there from World War II):

Horden beach (the six-foot shelf the sea has created along the shoreline):

The tank blocks from World War II:

Inside the cundy:

The cundy from the outside (looks like somewhere Pennywise the clown might hang out):

The cundy from the other side:

The viaduct (also known as Gregory’s Leap):