Alaska rumbles and 41 passes

A 7.0 earthquake near Anchorage, Alaska this morning. That’s pretty hefty. I had to do some research about the fault lines that run in that region. The Denali fault is an evil bitch, running between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. Today, there was a shift and, well, I’m sure you’ve seen the news footage. Living in Southern California you get used to the idea of living with a constant, nagging warning of an impending quake. There have been quite a few shakes and tremors since I’ve been here, but I can’t imagine being in something like what happened today. Scary.

President H.W. Bush passed away today - at the grand age of 94. In England that’s what you call a good innings. I always liked him. When I used to watch him on the news, back when I lived in the UK, I always thought that he sounded just like a cowboy, or at least what a cowboy ought to sound like when he talked. Honestly, I always thought he was a decent man. R.I.P. Mr. President.

Pew Pew Bang Bang

So, it’s been a couple of years since I started training with things that go bang. There is now, though, a marked difference in the kind of training I’m undertaking, and the people I’m training with. I’ve had good fortune to have been able to train with some great guys since I started, and am honored to call them my friends. I’m looking forward to continuing that journey, albeit a little less frequently, simply due to time and distance - the range is a 300-mile round trip away. Blimey.

Spring forward to present day and I’m really quite excited…

So I found some really cool people to train firearms with, and, not only are they all excellent human beings, but they are… wait for it… twenty-five minutes from where I live. That means I can train more regularly, not have to take a whole day off work, and not spend between 5 and 7 hours in the car just driving to and from the range.

So, thanks to Ben, Daniel and Emily for reigniting my interest and passion for all things pew pew.

Check them out. www.artifexfirearmstraining.com

To be continued because it’s getting late and I’m knackered.

IT'S BEEN TOO HOT TO WRITE...

Well, as you have probably read, or seen, California is hot, and, well, tragically on fire in places.

It's been a REALLY hot and dry past couple of months. Being from England, it's been something that I've struggled getting used to. I mean, I get my tan from my Scottish grandfather, Irish grandmother and - on my father's side - my northern English relatives. In other words, I get sunburn walking out to get the mail.

I'm a year older in two days' time. Shhh...

Sigh. Okay - back to work.

Spring is struggling to spring

It feels like it's been cool and gloomy for months. Come on, California, get sunny. I need to continue my hot streak of making my old friends and family in England envious of our glorious, year-round weather.

I'm working on uploading a hard goods art page. The problem has been a common, new-age, one. I can't find the portable hard drive with all the archived art on it. I shall report back!

Liverpool FC beat English premier League champions-elect 3-0 in the Champions League quarter final first leg last week. I'll just leave that there and cling onto it if we lose the second leg on Tuesday...

It's 2018... and it just sounds so futuristic.

I made myself some of the usual, obligatory promises, that I shall not refer to as 'resolutions'. I will get (back) into shape (because I will never admit that I've ever really been 'pout' of shape for so long that it really matters), I will finish my newest novel (more frilly shirts, perhaps), I will write my first full screenplay, and I will achieve a one-second draw at the shooting range. Also, there are a couple of other 'resolutions' that I can't reveal just yet, but that's because I don't want to jinx them, rather than them being all cool and secretive, like.

What does all of that mean? It means the same stuff as it meant for all of my efforts in the same arenas for all of last year. Well, yay for consistency at least.

In (proper) football news, my beloved Liverpool FC have sold our star Number 10, and superstar Brazilian midfield magician, Philippe Coutinho, to Barcelona for a staggering £145 million. That's about $197 million on this side of the pond. He will then (on top of that fee) be paid around $350,000 per WEEK, plus bonuses etc. etc. on a five-year contract, and has a - wait for it - $545 million release clause in his contract, meaning that, if any other club in world soccer wanted to approach Barcelona to buy Coutinho, they would have to come up with AT LEAST half a billion dollars just to get to the negotiating table. And to think that my parents used to tell me to clear my dinner plate because children were starving in Africa. The world has gone mad.

Look out for another portfolio page, with some of my slightly older, more action sportsy stuff, coming soon.

Happy New Year!

The weekend is off to a winning start...

So, firstly, congratulations to the England team for beating Spain to win the U17 World Cup. From being down 2-0 to come back and beat such a strong team 5-2 in the final is a fine achievement.

Secondly, my beloved Liverpool got back to winning ways today with a 3-0 win in the English Premier League. Long may that trend continue - although if you know Liverpool that is certainly a long shot and, some might say, simply fanciful optimism. Ah well.

My everyday life is hectic. A full-time career, a part-time one, a son with autism, trying to stay in half decent shape, a busy home life, and in those nooks and crannies of spare time, I write books. Yes, I am a fiction writer. As it happens, I'm at the querying stage of my second full novel The Warrior Gene. If you don't know what querying is, it's when you send out a query to a prospective literary agent, pitching them your book in the hope of gaining representation and, eventually, scoring a publishing deal. Querying is a daunting and confidence sucking process. It's taken more time to query as many agents as I have thus far as it did to write the book. Every single agent that has responded so far has done so with a, 'Thank you for submitting your book, but at this time...' type of thing. Thankfully, my skin has grown exponentially thicker after years of graphic design work, critique, sarcasm, dismissals and revisions, and so I'm neither worried, nor bothered, by the flood of rejections. I've also learned that it very much matters on what day you query an agent, what mood they happen to be in at the time of reading your query, and what side of the bed they got up on that morning. I also had to write an author bio - in the third person - so that was weird.

I will continue sending queries out into the literary world. Never surrender!

England are in the World Cup final!

... okay, so it's the U17 team, but I'll take whatever I can get. Best of luck to the lads as they face their arch nemesis, Spain, in the final.

UPDATE - England Won the U17 World Cup, coming from behind to beat Spain, so well done lads!

Autumn in California is much like...

...spring, summer and winter in California. Every time I talk with my dad on FaceTime (he lives in Manchester, England), he tells me what the weather is doing - he often turns the camera around and shows me the vista of Chorlton Park through his kitchen window - and I respond by pointing the camera skyward so that his entire phone screen becomes an azure blue rectangle. He chuckles accommodatingly. Thanks, dad. He would do the same for me, but his phone isn't waterproof. My next post will be about how my new office set up is coming along in the garage/sweat box/freezer.

UPDATE:

Okay - so I didn’t update you on the garage office/sweat box/freezer. It’s late November, raining outside (well, duh, it would hardly be inside, would it) and a balmy 59 degrees. I am actually wearing a sweatshirt. So, because there is little to zero insulation between the bare rafters above my head, all of the heat that I’m generating with all of my insanely hard work, is going right up and out through the roof. Damn you, entropy!

Not sure what the point of all that is, but I really wanted to use that entry line. Now tell me which book I lifted it from, smarty pants. Yes, I’m talking to you, internet detective…

They say that when you're sore from working out, you 'earned it'...

Well I don't want it! It's obvious that the older I get, the more sore I will become. I shall not 'adapt', nor 'grow used' to being sore. An easy solution would be to just ease up, right? I mean, I'm not exactly in my prime. I have no world championship competitions to enter, no nemesis that I need to train like Rocky in order to destroy, and no desire to be the world's crazy-fit king. So why do I throw up just a little bit in my mouth when I consider easing back as an option? Why don't I have a 50% button? Damn you, ego!

It's the middle of October and 90 degrees outside. OCTOBER.

I thought it would be a good idea to finish sorting the garage out today; the oppressive, sweat box and generally hellish environment that it is. My new home office will be in here, and so there are things to be moved, stacked, organized, and generally made less of a jumbled, mountainous cardboard eyesore. Twenty minutes into that little escapade and I had more ideas for a new weight loss regime than had made any progress with the mess in the garage. 'Garage Yoga - it makes Bikram Yoga feel like you're in cool, air conditioned luxury'. Forget the old spider webs and dust that I'll be sneezing out for a week, I think I lost half my bodyweight in sweat before I'd realized my shirt was soaking wet.

Today, I create history...

I've never had a blog before. I've always sort of avoided setting one up because I've never understood them (this is still true) and so I developed a sort of blog discrimination, borne out of 'not wanting to know what the blog thing is'. Maybe I just didn't want to have to admit that I, too, was now a blogger.

Anyway, things I write here may be few and far between, or I might start ranting every hour about totally random crap. I don't know.

So, day one. History is made. My first post on my bl*g. I'm a bl*gger. I may never admit that, though.