Hello friends. I hope you’re doing well and looking after yourselves. I’ve been posting less on this website of late, confining most of my outpourings to Twitter (which you should follow me on – link to the right). I tend to assume everyone knows what I’m up to by a sort of quasi hive mind form of cultural osmosis. I am slowly waking up to the fact that this is a form of egotism, so in any case, here are two pertinent bits of news:

1. I have a bunch of gigs coming up! Some headline sets, some festival gigs, and some scratches of my brand new full-length solo show, Pub Stuntman. I’ve got dates in Norwich, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Brighton, Birmingham and Latitude festival, and I’ll be adding extra ones as I confirm them. You can see my latest gigs here.

2. I have spent the last year and a half working on a novel! I know, I know, I thought I’d learned my lesson with the execrable-dogboy-adventures-that-shall-not-be-named, but it turns out that the little imp that caterwauls YOU’RE NOT A PERSON UNLESS YOU’RE WRITING A STORY can’t be placated by anything less than squatting in front of a screen and banging out some prose fiction. The novel is far from finished (if I’ve made any progress at all, it’s in realising the truth in Hemingway’s old saw that ‘the first draft of anything is shit’) but – and it’s taken a long time for me to admit this to myself – I think it’s going to be pretty damn good when it’s done.

It’s a rip snorting adventure with a heart – think Downton meets Aliens – and I think you’re going to love it. If you fancy a sneak-peek at the first page of the work-in-progress (the working title is Guns And Burning Things) then it’s up on the Writers Centre Norwich website, where it was Highly Commended in the Escalator Literature competition. I’d love to hear what you think – drop me a line via the ‘Contact Me’ button on the right and let me know!

Right. Back to the merry coalface that is creative writing. Happy Easter!