It’s been over a year now since my last post. In that year I finished the first drafts of books four and five in the Collapse series, Scarcity and Abundance respectively, but both novels still have to be edited before they can be published. This means that 2024 is the first year I didn’t publish a title since releasing my first novel in 2017.

I did adapt The Ragged Arsed Philanthropists for stage and an extract was performed at an event organised by Leodis Productions at Slung Low in Leeds in November.

Other than that it has been a barren year and the reason is that most of my mental energy has been focussed on attempting to get a visa for my wife who is still in Brazil. Over the last year, we have only seen each other for one week because I have been in the UK trying to meet the requirements for her to get a visa while she is stuck thousands of miles away waiting for it.

As detailed in my last post, the UK Government decided to change the immigration rules, so I rushed from Brazil to the UK to find a permanent job and apply for a visa before the rules changed on April 11.

This I successfully acheived and a number of weeks later we received an email from the Home Office asking for more information. We supplied the information and a few weeks later we’re surprised to receive a refusal letter claiming the additional information wasn’t sent, among other errors.

Our only recourse in this situation was to appeal, which we did on July 13. It’s now over five months later and we are still waiting for the Home Office to submit their bundle of documents to the appeals tribunal. In the meantime we have only been able to speak via WhatsApp with the exception of one week in October when I took advantage of the autumn half term to visit her in Brazil.

Obviously, we are not alone in this predicament and there are families who have been separated much longer than we have. The appeals system in the UK has a capacity for 3,000 cases per month but the volume of visa applications and appeals has increased substantially with no increase in the capacity to process them leading to lengthy delays.

In the meantime, I have been attempting to obtain the conditions to be able to make a new visa application under the new rules which requires earning considerably more money which has resulted in me leaving the job I had been doing as a tutor at an alternative provision school for learners that have been excluded from mainstream education, and finding better paid work elsewhere.

I have been fortunate enough to find work with Apus Productions, a street theatre company, whom I helped with their Santa’s Airforce and Snow Patrol acts, and with the local council and I will begin a new permanent administration role in the new year which should give me the conditions necessary to make a new application which hopefully should be quicker than the appeals procedure.

I hope that 2025 will bring me the stability to enable me to resume my writing and, if it does, I hope to be able to publish the two Collapse novels and complete at least two further novels but time will tell. Hopefully my next post will be sooner than a year away and will contain more positive news.

Here’s an image of The Ragged Arsed Philanthropists being workshopped by Leodis Productions.