At the beginning of this month I began writing another novel about New Hope Island. This could be seen as a sequel to The Colony and some of the surviving characters from that story will appear in this one. But it will be a stand-alone in the sense that it won't be necessary to have read The Colony to get (and hopefully enjoy) what's going on in the new book.

Why am I doing this? Because the series of 25, 000 word stories I'm currently completing leave me with plenty of freshness and creative energy.

And because I want to put right what I got wrong with The Colony. It was my first (and last) attempt at self-publishing and it was not well formatted or well edited. It was too long and there was too much telling and not enough showing in the way the plot unfolded.

Ironically, given these rather serious deficiencies, it sold right from the start more strongly than any of my other titles on digital platforms. It's a steal to buy now, but wasn't when first published so it obviously struck a chord with readers I thought were a bit short-changed by those formatting and proofing flaws.

12, 000 words in and this novel is already shaping up to be a big improvement on its predecessor. There were things I thought I did well in The Colony, but I'm doing them better here. And going back to characters such as Patrick Lassiter, Phil Fortescue and Alice Lang is proving to be enormous fun.

I wrote The Colony in Shaftesbury. The only problem with going back there now is the intense nostalgia I feel for that place and time. But as some of my characters are going to discover to their cost, loss is part of life.

My working title is New Hope Island. I'm pretty confident I'll finish this one early in August, for September publication on Kindle and the rest.By then I'm also hoping to have something more enticing to call it.