Wet Wood Fire & Massive Proof Copy

More outdoors activities. A picnic in Pwll Du (one of the nicest and most isolated beaches in the Gower) with my lovely friend Elena and an opportunity to attempt to light a fire with wet wood. It had rained heavily all the previous night, so the question was: could I do it? I often fancy myself as a bit of a Ray Mears and in fact he's one of my heroes, so I bore in mind the methods he teaches for lighting a successful fire, including laying a base of logs to keep the fire above the ground and create embers, splitting the lengths of wet wood and making a feather stick to get it going in the first place. I was inordinately chuffed with myself when it worked. Tea with lemon followed and for some reason food and drink tastes better when prepared on a camp fire than any other way.

I returned to civilisation to find that the proof copy of my new collection The Just Not So Stories had arrived. For some reason it's massive. I don't mean massive in terms of the number of pages, but in sheer physical size. It could double up as a coffee table or windbreak... I'm assuming that the book when it is published won't be quite so large. It is much easier to proofread text that is so big, so I'm not complaining! This collection contains some of the best stories I have written in the past five or six years (in my opinion anyway), including 'The Blue Jewel Fruits', 'My Crow Nation', 'How to Make Enemies and Alienate People', 'The Leveller of Neptune', etc. The publisher is Exaggerated Press and I'll post more details here when the book is available to the reading public.