This year, I've been mostly writing serial fiction.

It's a return visit to some old friends.

This year, I’ve been struggling with some half-finished novels. I don’t know why, but I can’t seem to move them forward. The normally reliable voices in my head who narrate them have gone silent. Without them, I have no chance of making any progress.

As I have already written over 150,000 words towards these novels, I hate the idea of never finishing them.

All I’ve managed to write with any consistency this year are short stories, some are standalone, while others are connected by character.

They seem to be the only thing I can manage right now.

So that’s what I’m doing, until the urge to finish the novels I’ve started returns.

It’s not as if I’ve never written short stories. I’ve written over 200 short stories in the last twelve years, some have gone on to become novels and series, several have appeared in anthologies, while many of them were posted on Medium, back in the day.

As well as the Captain Starlight and Raf and Cat adventures that I’ve been posting here, I’m also writing a sequel to a set of stories called The Adventures of Kalyn Deere, Bounty Hunter.

The Kalyn Deere project started life when I saw a sign by the side of the road, while I was driving around Devon. I don’t know if it was for a house, or a road or something else, but the name on it stuck with me.

The name on the sign was Harmony Chase.

I thought that was a great name for a character. It sounded like she could be a femme fatalé from a 1940s noir, and I wondered about her and who she might know. Which was when Kalyn came up. She had already featured in a short story called Bounty Hunter, where she played a minor side character in a Dave Travise adventure.

I thought that it would be cool if Kalyn and Harmony had their own adventures. In my mind, I could already see a set of stories much like a T.V. series, with individual episodes and an overriding arc.

As a bonus, I could use the universe that I’d created for Dave Travise, which would save on worldbuilding.

In 2023, I wrote 18 Kalyn Deere stories. Harmony and Kalyn were joined by Debs and Dusty, two more strong women with tales to tell. Some of the longer stories were split, making 24 parts, which I published weekly in 2024. After I’d posted them all, I put them together and published them as a book.

If you’re interested, you can get a copy from my new Substack shop at the special price of £1.99. That’s a £1 saving on the price you would pay anywhere else.

Now I’m back writing the second set of stories, called Kalyn’s Crew.

Once again, there will be a mixture of action and more cerebral stories, with the same theme at the back of all of them, the search for Kalyn’s father and the reasons he left.

Here’s a taster from the original adventures. This is part of a story called Hanlon’s Second Case.

Drip…, Drip.

It was the sound of the water, falling from the ceiling into the puddles on the floor, that woke me up. Shame, the dream had been a good one, I was back on Premex, in The Still, before my present situation had even begun. At that point, I didn’t even know who Jennis Warren was, that Hanlon’s client wanted a word with him or why he had chosen me to go and get him.

I was on my fourth or was it the fifth, drink of the night, they were mostly mixer but only Dusty knew that. It had added to my reputation as a hard-drinking, no-nonsense, dependable businesswoman. There was a new man in town, he said he was a miner on furlough. He didn’t know it yet; I was planning to get more than friendly before the night got much older.

Drip…, Drip.

It must be raining outside, again. I was in some sort of cellar; I’d been here long enough to know that the roof leaked when it rained. And it rained a lot. I was wide awake now, before the good bit of the dream too. In the gloom of my cell, I could hear the wind howling, through the small, high window. The one at ground level, with the bars, or else I’d have been out of there before you could have said bonus payment. The thin light of early morning illuminated the puddles on the floor of my prison, at least my bed was raised off the ground and I didn’t have to sleep in the water.

I had been here three days and I had a plan to get out, although it was going to take me a while longer to put it into operation. It just needed to happen before Warren came back with his buddies.

At the moment, there was only one other person here, my guard was an obese man called, predictably, Tub. If I could only get him inside my cell, I could see if my plan worked. If it didn’t, I knew that Tub had been instructed not to kill me, so there was that.

I heard him shuffling down the alleyway. “Here’s your breakfast,” he called, “keep back.” There was the sound of a key in a rusty lock and the door opened. I heard the smack as a self-heating food pack hit the floor. I resisted the urge to say thank you, that was the start of a slippery slope. The door slammed shut, the key squeaked. I went and picked up the pack. Pressing the button on top of it would activate a small electric heater in the box that warmed your food.

I had another use for that part of the pack. Cold eggs and bacon weren’t too bad, a small price to pay. The food eaten, I dismantled the box, throwing the card down the hole that had been thoughtfully dug in the corner of my new home. The battery pack, wiring and switch joined the others in a small gap I had found in the brickwork, which I covered up with dust. Five more should be enough to do what I was planning.

There was nothing else I could do. I sat on my bunk and listened to the wind and rain. It was hard to put my finger on the point where it had all started to go downhill.

I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. My life wasn’t normally this dangerous. I had spent most of my time so far repossessing ships, dealing with scammers, and tracking down the odd fugitive, even then, most of them came quietly.

What had made this one escalate?

Two days day after I’d met the miner, whose name I had already forgotten, Hanlon, a licensed credit broker had come into my office. I was surprised to see him, I hadn’t finished the last lot of work he had given me yet. As usual, he helped himself to coffee and the battered chair that Dad had sat in most of the time. Anyone else and I’d have told him to get out. Hanlon was OK, Dad had liked him. He was generous with beer on expenses, and he put a lot of work the firm’s way.

“I got an extra job for you. If you want it.” It was the way he always spoke, no social niceties, purely business. At least you knew where you stood with him.

“Good morning, Hanlon. Sure. What’re you offering me?” I responded in kind.

He sipped his coffee, “this is good stuff, where did you get it? Oh, yeah, you heard of a man called Jennis Warren?”

I racked my brain. I’d only taken out the good coffee because I needed the caffeine, so far it wasn’t helping me much. “Nope, what’s he done?”

“Never you mind. He owes my client, and he’s run for it. I want you to find him. You can bring him back or hold him till I get there. Usual fees.”

That meant bringing him back, holding him paid a lot less. “You got a warrant, something legal I can wave at him?”

He shook his head, “not this time, it’s off-book. Does that bother you?”

That explained his unexpected arrival. It also meant I had no legal backup. Wherever I was, I couldn’t use the local law to help me out. If I got caught doing anything dodgy, I would be in trouble. The money for an off-book job was better though. I couldn’t afford to be choosy, we had expenses. Hanlon knew that.

“No,” I said. “Give me a clue.” As for why he wanted Warren, that was well above my pay grade. It was probably better that I didn’t know. Hanlon was always straight with me, my father had trusted him, as much as he had trusted anyone. That was enough.

“He’s got a ship, called Marion’s Hope.” He avoided the question, drained his coffee, “I’ll see you when you get him back.”

He got up and left me to it.

“No good luck?” I called after him.

He didn’t answer.