Make Christmas special this year - give the gift of hope: it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

                                  The Butcher’s Boy is the first in The Renaissance Brothers series.

A film about Charles Dickens is always a good thing in my book - if you excuse the pun - and I’ve no doubt that one day some insightful film Director will be working on a script from one of my books, but lets not get too far ahead our ourselves!
“The man who invented Christmas” has been released in the cinemas and I can’t wait to see it. The storyline is quite powerful so don’t let the humor gloss over some challenging subjects which are particularly relevant in the current social climate. But in the end, its all about
HOPE
And if you’re going to see the movie then you MUST get a copy of my book called Mr Dickens, which looks at another facet of the life and times of Charles Dickens, and which also concludes that HOPE is such a vital ingredient in all of our lives.
Let me know what you think of the book and the film.

Life never quite works out the way you expect it to.
Just when I thought The Butcher's Boy would be hitting the bookshops, I hit a minor speed hump. It turns out that the colour of the pages in a book actually makes a difference to the thickness of the book. And if the thickness of the book is altered, then the artwork on the spine of the afore-mentioned tome will no longer fit - too big and it spreads around onto the front and back covers, and too small and it looks like .....well, like you've shrunk the book! All this hinges on whether on whether you chose 'cream' or 'white' pages.
Having made such a  fundamental error I set out to correct it with a simple 'click' to change the colour setting, in the naive belief that publication would then proceed on well oiled wheels, or at least at the speed of electrons along a copper cable.
But I'd forgotten about Black Friday.
Unlike most of the online population, I was blindly oblivious to the fact that this event comes the day after Thanksgiving and is a sort of unofficial Holiday in the USA - and publishers take their holidays seriously!
​The long and the short of it all is that the release of The Butcher's Boy has been delayed until later next week when hopefully, some semblance of order will return after the chaos of the festive break.

And whilst you are enjoying the lull in reading material, what better way to enrich yourselves than by making your fortune on the Bitcoin 'merry-go-round'. I've decided to gamble a modest amount in the crypto-currency lottery - I hasten to mention that I won't gamble any more than I'd spend on coffee in a year - a light hearted attempt to lift the gloom that seems to abound in the popular press or on-line.
At this stage I'm not sure which will make me financially independent first - being an Author or a Bitcoin buccaneer? Probably neither I suspect.
Not that it's make much of a difference, I'll only have to hand it over to my wife or my children or some other well deserving 'charity!'

I started writing this book during an extended stay in Rome some time back. At the time I was just trying to see if I could write a book, little did I know that I'd be finishing the third book in the series earlier this year! Now it's time to share my book with the world.
Many people and many things have inspired The Renaissance Brothers, but two of them stand out.
Firstly, there are all the invisible folk who struggle in silence against often terrible social injustice and yet who keep "turning up" and are still fighting for their place in the sunshine. Many of these are young Mums and a even more of them are their children. They are my unsung heroes.
The other most significant person, is my wife Maggie. She taught me the meaning of love and that in marriage it is just as important to learn how to "yield" as it is to give. She is an amazing lady!
Currently The Butcher's Boy is with Ingramspark, which means that within a week to ten days it should be available through Kobe, Kindle as well as through your local bookstores too - just quote the catalogue number for the book: 
                                                                      ISBN 9780648069423 

The weird looking images above are of a normal brain.
Mine’s like that.
I know, because a couple of days ago I had a migraine. But this one was different: I couldn’t remember words - which for an author can be limiting!!
Thankfully I went to St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney where the care was extraordinary! I was seen immediately, had an IV up in minutes and was being scanned a short time after. Thankfully the results were excellent and I was having lunch at a fine Italian restaurant nearby within the hour.
I wanted to share that with you all as I’ve been working my GP job fairly hard recently and haven’t had time to get to tap on the keyboard, to write my journal or fashion my stories.
A salutory lesson: care for self is mightily important, but having a great Health Care System comes a very close second!

​Shortly I’ll have some FANTASTIC news for you.