New Website:  www.jimedmiston.com

Yet another life phase is coming up - and why shouldn't it with the coming of a new year.

Over the past few years, as well as writing fiction very few people can find, I've been writing  and illustrating school books for two publishers.

Grammar and Creativity was written for LCP and is available here:

http://www.lcp.co.uk/primary-school/literacy/grammar-and-creativity

Also, for LCP, I illustrated a series of books of Spanish for beginners, called Tapas Travels.  They should be available any minute.  They are to be found here:

http://www.lcp.co.uk/primary-school/languages/tapas-travels-spanish-language-resource

Currently, I am two-thirds of the way through a 6-book series of reading books for primary school children for a publisher called Headstart Primary.  The first few have already been published.  They can be found here:

http://www.headstartprimary.com/#!/English-Reading-Comprehension/c/15239122/offset=0&sort=normal

The New Website  www.jimedmiston.com  

This signals another phase.  Having been an academic, a wooden toymaker and designer, children's author and illustrator, followed by several years as primary school teacher, I now plan to paint.  Just paint. No sawdust.  Not necessarily with sales in mind (though that would be nice).

Come January, I'll have a studio at 44AD, 4 Abbey Street, Bath BA1 1NN

So, do visit the website - see what you think.

The Puzzle and the Clues

Here are some of the questions about the 13th and 21st centuries that Janyka B will need to answer if she is to understand how the world becomes what it is in 3001AD.

1.   What is the mugger husk?

2.   Where is the location of the Octangular or its useful remnants?

3.   Can she trust the amnesiac umbilica-driver of the marauder known as Audrey?

4.   How can she evade the soundlicks with a younger brother who turns out to be a time-jammer?

5.   What are the other questions?

Characters in Waiting

As I said - more to write.  There are characters waiting: Janyka B has more to discover.  Will the driver of Audrey the Marauder stay alive long enough to turn in Janyka and her kid brother.  Is Gonzalo de Zanj likely to turn up at all?  I certainly hope so!  Naturally, I'm concerned about what form Phar Lazar will emerge as, because he's got several deaths to experience before they get the better of him.  And, most importantly,  Vinny's role will be crucial, but how will it be played out?

The Reptile Wars

For a long time now I've been harbouring ideas about what happens in the timeline between Vinny's crash into the 13th Century and his 21st C beginnings.  Also the book hints at people from the future researching his life for some important political and social reason.  I know who they are and why they are doing it.  I know who is out to thwart their haphazard efforts and where the unlikely source of help is going to come from.

What I don't know is, given the number of fiction- and lyric-writing projects I'm involved in currently, how the hell am I going to find the time to extend the scope of The Reptile Wars?

How did Harald the Merciless turn out to be such a bully?

Another excerpt from The Reptile Wars:

“What were you thinkin’ of, Baalfire,” sneers Harald, batting the top of my head.  “Bringin’ your little sister?  You got squirrel meat for brains or what?”  One or two of the other gang members snigger, so pleased are they to have someone else in the firing line.   I let it pass – for now.  Avoid trouble.  I’ve let a few things

pass.  Despite my usual avoidance tactics, I know there will be showdown one of these days.  Soon.

  I suspect Harald is having the same thought, for he says, “Let me tell you, Mr Disappearing Baalfire, a thing or two about the great and mighty Harald Ruffsnape.  My old dada, night after night with his head

in a pan of cider and his belly resting on the table, calls from his bed for a flagon of mead.  ‘I got demons dancin’ around inside my head, Harald,’ he says.  ‘And they’re all wearin’ them Frenchie wooden sabots.  The noise they be makin’ is something atrocious.  A little mead will settle them, I’m sure of it.’

‘Mead?’ I says, roused from a deep sleep in which I been wrestlin’ with the strangest forest creatures and chewin’ their heads off.  So I staggers from my bed in the direction of the barrel of mead.  Now by the age of ten, I have grown quite a fine belly of my own.  By then, my arms had the strength of young men double my age.  And by the time I heat up the mead and carry it to His Almighty Drunken Laziness, I  decide the time has come.  The time is now.  This is it.  So, holding it high above my old man’s grasping hands unable to reach because of the dancing demons, I upend the flagon.  Oh, dear!  It is sticky and it is hot.

Gideon – that’s my old dada’s name – he lets out the kind of bloodcurdling scream of agony you hear when you slit a pig’s throat.  He jumps out of bed and prepares to commit murder.  This is the moment…  You listenin’ to this Baalfire?  This is the moment when we stand belly to belly, so that who’s in charge in this god-forsaken house is about to pass from his hands to my hands. ‘You… you… you no-good-son-of-mine, you’re goin’ to wish you were never born!’ That’s what he screams at me.  And I says, ‘I already wish that, papa, oh dada of mine.’

Now he pushes past his only son, finds himself a hefty stick by the door, and returns only to have it wrenched from his hands and cracked over his own skull.  ‘Fine stick, dada.  I couldn’t have chosen a better one myself.’  My dada always did have a good eye for the choosing of sticks.  But he didn’t do that again.  No longer did I let him lie around and have me do all the work.  From that day on, dada becomes slave to the son.  For I had a lot on my plate besides extra rations of bread, fresh meat and boiled turnip.  There are boys to be rounded up.  Dogs to be kicked.  Ageing villagers to be tormented.  And sniveling weaklings to be sorted.” 

He reaches out to prod me in the shoulder, only I push his hand away.  He just grins.

“When you goin’ to tie a pretty ribbon in that hair of yours, Baalfire, and be a proper girl?”

I save my reply for another day.  

BUY IT HERE:   

http://www.amazon.com/The-Reptile-Wars-Volume-1/dp/1497594995/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405352668&sr=8-1&keywords=the+reptile+wars

Is it a Dragon?

TODAY IS THE LAST DAY OF THE FREE PROMOTION OF THE REPTILE WARS.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Reptile-Wars-Earth-ebook/dp/B00JPL5SKM/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1402329028&sr=8-2

http://www.amazon.com/The-Reptile-Wars-Earth-ebook/dp/B00JPL5SKM/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1402329028&sr=8-2

Here is an excerpt from this medieval fantasy, ispired by a real historical figures - El Drac, an Arabic warlord, and King James of Aragon.  At this point in the story of The Reptile Wars, something is spotted on the brow of the hill.

Suddenly, something dark blocks the moonlight.  It’s there.  We see something for a split-second, then it’s gone.  Was it on the top of Bartholomew Hill or in the sky?  There’s nothing to see now.  “Tom, did you see that?” I say, scanning the horizon.  Still lapsing into my old ways of thinking, I figure: a paraglider, plane, helicopter, drone?  No, of course not.  Tom’s mouth is open, but he doesn’t answer.

“There it is again,” I say.  Ellyn sees it too.  They all see it.  Like a black sheet being shaken in front of the moon and the sound of a sudden gust of wind.  Then something like a crack of angry thunder.  This is followed by a glow.  An orange glow.  It should be a pleasant, gentle reddening of the sky, but there’s something sinister and wrong about it.  Something unnatural.

Geoffrey can’t stop the tremors taking hold of his body.  “No,” he mutters, crossing himself.  “No.  Oh, please, Lord, protect us.”  He breaks loose from us, steadies himself on the solid trunk of a gnarled tree, and starts to moan before falling to his knees and trying to pray.  Tom’s dog whimpers and cowers beside him.

We stand and watch as the orange-red glow grows deeper and stronger and becomes a blaze of spitting, crackling light.  It breaks out in other places, somewhere behind that hill.  Astryd grabs the man by the shoulders.  “Geoffrey!”  she cries, trying to shake some sense out of him.  “Do you know what’s going on?  What’s happening over there?”  He can’t answer.  His distress and agony are too much.  But Astryd persists.  “You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you!  Didn’t you!”

The night sky itself is turning scarlet.  Deerwood is on fire.

“I wanted you to be safe.  I wanted us all to be safe.  You and Ellyn and Vincent and Tom.”

“But our houses!  The others!  What have you done?”

Ellyn is crying pitifully.  Astryd pulls her close.  But then we all throw ourselves to the ground.  There’s a rush of wind like some kind of cyclone that breaks branches and scatters brushwood everywhere.  The two horses that pulled the wagon buck and panic and flee, turning the whole thing on its side before breaking free.  For out of the smoke and flames comes something black and unidentifiable.  Bigger than any bird but shapeless.  It soars across the brow of the hill, swoops low over our heads, just a wingbeat away, and disappears over the treetops into the night.

Face-to-face with Harald the Merciless

Once Vinny arrives in the medieval village of Deerwood, he is challenged by Harald Ruffsnape, nicknamed The Merciless.

One of the bigger, more aggressive boys steps forward.  “You tell him, Harald!” they all shout.  “Harald Ruffsnape’ll sort you out.”  I have this in-built bully-detector – I don’t like them – and it goes off as soon as they move or open their mouth.  They bring out the worst in me.

“I know how we can tell,” says Harald.  “The red lock.  He ain’t got it and that’ll prove he ain’t a Baalfire.”  With the crowd baying their agreement, he goes to yank at my hood.  I push his hand away.

“Whoa!” I say, holding my nose.  “Body odour!  Ever thought of washing?”  I can see the wheels in Harald’s head whirring around.

“Washing?  That’s what rain’s for.”

I wave my hand in front of my face.  It’s the smell of the pig fat in Harald’s straw-colored hair that is so overpowering.  “You may be a belligerent moron,” I tell him, “and you could do with borrowing a bottle of deodorant, but I like your hair.  You must rub pig fat into your hair every morning, snatch chubby handfuls of it and pull it up into spikes.”  I nod slowly.  ‘Yeh.  Cool.”

While the belligerent moron is working out belligerent moron, deodorant, yeh and cool, I reach over.  “Excuse me, Harald,” I say and remove the hand clutching Astryd.  The old man can’t believe he has just been touched by a cursed demon and he stares at his skin expecting it to start rotting any minute.

“I’d put something on that,” I growl at him, “before it melts.”  I figure this is the moment to pull back my hood to reveal the red streak in the thick of my black hair.  “Vincent of Baalfire.”  The petrified man shakes uncontrollably, but can’t find his voice.  No one else speaks.  They all lose control of their mouths.  For there it is, of course: the unmistakable sign of the Balfour family and, it seems, the Baalfire family.  The red lock of hair. The boy who was lost, the boy who some said was dead, has come back.  Or so they believe.  “Say it!  Repeat after me: Vincent of Baalfire!”  One or two find their voices and mutter the words.

Harald is no longer trying to figure out what I’ve just said to him and whether a belligerent moron is a good thing to be or not.  So he settles for gloating.

“Well, well, miracle boy.  So you got lost and you got found again.  Don’t know where you been for near ‘nough a whole year.  Maybe them wolves ate you up.  Then I reckon they spat you out again ‘cos you tastes like foul, nasty, foul stuff.  And then them twitchy little fairy elves got hold of you and dressed you up like a proper bluebell with twinkletoe shoes, you numkin’.”  Other boys, part of Harald’s gang I suspect, mingling in the crowd, hoot with laughter and point.  But the fun and the fear is fading.  One by one, they disperse, but not before Harald walks straight up to me again.  He looks me straight in the eye.  A challenge.  A provocation.  And thinking this is not the moment to flinch, I stare straight back.  “Huh,” sneers Harald eventually, and he prods me in the chest before he walks away chuckling to himself, “Twinkletoed bluebell.  Hah!”

This is an excerpt from The Reptile Wars, currently being offered as a free promotion on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JPL5SKM

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00JPL5SKM?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

The backstory, explaining how Harald came to be the way he is can be found here:

http://www.amazon.com/Bullying-Harald-Ruffsnape-Reptile-Wars-ebook/dp/B008H4WUV8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1402242802&sr=8-1&keywords=the+bullying+of+harald+ruffsnape

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bullying-Harald-Ruffsnape-Reptile-Wars-ebook/dp/B008H4WUV8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1402242802&sr=8-1&keywords=the+bullying+of+harald+ruffsnape