Pali (Pāli) is an ancient language of India and the sacred language of Buddhism.

The Pali word for suffering is ‘dukkha’. This is widely known, especially by those with an interest in Buddhism or new age philosophies generally. The word is complex, however, covering many different aspects of the unsatisfactory nature of human life and all existence.

The literal or original meaning of the word is fascinating. It means “stuck” – literally the axle hole of a cart that won’t allow the wheel to turn.

The opposite of Dukkha is Sukha, meaning “happiness,” “comfort” or “ease.” It literally means “unstuck.” Or “having a good axle-hole.”

Sometimes taking a word back to its roots opens up its meaning in ways that a thousand hours of teaching, or meditating, never could.

The trick is allow the wheels to turn.

Photo 'Wagon Wheels, Romania' by Luke Price via FLickr and Creative Commons

Swear words are extraordinary things.

A TV show might show graphic violence, gunfights and knifings, rape and emotional turmoil, murder, mass murder, the deaths of thousands, even millions of people. And the audiences soak it up.

Throw in a couple of f***s and s***s and m*****f***ers and the complaints will pour in. “Don’t use words like that in front of the children,” people exclaim.

It’s as if behaviour doesn’t matter – feel free to lie and cheat and steal and kill, just so long as you don’t use a naughty word, one that mummy said was bad.

Is it because there is a secret hidden power within these words, like spells that can unleash untold damage?

Or do some folk simply lack all sense of proportion?

(That, by the way, was a rhetorical question…)

The ebook version of ‘Wild, Hugo Wilde‘, my young adult adventure about two runaways living wild on Dartmoor, will be free on Amazon worldwide from Monday June 27 to Friday July 1.

My crime thriller  ‘Blood Read (Publish And Be Dead)’ is close to being ready for publication. The book is the first in a series following the misadventures and mishaps of investigative reporter Tom Capgras and his family.

The book will be published this summer / autumn. In the meantime here’s the short version of the blurb and the first chapter of the novel:

A serial killer stalks the London book-world 

A literary mystery thriller

When investigative journalist Tom Capgras finds his literary agent hanging from an oak beam in her West End office, an immaculately tied noose around her neck, his dreams of a non-fiction book deal appear dead in the water.

Bad day for him, worse for her.

Joanne Leatherby’s death looks like suicide but Capgras suspects murder. Nonsense, say police, who dismiss him as a conspiracy crackpot.

At Joanne’s funeral Tom meets a fellow writer, the alluring, mysterious Kiera Roche who shares his suspicions. Together they investigate and uncover links to a string of untimely deaths  – editors, publishers, reviewers, even book bloggers, killed for an unkind word.

Blood on the Covers, Death in the Margins

The evidence points to one man – a mid -list author of detective tales with a career on the skids. Cast adrift by agents and publishers alike, his dreams thwarted, Arthur Middleton has gone over to the dark side and embraced self-publishing. What Kiera says may be true – that “ambition makes monsters of us all” – but how mad would a man have to be to kill for publicity, for book sales? Mad enough to admit everything on the pages of his latest blockbuster?

As the body count mounts, and the police still refuse to take him seriously, Capgras must act alone, defy the odds and get to the truth fast – before the killer gets to him.

A crime thriller with a twist of satire – in the vein of Le Carré and Leonard, with a nod to Kurt Vonnegut, Jasper Fforde and Tom Robbins. The first book in the genre crossover series The Capgras Conspiracy.

Blood Read (Publish and Be Dead)

Chapter One: The Gatekeeper

Doors never opened easily for Tom Capgras. The gatekeepers, those at the helm of life, know a trouble maker when they see one and at every turn they blocked his way.

Yet here stood an unlocked door, an inch ajar. He tapped lightly. “Jo? It’s Tom.” No answer came, only a rasping creak – an echo of summer days at the dockside, water lapping against boats, the screech of gulls and the moan of rope on wood.

Rope. That was it.

He pushed at the handle and edged into the office where Joanne Leatherby, literary agent, waited patiently for their meeting to begin. He noticed her feet first, twisting and turning above the waste paper basket. A Series 7 Arne Jacobson chair had been kicked onto its side. The desk was clear apart from a pile of papers in the centre. Tom recognised the tattered edges of his own manuscript where his printer had mangled the pages. He had been meaning to replace it for longer than he could remember. Joanne had told him it looked unprofessional.

She was beyond caring now, her face white and bloodless, her eyes staring, mouth contorted in pain. Tom yelled for help, his voice muffled as if underwater or heard through thick glass. Cut her down. Check her breathing. His foot collided with the bin and it rolled across the room.

The rope had been secured to a solid wooden desk and thrown over an oak beam. The knot wouldn’t move. What fiend devised this? Joanne didn’t seem the type for the boy scouts. Finally, it unravelled. Her body hit the carpet with a thud and he winced at the impact, though she could feel no hurt, not any more.

[continue reading…]

Sometimes the most mundane tasks in life come with simple but crucial messages. Take mixing two-stroke oil with petrol (‘gas’ to those of you in the USA). If your mind is a-dither and scattered, flitting between plans and worries, you’re probably going to mess up. The consequences won’t be too serious (providing you’re doing it outside, in a safe location, naturally) – but the lesson is an important one. Before you begin to pour, steady yourself, concentrate. Keep your mind on what you’re doing. Get grounded.

It’s the same throughout life. If you’re in a hurry, stop and slow down. Get a grip of yourself, ground yourself and focus on the task, not on the stress factors or the worry or the ‘what ifs’.

The same goes with writing. It’s not how fast or slow you go that makes the difference, but the quality of your focus while you’re doing it.

Photo: Focus on Books by Kamal Hamid

I have a dog who is scared of the rain. And when you live on the west coast of England… well, let’s just say it rains a lot. So my poor Airedale can end up at her wits end some days, needing constant reassurance.

The thing is, of course, she isn’t really afraid of the rain. Too often, storms have come in off the Atlantic bringing torrential downpours and claps of thunder. And she associates the thunder with fireworks. She’s terrified of fireworks. Why? The noise, clearly – and the gutteral vibration, the soundwave. Does she associate it with gunshots? She’s not able to make such a simple correlation. But the point is, she’s not scared of rain in itself. But she connects it, through a chain of associations, with the fireworks and thunder.

She’s only a dog. But then, we’re only human. I wonder how many of the fears that haunt our lives are ultimately unfounded or misdirected.

Photo: After The Rain by Susanne Nilsson via Flickr and Creative Commons. 

Looks like my dog had a hard night watching Netflix.

A little over a month ago I decided to start blogging on a daily basis. Give it a month, I told myself, and see how it goes. [continue reading…]

Consciousness is notoriously difficult to define and pin down. We all know roughly what it is, because we will live within it. It is our lives. Our selves. It is strange and mysterious, yet commonplace and intimately familiar at the same time.

There are still countless questions around consciousness and how it is created that have not been solved by scientists or philosophers. However, I discovered a fascinating aspect of consciousness while researching my sci-fi / speculative fiction tale Lost In Thought.

The book involves a group of characters attempting to wake a coma patient. They use a far-fetched, fictional mind-meld machine, developed for computer gaming purposes, to enter the patient’s mind and interact with his personality and memories. What I discovered while researching some of the neuroscience around comas was a clue as to how consciousness is created and evaporates on a daily basis within our brains.

“As we fall asleep, the connections between different parts of the brain begin to fall silent. As we wake, these connections are restored.”

FMRI machines reveal there is still activity even in the deepest sleep. Critically, however, as we fall asleep, the connections between different parts of the brain begin to fall silent. As we wake, these connections are restored.

This suggests that consciousness is created not simply by brain activity, but by the different parts of the brain connecting  – to create something that is more than the sum of its parts. The thalamus and the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala can’t create consciousness on their own. But working together, they can and do. They create something beyond themselves, something they cannot understand or comprehend. The amygdala isn’t conscious, so it doesn’t know that is it helping to create consciousness. But it is part of that consciousness.

So, what if scientists really could create a ‘mind-meld’ machine? What if they used it to link together the minds of dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, or millions of human minds? Continue with the experiment