As a child, my hero was Charles Dickens. An unlikely hero for a small boy, but I wasn’t your average small boy. One of the first stories that I wrote was my attempt to emulate Dickens’ style. It was a murder mystery called “Close Death”, and I set the story at Christmas for no reason other than the fact that Dickens liked to write about Christmas. The setting bore no relation to the rest of the story, but it did mean that the story could begin with the immortal (for me) opening lines of, “It was death. Death in the night. Christmas was coming, and so was death.” Powerful stuff.
A few years ago, though, I decided to revisit my childhood admiration for Dickens by following his example of the serialised Christmas Book, a novella set around Christmas time, published in instalments as Christmas Day approaches. The first two of my Advent stories can be read in full here at the Consolations of Writing, and the latest one is being posted progressively during November-December 2016.
The Gift – Advent 2012
Pageant – Advent 2013
No Ghosts This Year – Advent 2016
The Consolations of Writing 