Who needs password protection, firewalls and other miscellaneous security systems in this day and age? “All of us!” I hear Internet security experts cry. Well yes, but that spoils my little anecdote and I’ve never been one to let logic and realism get in the way of telling a daft story. I will therefore cry “not I, for I have a cat!”

This cat, in fact.

I am Guard Cat. Purr! Err, I mean "Grr!"

This is Fred, my lovely tortoiseshell queen; which children the world over are usually disappointed to find out does not mean she has a) a hardened carapace, or b) a crown. I kid you not, I have been asked this.

Fred likes to sit on my graphics tablet, or occasionally lie on it when I have a desk lamp turned on. This is because she knows the tablet will be flat, warm and reasonably comfortable, what with it usually being covered in paperwork. Normally this is paperwork I have placed there so I can see it while I’m working. She also knows lying on the tablet while I’m using it will get her some attention; as will sitting on it (and thus being right in my line of sight) when I’m typing.

As a result, it can take some time for me to get work done. I don’t mind though, Fred is lovely and giving her a cuddle is much better than work any day of the week.

Sometimes we come to the unfortunate realization that what we are writing really doesn’t work. It can happen to all of us and chances are it will happen more than once. With me, it happened a while back but I’ve only just worked out how to fix the problem. It will be nice to finally get through this story.

Anyone who has been reading the stories section of this website (or who was following the Building Tales blog before I incorporated it into this site during the last redesign) will have probably come across The Curse of the Other World. It is designed as a supernatural horror but it really wasn’t working for me. I couldn’t get a grip on the characters and I didn’t feel they fit the way the story needed to play out. In short, the story was not working for me and that’s why it ground to a halt.

It struck me yesterday while I was reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that what I needed to be writing was more akin to detective fiction than supernatural horror. The storyline fits better into that genre than what I was trying to do with it. That’s not to say there will be no horror in the new version because there will, but now I think I’ve got the angle I need to see the story through to its conclusion.

As for the characters, I’ve been reading a lot of Poe, Conan Doyle and Lovecraft recently and each of them has shown me one thing: if you are going to unravel a supernatural mystery, you need a character that will keep ploughing on regardless of the danger to themselves or others. Poe and Conan Doyle have that in abundance because of how their Dupin and Holmes characters act. With Lovecraft, he has characters who invariably should have given up and run away quickly before going insane or being killed horribly (or both) but don’t because of a singular thirst for knowledge that borders on insanity.

The character of Sarah Barclay was designed to be a knowledge-seeker in the Lovecraftian style but with a personal need to see the storyline through to its conclusion because of events in her past; hence why the storyline was running in two time lines simultaneously (and I don’t think I’m really giving anything away by saying that here). I’ve decided to ramp up her drive in the new version; and also change her name. I’ve been working on this storyline since before I met my partner’s family and writing about someone with the same name as my sister-in-law seems a bit odd now, so I’ve gone with the alternative name I had considered for the character when I started out. It’s not a problem to change names of fictional people but I thought any of you who read this might be interested to know why I made the switch.

I’m going to start posting the first draft of this new version once I’ve finished chapter one, because that way I’ll have a bit of a buffer for those times when I run out of steam or just can’t make the time to write on a particular day. Expect to be able to read something new soon.