Haunted Minds

The last couple of weeks have been frantic.

As some of you may know I am the chair of five different community projects right across Northern Ireland and unfortunately I'm not the kind of chairperson who can sit back and do nothing. And the projects are quite demanding.

One for example has been set up on a local estate to help one parent families attain education. It provides a creche and a number of other facilities such as laundry services etc mainly for young mothers on the estate. It actually started out as a women's drop in centre but has now a turnover of a few million pounds. Consequently it is run almost like a business - I was in at the start of it and I suppose myself and the Committee are victims of our own success - and it needs a Chairperson working closely with the Business and Project Manager to keep it even going. Recently it's been extended to include domestic abuse - started out with abuse towards females but now has been extended to include abuse towards males which is a growing problem on the estate and in Northern Ireland in general. There is no comparable organisation in Northern Ireland so we've been starting from scratch.

That's just one of the projects I chair and as you can probably see it takes up a lot of time - especially as everything requires a report, evaluation and assessment. We have meetings tomorrow with the police to look at abuse referrals from them and from the courts, so it's pretty steady going.

In the middle of things I'm writing the new Lovecraft book A Haunted Mind. It's hard going - there are so many Lovecraft fans out there that you want to get your information right because there are people who eat and breathe the Mythos. I don't think that there is another Lovecraft book like it in the market - see when it comes out and let me know what you think.

At the moment I'm going through the books of the Mythos in order to see if they could be based on some actual works and where Lovecraft and others might have got his inspiration for them from.

As well as that I'm working on American Vampires which will be following closely on the heels of A Haunted Mind. This has been a lot of fun but it's taken a lot of research too. I hope you will like the result.

So just eating sleeping and working. But I think the reults will be worth it. I'm also working on cannibal cults at the moment for the Cultes des Goules which may have had its origins in actual historical events. I'll not say any more - you'll have to buy the book when it comes out. Off now to grab a bit to eat and then back to American Vampires and Skinwalkers. It never ends!