20 years ago I wrote a book.

Fundamentally it was to see if I could write a book, and as it turned out it was one of those experiences that left me with a family of characters that had fleshed themselves into being and a world that is still waiting to be explored further.

A few friends have read it (some of them 20 years ago) and the response was good enough for me to self publish it in 2006 through a DTP site.

That version was totally text based, and I had a strong desire at the time to illustrate it, in the way many books of my youth were illustrated by the likes of Charles Keeping and his kind.

It’s time to rectify that. I’m currently finalising proof reading on the original text and revisiting the designs and illustrations I did twenty years ago for the project.

Among the papers I’ve also found the scant notes for a sequel… ‘Stovepipe and The Skellermen’, which goes to show you can’t keep a good monster down!!

Stovepipe takes place in my home town of Whitehaven, tucked away on the industrial coast of Cumberland during the Second World War.

It is a book very much in the vein of books I read as a boy back in the late 60s and early 70s and is a tip of the hat to all the fantasy and adventure novelists who dragged me through my formative years.

The movies of Ray Harryhausen and Willis O’Brian were also a huge inspiration for the book – and I still love a good Godzilla movie to this day.

Among the fantastical elements there is also a deep ‘heart’ that is the central core of what the book is about, and on reading it again after many years it is a lot fuller and stands up far better than I thought!

So if you’ve already read Stovepipe’s original adventure or you’ve never heard of him… this new, ‘restored’ version might just be up your street!