In the late 1990s, I wrote a 150,000 word manuscript called “Dark Satanic Mills” set slightly in the future and based around a civil war in the UK. Though the first draft was completed, I didn’t do anything else with it. Let me demonstrate how long ago I wrote this, and tell you that I wrote it on a Commodore Amiga. As such, all of that hard work was lost. Not even a faded manuscript exists.

Around 2008, I started to rewrite “Dark Satanic Mills”, but never got around to finishing it. I stopped around the 160,000 word mark, and the story itself was only about halfway complete. It was a manuscript that I occasionally picked up, added to, and then put to one side. Last year, I determined that I really wanted to complete this, my opus magnum, the biggest single story I’ve ever written and told. It seemed like such a monumental task. And when I read through all that I’d written so far, I realized that this could be split into two separate volumes. And then, when I looked even deeper, I realized that it would be better separated into three volumes. And this isn’t a cynical move on my part – selling three books when one will suffice. “Dark Satanic Mills” could be a single book, but it would be about 1,200 pages long, and at the moment KDP does not permit print books longer than about 730 pages. But the key element in deciding to split the entire work into three volumes was that each volume is self-contained insomuch as it can be read as a single story, without any need to read either the preceding or the following volume. Much the same as when I finally got around to writing the sequel to my 1995 book, “die Stunde X”, it was not necessary to read “die Stunde X” before reading “nach Schema F”, and vice versa.

So what, exactly, is “England’s Pleasant Pastures” about, what is the setting, the premise? It’s set slightly in the future, at some point when the British Army is involved in a variety of conflicts across the world – in the Middle East, in Africa – and a new Conservative government is struggling to balance the books and keep an increasingly divided population happy. There are race riots across the country, and the story opens with a brutal attack on a pair of police officers, and a subsequent riot. In amongst all of this, General Fairfax, a retired British war hero, has received financial and military backing from a couple of rogue nations to start a civil war in the UK. Together with a couple of retired army officers, Colonel Michael Jericho and Major Paul Decker, his small army of British ex-soldiers take over two towns in the Fens of England. The conflict escalates and spreads further, as first the police and then finally an understaffed British Army are brought in to tackle this insurrection. Topics of racism, extremism, ethnic cleansing, revenge, military intervention, and proxy wars are sprinkled through the entire series.

Of course, I’m still working on the blurb, so at the moment I’m just flinging words down on this blog post. But “England’s Pleasant Pastures” should be out on 1st April 2023. Or is that an April Fool’s joke? I hope not.

If you spot a typo in this post, let me know and I’ll dedicate the rectification to you.