Hi folks

I am more neglectful of this blog than I should be!

But now I am afraid that my neglect could get worse.

That’s because I am in the middle of self-publishing a crime novel, under the pen name C.D. Coleman. The novel is entitled Burned, and here is the blurb:

A body is found in a burned out car on the outskirts of Dublin, and the newspapers are full of speculation about organised crime involvement.

But Jana Moravec has her own compelling reasons to get to the bottom of the mystery. Coming from a broken home in Prague, but having managed to achieve a good education, she now works as an escort girl in Dublin, and the victim was a regular client of hers. She knows that the detectives investigating the case will soon make that connection, and that police pursuit of her clients would ruin her business. Furthermore, it soon emerges that, for some reason she cannot fathom, the criminals who probably carried out the murder in the murder are pursuing her as well.

In the meantime, she is being blackmailed by her cocaine-addicted brother, while her stalker ex-boyfriend has also reappeared on the scene, after a gap of several years. 

Burned is a story about a woman who struggles with a traumatic past and a menacing present. Can she maintain her carefully constructed persona when her livelihood, and even her life are in danger?

I had the idea of putting Jana Moravec, the main character at the heart of the website brand. And it includes a blog that is written in her name. So now I have two blogs to keep up to date.

Of course, the priority topics for Jana’s blog reflect her own preoccupations, rather than mine. But this is not to say that on the issues she writes about I disagree with her views. It’s more that some things I might write about, like the arts or politics with a capital P (as in, my views on Donald Trump or Palestine) would be “off brand” for Jana’s blog (of course, she hates Donald Trump even more than I do, if that’s possible, but references to him are likely to be in passing, rather than the main topic of a blog entry).

Her first blog entry is about decriminalisation of sex work, and you will have to wait and see what comes next.