Peter Rogerson

Me and my Books

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Printing on Demand is the ultimate in the world of environmentally friendly books. Nothing is wasted because books are only printed when they've been paid for. Everyone must have heard about the cruel world of publishing, how people like J K Rowling struggled before they had their first book accepted. Those of us who turn to businesses like Lulu have gone through that nightmare, have failed but are still convinced that our work is good. And we give the potential reader an alternative to the book: you can download most of our titles for considerably less than the paper version. They come in pdf format, which can be easily loaded into Acrobat Reader (which is itself free). That's got to be the very height of environmental friendliness!

Click Right Here For More of My Views on the environment.

And for anyone curious enough to want to know, the piece of blubber in shorts is me in Portugal, in between having my pockets picked and losing my camera.

BEFORE I CARRY ON WITH THE MAIN FAYRE WHICH IS MY FICTION, I'LL JUST MENTION A LITTLE BOOK OF WISDOM! I'VE BEEN CONTRIBUTING BLOGS TO THE SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE MYSPACE FOR SOME TIME AND I HAVE COLLECTED SOME OF THEM RIGHT HERE FOR YOUR DELECTATION AND DELIGHT AND BECAUSE THEY SWIFTLY DROP OFF INTO THE ETHER AND GET LOST.

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For some time I've been writing short stories about a little horror who becomes a much bigger horror by the name of Janie Cobweb. "The Peculiar Histroy of Janie Cobweb, Mistress of Time" is available from Lulu books - check it out at right here. There's something positively entertaining about nonsense and the trivial, you know!!

SEX, SEX AND YET MORE SEX???

Since starting to place my novels on Print-on-Demand I've obviously had to re-read them, edit them (though there may well be errors still in them - I'm not a qualified editor by any stretch of the imagination, and anyway, having made an error once I find it very difficult acknowledging it as such!!!) and I have been shocked by the huge amount of sex that enters into them. Why, I ask, have I created such a montage of carnal activity? And what is there about sweating bodies that I find so necessary to my fiction? After all, about half of it can loosely be defined as Science Fiction and, traditionally sex and SF haven't gone together. Yet I suppose the real truth behind it is that, after the satisfaction of such instincts as satisfying hunger and thirst and guaranteeing a comfortable bowel and bladder, sex is hugely important. It's why we're all here (unless any of you is the product of a virgin birth, in which case…) But back to the real world. Men, they say, bend their minds towards carnality a huge number of times each day, and with a remarkable frequency, and women almost as often.

So I make no apology. I don't think there's anything overtly explicit or gratuitous in my work (though A Fall From Grace might strike some people as edging that way), and if there is - so what? As a species we spend a great deal of time worrying about the impression we make on members of the opposite sex, and that can only be for one reason. We want to appear sexually attractive to them because nature's drive for procreation says we must - even though we may do precious little about it when we've actualky succeeding in making that right impression! This drive towards attractive appearance is of course, true of everyone except me. Just look at the blubber photographed at the top if this page! I don't care what I look like because I know full well that my mirror, which cannot lie, informs me that anything remotely like enhancing my appearance in order to make the right impression is doomed to abject failure. But then too many years have fluttered past since I was in my halcyon days! Anyway, on to start a page which is meant to define my work.

I'll start with a very brief biography of myself.

Born in 1943, which is a darned sight too long ago, and brought up in Rugby, Warwickshire, before moving as an adult to Nottinghamshire, I seem to have spent forever bringing up four of my five children single-handed, and now I'm involved on a part-time basis with the care of one of my grandchildren. And I'm no domestic hero and am positively blind to all manner of chaos if there's something more important absorbing me.

I turned to writing as a means of keeping a certain amount of sanity (and to provide distraction for the above-mentioned absorbing something).

I first used a portable typewriter and gallons of tippex, but soon turned to the computer I'd bought for the children to use when blasting aliens. I liked that computer (I've still got it in my bedroom, which is the single confession that must indicate I'm still without a partner). It was an Amstrad CPC, and many of the works that are available now on Lulu had their first drafts written on that. And it wrote them well. Much as Mr Microsoft of Gates might want to improve his Word program, it scrolls no smoother than did Protext on my geriatric Amstrad, and the words it eventually puts on paper are no better endowed with mystery. And if his software is still being used, unchanged in any way, twenty-odd years in the future I'll be surprised! You see, ++++ I'm a sad old-fshioned creature who really ought to be put out of his misery!

The earliest remaining work of mine is, as we write/read, finding its way onto the POD publisher Lulu. Written in five parts it strides human history like a collossus! It is a genre all of its own, science-fiction, historical and erotic, all nicely mixed up. But, upon re-reading, mostly kind of erotic.

Love's Deadly Dawning begins the saga, with a young couple fleeing their home planet and seeking a new home.

The Eagle and the King takes the story on into a world of ancient myths, religions and sagas, and ++++ The Giant and the Gems sees fabled battles and a mighty victory.

The story continues with The Pirate and the Child and concludes with Fire and Water.

But halt! Don't leave! There's more! Go to Lulu and find out!


Right. So I've maybe generated a bit of interest. Now here's my offer as a special loving bonus to a special person like you.

Books make a fine present. Birthdays, Christmas, get-well-soon, I'm sorry I flirted with your best friend, that kind of thing. So how about remembering this teensy weensy little commercial for that time when you need something special.

And you can probably tell from the following descriptions if MY books fit the bill. When I'm writing I'm not afraid of going into the nitty gritty of relationships, even when the subject matter might seem that rumpy pumpy in the wilderness is possibly inappropraite. So you'll know if that special person in your life might want to find one of them at the bottom of his stocking or in his hand-luggage for when his flight's been delayed or next to the lavatory when he's got tummy trouble. No. Strike that last one.

And if you order it from me I'll sign it and include a brief, personal message for no extra charge. The price as advertised by Lulu plus £3 p&p for first class postage. Cheques and Postal Orders only (at the moment). Email me at moc.dlrowltn|nosregor.retep#moc.dlrowltn|nosregor.retep I only carry a small stock of my books so if there is unprecedented demand you may have to wake around two weeks for new copies to be printed.

Go on. Doesn't that tempt you?


Here follows a brief outline of my other novels, starting with

FOR THE LOVE OF ROSIE

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Puppy love is something most of us have experienced and subsequently almost forgotten. This story explores the mind of an elderly man who hasn't forgotten his first love but can relive some of the events he lived through years ago as if they were yesterday.

I have called this book a romance, but that isn't strictly true, at least not in the traditional Mills and Boon sense. In parts it is tougher than that. There is a war and its bloody outcome. There is a loss of parents accompanied by a loss of faith, adventures of teenagers beginning to experience the birthpangs of love in a time of innocence, and the final hearbreak as war drives a stake through the romance.

I am a man in his sixties (as has already been observed) and yet I often find my eyes watering when I'm watching the last scenes of that great family film The Railway Children. Well, For the Love of Rosie, though penned by me, has exactly the same effect on me as I plod through the last few pages, I'm ashamed to say. We live with the elderly hero, and feel for him, and when things go right at last we weep for him. Or at least I do. Sad git that I am. It's meant to be a story for the heart as well as the mind. Mind you, it has no roots in reality and I doubt very much if an octogenarian spends a great deal of his time moping about the past when he still has s brief tomorrow to contemplate.

Finally, and I don't want to sound too pathetic here, but this is a story I actually enjoy re-reading. For Heaven's sake, what's wrong with me? Am I insane?

For a brief taster try clicking here.

THE GENTLEMAN OF THE ROAD

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Kevin Stonewell was a teenager who was always likely to be bullied by just about everyone whose path crossed his. It wasn't his fault: his mother (a single parent of the worst kind) only put a minimal effort into his upbringing because she was both an alcoholic and a cheap prostitute. He was invariably filthy and his home lacked the resources for him to be able to do anything about it himself. So he often smelled, and that wasn't helped by the fact that a gang of bullies physically assaulted him to the point that he wet himself.

He decided that something must change, and the best idea he could come up with was to run away, to become a humble tramp or gentleman of the road. It was after making that decision that things became darker for him. And the parent who was responsible for his condition was arrested for his murder (thought there was, of course, no body). Police custody didn't suit her, and a lifetime of alcohol abuse soon took its toll on her.

Kevin's present was the product of his past, and the same was true of his mother, and as we move through the intriguing and dark plot of The Gentleman of the Road doors are opened on that. Her conception one wild 60s night, her birth in a farmyard, her first years at the hands of a senile farmer, all contributed to her sorry state, and Kevin's appalling situtation.

For a cheeky free sample of the first chapter try going here

A FALL FROM GRACE

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In the light of sensible and mature debate on this wiki I have taken the step of altering the access level on Lulu of this title to MATURE, which means it doesn't appear on my storefront there. This is a handicap to me, of course, but in all honesty I think it is best that impressionable young people aren't beguiled by what they might see as smutty content. The book, though, is still available - and I invite adults who may be interested to obtain a copy. But if you do it for the erotic passages I warn you: they are few and far between.

It has been suggested that a man attempting to understand the motives and physical lusts of lesbian ladies is on to a loser, taking on much more than he could possibly hope to bite, but I'm afraid I'm not easily influenced by what has been suggested. Indeed, the great truth is a straight man (or a woman) writing about gay relationships between members of the opposite sex to him/herself shouldn't find it too difficult - for obvious reasons.

A Fall From Grace began its fictional existence as a consequence of me noticing the way an elderly lady (Now deceased) spent a huge amount of every day walking apparently aimlessly around the area where I live. I didn't know her and never spoke to her, yet I thought a great deal about her. What, I asked myself, is she doing, walking nowhere for hour after hour? Then I asked an even more important question - what was she like when she was younger? Young people don't half-walk, half-stagger around an area, constantly chewing on fresh air - so what was she like back then?

Young people, I decided, are invariably quite attractive. They have to be in order to draw attention to themselves and consequently get a mate and pass on their genetic heritage into the future. So what was my old lady like when she was, say, in her teens and twenties?

Maybe, I thought, she was ravishing. It was hard to see now, but time is a cruel artist when it comes to human flesh. Maybe she had a boyfriend, the thirties equivalent of famous footballers today? Or no - maybe she had a girlfriend! Maybe she was drawn towards another beautiful young woman and maybe the two of them had a really good life together. And if they did, I decided, I must not pull away from the physical bits of a relationship. I must warm to them.

Then I got to think of reasons.

Had there been anything in her childhood that had driven her into the arms of another woman?

Probably, I thought. Maybe she came from a single-parent family in days when single parents were few and far between? Maybe her mother had driven her father away because she had an irrational hatred of men. Maybe that hatred drove her to extremes. Maybe she was the kind of Christian fundamentalist who thought it best to beat the devils out of her daughter in order to save her from the ravaging and sulphorous fires of hell.

So I had her past and her present, and all I had to do was fill in the middle bit and find a route by which she became the sad old woman of today.

I liked her as a young woman. I liked her honesty, her honour, her special smile. So I decided she should be violently raped. Such a vile intrusion against someone I like makes it all the more reprehensible.

And that is A Fall From Grace. There is, of course, a great deal more, but that is substantially it. If you're interested it can by downloaded from Lulu.com for a mere £1-25 and then you can read it on your lap top, and hopefully, enjoy it. At above 145,000 words it's a comfortable length. Enough to get your teeth into. And when you decide you need to read it and re-read it then there's the paper available from the same source!!!

There's more and a free extract on this page.

SPELLBOUND

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Have you ever looked at the serried ranks of suited men and women sitting on the front bences of the House of Commons and wondered why we did so badly when we voted for them in the General Election? Have you ever thought that maybe they ought to be stirred into some kind of useful activity by having to cope with somebody completely and utterly different at the helm?

Maybe not. But Griselda Entwhistle (and with a name like that she's just got to be an oddity) did, and unlike mere mortals like us she decided to do something about it at roughly the same time that she discovered that she had a little odd understanding with an odd character equipped with horns, a tail and - er - magical qualities. Oh - and that broomsticks, upright vacuum cleaners, lamp standards and everything longer than it is wide made excellent flying machines.

SPELLBOUND is not in any way a serious novel. I like to think of it as a silly book. It was written by me for me to read because I needed something like it. There used to be erotic books in which the author ran out of ideas close to page one snd published anyway because there was money in it. And anyway, too much eroticism is boring. Let's have some humour! And anyway, why should kids get all the fun, with Harry Potter and the Worst Witch? So we have a rattling tale about a general election and unexpected triumph by one elderly lady who has some very modern attitudes towards a of the horrors that afflict society. Drugs, prostitution, everything: she's got the answers! It needs reading. If you've got a laptop it needs downloading. (Faster, cheaper and not back-breaking like sitting at a desktop is.) And think about the fun an elderly lady could have if she could shed a huge number of years and suddenly, magically, equip herself with unforgiving legs and a micro-skirt - and a goggle-eyed but rather handsome police constable with uncontrollable erections at her beck and call!!

For a sample try looking here.

OFFICER GENTRY AND THE GHOST OF MAVIS ADDER

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This is a children's book, intended for 9-11 years. When I was that age just about all I did was visit the library and read. My childhood was, indeed, tremendously rich and varied. It's probably true that modern boys get as much enlightenment from computer games and CBBC, but I somehow doubt it. Anyway, it was television that inspired this book, or rather a BBC competition in which entrants had to write chapter one and provide a synopsis of a children's book. I entered, didn't come anywhere - and the following book is the result.

Officer Gentry (oddly named because he had odd parents) went on a voyage into the past as a result of "borrowing" his father's home-made time machine. A school friend (Vicky with a lisp) accidentally went with him. There's something fascinating about time travel and the great sadness is I doubt that it will ever exist as real In Victorian times because if anyone in the future invents such a thing they'd use it, and we'd bump into them. Anyway, Officer and Vicky didn't have the same constraints as mortals and they went off into the vastness of the past where they bumped into a scruffy boy and had to go to extreme lengths in order to escape his brute of a father. They also saw a ghost when they were sheltering from heavy rain in a church porch. During their wild flight from the bully they found themselves in the time of the Civil War where they met the origin of the ghost, a wise woman called Mavis Adder.

I plan that this is the first of a series of books starring the boy Officer Gentry, and that each one should contain snippets of information that may (or may not) be helpful.

For a few sample pages, click here

THE CRYSTAL FOREST

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Imagine a land in which the entire population is protected from the rest of the world by a surrounding metal wall for all of the year and a cone of invisible radiation that prevents everything, even heat and light, from reaching the population. Then imagine how the population would behave after several generations of freezing imprisonment. Then throw into the mix a damaged mechanical intelligence that administered everything from punishment to food to the males, add a strange convention that says that young men and women should be given a chance to breed for one day in their lifetimes and finally provide fascinating remnants of earlier times together with a hidden society of escapees. Then find a way out. That, in a nutshell, is The Crystal Forest and the very innocence of its main characters is the thing that appeals to me most.

All of this gives us a chance to ruminate on the good old battle of nature verses nurture. The discerning reader will observe that many of my books seem to become involved with that little nugget! It's probably an attempt on my part to find answers to personal questions of my own. After all, sheer chance can't have produced a wretch like me! I guess that's what some fiction is for, a self-indulgent exploration of problems the author feels he/she's been beset by. But this is more than that. It's a good story, too!

For a taster try going to this page

WHEN NO LIGHT SHINES

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There's a lot of talk these days of apocalytic consequences of the generation of excessive amounts of carbon dioxide and this little gem looks at one of the possible outcomes. Take it that the damage has been done, take it that the rising seas reduced the amount of inhabitable land, take it that wars ensued as a land-grab became inevitable, take it that the greater part of the land left was scarred and destoyed and radio active: take those things because they are what happened before When No Light Shines starts. What we are left with is a sad and deformed remnant of humanity in the Scrublands, an old man who has long known the secret of an extended life-span but who can no longer see any point in living, a group of humanoid creatures, half-blind but capable of direct mind-to-mind communication (and mind-to-mind sex - we've got to have the sex!), a dreadful gigantic building, the High Centre, meant to ride out the dark ages following the wars but now only inhabited by the insane and some androids. And within that discrete and sad bunch of remnants there must be the future. And that future will be after the long silence when no light shines…

Of course, nobody knows whether life on Earth will end in the not-too-distant future, but there's more to global warming and climate change than hot summer days. The seas will rise, the proportion of the planet that is inhabitable will reduce sharply, the major cities will be swallowed up. And there's nobody I know who's prepared to lock their garage door and keep it locked with their car on the inside, and certainly nobody who would be prepared to countenance not flying cheaply round the world whenever they want to. So things will change in the future, but I hope the outcome is no where near as bleak as my scenario in When No Light Shines.

There's a sample available on this page.

THE FROG PRINCESS

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We all know that young soldiers who fight in dreadful wars can spend the rest of their lives trying to recover from the mental trauma of the thing they've gone through. But what of other people their lives might touch? What of passing strangers who might slip out of the way, only to find themselves under a bus? What of their children? What of the pretty child next door who plays with the son he bullies? More people can be touched by war and battle than those actually involved in the bloodshed, and the tragedy that was a life turned grey can have its repercussions down many, many years. The Frog Princess is concerned with one such soldier. He fought valiantly during the second world war and on one occasion held his best friend's hand as he died, screaming. That's when the nightmares began.

One of the people whose life was more than touched by that tragedy was the young woman with her lover, walking past the railway station when the traumatised soldier decides to beat his wife and son for no other reason than because he's got to do something to get the flying bullets out of his head. But that young woman was the passing stranger and her lover ended up under a bus, right next to the remnants of an old frog. Fifty years later she finds another dead frog, and thinks of kissing it just in case it might give life and breath to her half-century dead lover who she's been mourning for so long. But instead she goes home to a sad old cleric who lodges in her house, a cleric too scared of himself to tell his story.

The Frog Princess is a love story - of sorts - but it's thoughtful, too, and hopeful. Maybe a person might have to wait the best part of a lifetime before his fears and devils are laid to rest, and its not just the combatants who may need that time.

There's a sample first chapter just here

DEAD LIPS, KISSING

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What is it with me and dominant mothers? There's another one here, a repulsive harridan of a creature much worse than the one in A Fall from Grace This one has a son who she treated with contempt throughout his childhood because if she was going to have a child at all she wanted a daughter. It all boils down to the filth she perceives inherent in the male of the species.

This book is listed on Lulu as horror, but like everything else I write it doesn't fit so easily in lists of a single genre. Oh, it's horrible enough all right. There are the requisite number of particularly foul murders and an insight into the mind of a killer. This time it's voices that motivate him to do his worst - mostly his mother's voice. She encourages him onto a path of foul murder until he gets to like the sight and smell and even the taste of blood. And not far away, near where he lives, there's a rocky piece of wasteland which provides him with the perfect resting place for his victims. He even finds his tortuous way in, where his decomposing mother seems to his jaundiced eyes to be waiting for him to kiss her on her fragmenting mouth. But there is worse to come, much worse. His now deceased mother wants a crusade against sin and evil, short skirts and everything she always saw as disgraceful, and he is going to put it into motion - if he can keep far enough ahead of the police, that is.

I feel I ought to make it quite clear that my own mother was nothing like the caricatures that appear in some of my novels. I suppose that it's because I've been a single harrassed father that I'm fed up with the stereotype that brutal and abusive parents are male, and subconsciously I've created them as female. And to think that I naturally put women on a huge pedestal. But then, I seem to have a penchant for lesbians too, for no good reason that I'm aware of. But revising my work in swift succession has amplified my own peccadilloes.

For a sneaky little preview click here

THE JEWELS OF OOOMBIS

http://lulu.wikidot.com/the-jewels-of-ooombis

This is a huge five-part romp through human history, from the very birth of human life to the near future, when things look bleak. Historians beware: it is a work of fiction and has a flexible attitude towards your favourite subject!! More details can be found on its dedicated page found by clicking on the above link, or, you lucky people, the one beneath this wonderful message!!!

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There we have it, then: the entire five parts of The Jewels of Ooombis are available via the good offices of Lulu. Check out my special Jewels of Ooombis page just here. I could waffle on forever about the set of stories, but that would only bore those not interested enough to want to know!!

Recently I've entered the wild world of versifying. It's been a foolish thing and I've posted them several a week on the social networking site Myspace, and now they're collected in a nice little volume called Rough Edges Intact, which refers to the fact that I haven't made any effort to rub off the untidy edges, mostly because I wanted them to appear as spontaneous as they did on the Internet.

The thing is, you can get your hands on this by visiting right here.

As I implied above, I do have a page on myspace. Myspace is a thing that I almost understand, but being ancient not very well. If you want to take a peek go here. I am beginning to find my around Myspace and have decided that it's quite a lot of fun, especially when writers from the other side of the world contact you out of the blue. A lady of my aquaintance has recently described my "friends" there as my harem because they're mostly ladies, though not intentionally on my part. Maybe it's my girly side coming out, the need to chatter to others with a girly side. It can't be because I'm charismatic or (heaven forbid me for even suggesting this) handsome. Anyway, feel free to check me out there.

ps ANY COLLECTORS OUT THERE? FEEL THE NEED TO INVEST IN A FIRST EDITION ON THE OFFCHANCE THAT THE OLD FOOL WHO WROTE THE THING EVER BECOMES FAMOUS? IF SO TAKE A PEEK BY CLICKING JUST HERE.