For two whole years now I’ve been working on a new project dubbed Westcrest. Due to the many nefarious distractions of “real life”, my reputation as a world-class procrastinator, and no small measure of pure, unadulterated terror, my vision of Westcrest has been repeatedly delayed.

All of that changed today when I launched the official Westcrest website, resplendent in all its blue and gold glory.

Of course, none of this helps to explain what Westcrest actually is, so let me have a go at that.

Over the years I have accumulated a lot of writing that has never seen the light of day. In a way, Westcrest was a way for me to start collecting together many of these odds and ends and combine them into one cohesive whole. The aim of this is to create some sort of solid framework in which most of my fiction can be based—to create not only characters or stories, but an interconnected world.

Literally, Westcrest is a work of serial fiction about a group of extraordinary characters who live on an invisible island in the middle of a lake. But to me, it’s about so much more than that. As mentioned at the beginning of this update, I have spent the past two years fleshing out the Westcrest mythology and building up a backlog of content.

What I hope this means is that, as time progresses, what begins as a simple serial will develop into something more. But without readers, Westcrest is as pointless as a plaque on the moon.

So even if it seems like something you wouldn’t normally be interested in, I encourage everyone to visit the Westcrest website and read the pilot episode, “Something Unexpected”, ahead of the regular installments which will begin next Thursday.

I aim to keep each episode less than 1,000 words, meaning that they shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to read and downloadable PDFs are also available. The series draws on a variety of genres and incorporates my love of everything from mythology and world history to soap operas and science fiction.

There’s also the Annabel Warrant Files, the first in a connected series of short stories that detail the adventures of a girl detective named Annabel Warrant as she attempts to solve the mystery of Westcrest, armed with only a curious disposition and… well something else I can’t talk about yet.

So please, if you have a spare minute or two, check out Westcrest. Feel free to comment and participate and please pass on the link to anyone else you think might enjoy it.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. You can expect more “insane” updates to resume in the coming days.

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