In North London, 2017
I'm a writer of fiction, mainly, and have published short stories, many of them finding a home in Ambit magazine. I also write novels and novellas, and my latest one is called A Blue Coast Mystery, Almost Solved. It came out in October 2020 with Addison and Highsmith, an imprint of Histria Books. It's set in London in the 1970s and on the French Riviera in the 1960s, among an expatriate community that often remains unseen, and is partly a story about people from places that no longer exist. You can see more about it here. It is available now from Amazon, using this link. You can also get it directly from Histria Books at this link.
In the summer of 2018, I had my second-longest piece of work, The Exploding Elephant, published by Bards and Sages under its Society of Misfits outlet. Like much of my work, it is set in Poland, in this case in Gliwice, the town where I lived in 1993. It's a piece of speculative fiction centring on a young opportunist whose bad choices are gradually coming home to him. At around 20000 words, it's a 'novelette' - a bit shorter than a novella. It has been published online and in the Society of Misfits Anthology, but I'm currently looking into getting it republished in some other way.
My first novel was published in April 2011 by Unthank Books. It's called Laikonik Express, and follows two American slackers on a haunted jaunt around Poland in search of a woman one of them has met. The Laikonik Express is the name of the train taking them on their way, which runs from Krakow in the south, to Gdynia in the north, on the Baltic Sea. There are a few pages on this site devoted to various aspects of it.
I post links to my published short stories here too, sometimes, or sometimes the stories themselves. I'll also post some of my unpublished writing here, some of it unpublishable, maybe, and some of it just works-in-progress, or stasis, and will welcome comments, criticism, creative derision and crisps.
Be in touch - it's good to talk, apparently. Find me on Facebook, which is a either a complete waste of time or just a partial one. I can also be tweeted @nikone3na though I've not been partaking in Twitter very much recently. That's the same as my often neglected Instagram handle.
When I nearly became one side of a Bacon sandwich: from my friend and mentor Geoff Nicholson's (2016) The London Complaint
