With my second novel Death Watch out, how can I stop my brother-in-law from reading it and deciding that anyone who can imagine all this is not a danger to the community?

This is a extract from the second Nova Winterborne novel by Jim Clarken. 

Nova may regard recent experiences as a karmic blip. But Karma has not finished with her yet. Soon, Nova’s new life is shaken to its foundations. She discovers cameras hidden throughout her apartment. Her private life has been streamed onto a voyeur website. Worse yet, she has caught the attention of a serial killer.

Nobody, who doesn't want to learn, has ever learned anything in a classroom. To ask a non-reader to read and digest a two hundred year old novel is like force feeding a vegan bun burgers by the ton; it is both loud and painful for all involved. Being a reader, in a class of non-readers, is to write off hours of your life, time you never get back, time that in measured, not in minutes, but in the emotionally charged microseconds.     

When my mother went in for a week’s respite care, I stumbled around, figuring out the rules of this alien world.

At my age, Death takes a keener interest in me than when I was a mere twenty-years-old; how much more interested must He take in my mother. 

What happens when you get dragged into your mother's political campaign against a future president of the united states? If you are unlucky, you might wind up writing limericks.

Covid is no longer novel, but it is still here. Of course, you have to test before you can prove this fact. Jim Clarken’s mother is not a fan of being tested.

My mother has spent a lifetime being discreet, but lately she has changed and predicting her next public utterance has become impossible. And all the more worrying for that.    

Prompted by a telephone call on the landline recently, my mind took off down a rabbit hole, me racing after in in the hope of catching it quickly and getting back to more mundane musings.

You can read this and other blogs on www.jimclarken.ie 

Instead of reading my blog as I usually would, I am reading the first chapter of my novel Toxic Love which has just been published on Amazon as a paperback and on Kindle.