Book blurb for End of the Road (first draft)

Ruing the day he joined the British Army, bored soldier Corporal Dave Burden has just twelve short months left in the army in which to find a new civilian job. The clock is ticking away, and with the added burden of responsibility in the form of a new wife with a child on the way, he has absolutely no idea what he is going to tell his boss at the dreaded pre-release interview next week.

Fortunately for him, an idyllic outing quickly spirals into a day of tragedy. It was a day in his life he’d rather forget, a day full of horror and grief. On that fateful day a seed was planted, a seed which should never have seen the light of day. That seed only needed a slight amount of nurturing to begin its life, and that nurturing came from the most unexpected of places, as indeed did the damned seed...

Based on true events, END OF THE ROAD is the first part of THE ROZZERS series, a collection of five contiguous short stories by new British author DIEM BURDEN.

Look out for COPS DON’T RUN, part two of THE ROZZERS series, out soon...

(just for Chris @celwelsh !!)

I'm OK, I'm still undead (sorry!)

I'm not dead, I'm not on holiday, I haven't had a nervous breakdown and I haven't been arrested. Truth is, I'm fed up with making excuses for not having a single book from my l-o-n-g list of 12 books published yet!

Knock before entering...

Ergo, I am hiding in my writer's cave.

I don't wanna be one of those writers who does more talking than writing, who does more networking than publishing. They aren't really writers, they are either people who talk about things they should be doing but can't be bothered, or social intercourse addicts who do a bit of writing when there's nobody on line...

Not me. I'm a writer. I know how many words I have written these last eight years. How many? Ooh, about a quarter of a million creative words, maybe more. But the only person to have read them is me! So it is a little absurd to be calling myself a writer or an author at this point, right?

Well, that's why I'm not here. Or on Twitter. OK, I have been boosting my Facebook page 'likes' when I can (and that's a story worth talking about later) but in truth, I have completely vanished from cyberspace! There is NO internet in my cave!

Because, to continue to call myself a writer, I must be able to do more than talk about it, I must be able to do more than Tweet about it, I must have a published book to offer you.

So that's what I have been doing, selfishly. I set myself a deadline of May 1 to get my first offering out there, and I need to cut myself off and get on with the craft of not just writing, but publishing my first book.

Life can't be ignored, the internet can - it's just a matter of will power (or a deep enough cave).

(The reason I am contradicting myself here and blogging tonight is that I have just finished the final edit of my first book, End of the Road, part one of The Rozzers series. My critique partners have been tapping their feet, believing I was just a talker-writer. I'm not. I am a writer!)