My current projects

Now that the 'last Escape' has been released I can focus more on other projects. I have nearly finished a first draft of a follow-up book. This manuscript, which I've been calling 'After the Temple', continues the story of what happened following Wat Thamkrabok. It covers my first year and a bit sober. There is still so much work to do on this manuscript that I fear that it will never be complete.

If I do ever manage to finish 'After the Temple' then the next decision will be what to do with it. I suppose this decision will depend a lot on how the finished manuscript turns out and if 'Last Escape' is well received. I expect to have it finished by the end of 2008.

The reason for writing a follow-up manuscript is that there are many books which describe people giving up alcohol/drugs but there doesn't seem to be many which deal with staying sober after this. Life improves completely when the addiction is put aside but problems still arise and some of these seem common to all newly sober people. It is my hope that maybe this next book can offer encouragement for those trying to stay sober.

Another reason for this book is that following the completion of my blog, which covered the same time period as the book, there were readers with questions. They were interested in what happened to the others after the temple and they were even interested in what happened to me. I dealt with some of these issues briefly in the the postscript to 'Last Escape' but not in any real detail. In the postscript I was trying to condense almost eighteen months of an exciting period of my life into a couple of pages.

As well as 'After the Temple', I am also working on a fiction manuscript. This book is still in the very early stages. Writing about myself all the time so directly can feel a bit draining and self-indulgent and so this is a break from that. I know that some people argue that even fiction is auto-biographical, in that everything we write contains a bit of us, but I want to try my hand at this genre. I am still new to writing and eager to improve my skills.