Day off from the day job yesterday, and for a change took my laptop with me on our tour around town to the Museum, Angie’s Pilates class and the best coffee shop in town. Putting the earbuds in and playing some of my favourite tunes meant I could pound the keypad to my hearts content undisturbed, managing to almost crack the 2000 word mark in the latest Cerberus story “A falling of Angels”.

The current storyline has my mind reading hero hunting down a child molester in the middle of a massive refugee camp on the site of Bristols old Avonmouth docks. He is also looking for a lead to a cold blooded murder and the source of a menace which could bring mayhem to the streets. It’s coming along nicely.

One of the themes I constantly find myself returning to within the Cerberus series is exploring the nature of human consciousness, and putting forward the postulation that our minds have a Quantum level effect upon our surroundings. Not physically, but at the level of phantasms, shadows on the background of space / time. Back in 1972 there was an early TV play written by Nigel Neale called ‘The Stone tape‘ which was generated on the premise of strong emotional events imprinting themselves upon physical objects, like stone. My take on the theme is this; in the process of existence we imprint our minds / memories / desires upon the very fabric of the universe, which is where my notion of the supernatural comes from. Strong baseline emotional events, fear, love etc leave the longest lasting impressions, like the victims of nuclear explosions leaving shadows on walls and ground. Even certain strong personality types leave a mark. Some are merely images, others like GIFs, some like computer games. All depend upon how driven the individual was who left the marks.

Is this concept true or false? Some say that because stories of the psychic world are purely subjective, the answer has to be a firm and unequivocal no. For myself I have no idea, but that doesn’t stop me exploring the concepts and mud wrestling with them. If nothing else it’s provided me with much good material.