Some of you will remember the story, set out in Shadow Dancing, about how, a few days after I bought this house, a near death British Blue, (or she might be a Chartreuse, identical except for a slight difference in eye colour) came staggering down the mountain, as thin as a rake and obviously dying of starvation, having eked out her fragile existence by catching the occasional mouse and finding a little rainwater to  drink.

I doubt that she weighed more than three kilos, so I fed her and gave her clean water to drink, and I think that she decided to adopt me as her human slave.

I bought her an automatic cat food dispenser and a water tower, and she recovered remarkably quickly, and filled out until she now weighs something over ten kilos, around twenty three pounds, because these are big cats.  Most adult cats top out at around five or six kilos.

I don't think you can talk about "love" between such different creatures as felines and humans, but there is certainly a degree of affection.  She is never hungry or thirsty, because of her automatic systems, but frequently leaps silently up on me and tucks herself into my armpit.  If this happens while I am still in bed with my eyes closed, I can tell you that the impact of twenty three pounds of solid bone and muscle on your chest is extremely significant.

She is extraordinarily silent, never making a sound, except that once she is settled into my armpit she purrs, extremely quietly, a sort of deep subterranean rumbling, so quiet that you have to crane your head  to hear it.  She still has the killer instinct which  helped her to survive on the mountain, so I often find a small and very dead offering outside the back door. Never hungry, she just kills them, as if to prove that she can.

My neighbours in the next house down the hill have twenty or so scrawny ill fed cats, and whenever I have mentioned  the possibility of neutering at least the tomcats, he has refused to even consider it.  'It would fly in the face of nature ' he said. 

She is enormously powerful (for a cat), and I once saw her dealing with one of the scrawny toms from next door, who had decided to try his luck with Glamourpuss.  She turned, as quick as a flash, and gave him what in boxing terms would be called a right hook, which sent him skittering across the path for at least a couple of metres, possibly seven feet or more.  We never saw him again, that's for sure, and Glamourpuss looked up at her human slave as if to say "I taught him a lesson, didn't I? "

She may of course have her own cat name.  She certainly doesn't answer to any name I give her, just treats our house as her home.  She  has not only superb night vision, seeing in the dark as well as we can see by day, but she has phenomenal hearing.  We live set back from quite a busy road, and she ignores most cars passing by completely. However she can identify my little russian helper's   car when she is al least a kilometre away, and turns her head to follow her through the gate, up our drive and into the parking space.  At first Glamourpuss was quite hostile, glaring with her huge golden eyes as if to say "I am the female in this house.  What are you doing here?"  But now they are getting used to each other.  The only thing she cannot bear is the sound of the vacuum cleaner, which sends her rushing to a quieter place."

So there we are.  Living alone with only Glamourpuss and my superb MacBook Pro for company is not ideal, but we have to learn to adapt, don't we?  Right, back to book 3, Shadows, Lynx and Shires, because as the say in all the books "It won't write itself".

John Walker.

So you wake up, your mind filled with ideas, if you are lucky, or empty of any thought but breakfast.  Overall is the brooding presence of the computer on my desktop, and so eventually you sigh and go and sit down in front of the amazing Apple computer.  Even the cheerful Apple "bong" does not lift your mood very much.  However as soon as you look at last night's work - 9 o'clock - was this an early night? - your last night's characters seem to come alive.  One speaks and another character responds, and away you go.  This is a sort of magic as if the pesky characters have been waiting all night to carry the story on.  it is as if they had been thinking about the story while the computer was switched off.  

So, what has been going on apart from writing?  We have looked as a new version of the Shadow Dancing cover.  Here is a picture of it, and also of the original cover.  We would very much like your opinion as to which you would prefer.

Book 2, provisionally entitled "Shadows and Lilies", is waiting anxiously in the wings for me to give my editor, Frankie Sutton, the go-ahead.  

I am, at the moment, very much enjoying the writing of Book 3 which is provisionally titled "Shadows, Lynxes and Shires".  It carries the Charles and Amanda story forward and brings in and elucidates the other characters, and while it is no more than 60% complete at the moment, when it is published we hope you will enjoy it as much as the other two books.