This is possibly the worst idea I've ever had in the whole of my life...

I am trying over the next few weeks to put together a new book. For various complex, ambitious, and downright daft reasons I am going to try to finish it completely by the end of November. The book, The Resurrection Bureau, is not actually a children's book - but not for the usual reasons, but just because there are no children in it. It is about...
Well, always better to show than tell, I always say.
From next Monday I will start publishing weekly sections of The Resurrection Bureau online. As with any book you start it with no clear certainty that you are actually going to be able to finish it, but, what the hell - it'll be fun to find out if I can actually do it, won't it?
So, be here Monday August 30 for part one of The Resurrection Bureau - and keep your fingers crossed that there'll be more than 5 pages a week!
To whet your appetite, here's a bit of a taster...

The Resurrection Bureau

1.

It was, give or take a decade or so, the early fourteenth century.
Mr Craft strongly suspected it was the year 1313, but he didn't like to mention this to Mr Grace. Mr Grace had become deeply superstitious, and not for the first time. There had been that awful business in the sixth century. One moment they had been on the verge of Saxon enlightenment, the next moment it had been all horsehead demons, cynocephali, magic swords and water witches. It had all been very embarrassing. And all because Mr Grace had refused to cross running water. Dreadful.
It was an inevitable part of the Mission that sometimes they saw patterns in the fabric of things - it didn't actually mean these things were true. Though, of course, they inevitably were true.
The problem was that Mr Grace and Mr Craft were entirely dependent upon one another, and the Mission could not be fulfilled if either one of them failed to pull their weight. Mr Grace was currently pulling Mr Craft's weight as he sat in a cart. For obviously reasons they did not have a horse, but Mr Grace was easily as strong as one of those animals.
Mr Grace was almost seven feet tall and broad enough to just fit between the cart's forks. Mr Craft was small, little more than five feet tall, but he had deceptively long legs that were folded under him now in the rank straw. They looked as different as it was possible for two men to look, even down to the colour of their skin, but they shared the same piercing blue eyes. Mr Craft took them from Mr Grace now, pushed them into his nicotine brown eye sockets, and looked out across the drab landscape.
Bleak hills sat beneath an iron-grey sky as rain fell indefectibly. Half way up the valley a stuttering light showed.
'Straight on, Mr Grace.'

To be continued...