As I was walking to St Ives, I met a writer with seven lines...

A writer can never hide from what he or she is. So I suppose it was, with surprising monotony, that my week long break away from the laptop would inevitably see me clawing my way back to it, figuratively.

We’ve just been away to St Ives, a lovely coastal town that has banished all memories of Newquay, which (being frank here) isn’t the most picturesque place in Cornwall, (but hey, it has the best waves). St Ives, on the other hand, is – and without meeting any men with seven wives – an idyllic coastal town that under deep blue skies could be almost Mediterranean. I don’t often fall in love with places when I visit for less than a couple of days, especially if that visit coincides with a wretched foot-off-the-gas-peddle-cold (which only seems to strike once you wind down physically and mentally), but this little place stole my heart, hook, line and sinker…

The condition of this short-break was that no writing would be undertaken during the holiday, and certainly no book promoting. Having become a little weary of walking into bookshops to make small-talk to the owner in the attempt he or she would stock my book (I’ve been doing it over the last 8 months, so it was refreshing to simply go into a bookshop to look for books, and not my book) I managed to fulfil the latter part of the condition with no problems.

The former part proved a little harder to do.

In my defence, it was St Ives that was at fault. I was quite happy to sit back on a beach, to finish reading Jonathan Drapes’ Never Admit to Beige, and China Mieville’s Looking For Jake. But best laid plans and all that… well I ended up ducking into the local post office to buy a notepad and several ball-point pens.
You see, after a day or so of roaming St Ives’ compact, cobbled and white-washed streets, garnished with hanging baskets of vivid flowers and occasionally peopled by lost-looking tourists - stories began forming in my imagination. By the second day, one story in particular just would not budge from the ol’ brain, and I began to write it down in the glorious sunshine that has been quite remiss this summer.

It became a story known simply as “The St Ives Project” A story that will hopefully do to the Cornish fishing industry what Jaws did for beach-holidays. Yep, I’m looking at a real horror novel here, a little pulpy, but with some genuine (I hope) “fucking-hell” moments.
Like the coming Isles of Sheffield book, “The St Ives Project” will be a slim novel – a snip at around 300 pages – but for the next couple of years I’m looking at smaller projects until I embark on The Fortress of Black Glass, and the “St Ives Project” fits the bill.

And Mrs Curran has definitely been sold on the project too, especially with the prospect of a whole month in St Ives in September ’08 while I write it all down.

So I had a break… a slim one. But I’m just a writer who loves writing, and as my wife Sarah pointed out “it doesn’t matter where we visit, you always come up with a story based on it. You just can’t switch off from being a writer, can you?”

Like a sensible husband, I didn’t argue.
And like an amazing wife, who knows you better than you do, I realised she was dead right…