There it was…
CLAUD, early twenties, wearing sunglasses, has two black duffel bags at his feet.
There are a dozen or more people on the boat. Claud is watching three of them.
The first, a slender-bodied girl wearing a T-shirt and bikini bottoms, is talking to an older man. A guy of about her own age seems irritated by the attention she is giving the other man.
The girl catches Claud looking at her and shimmies her hip provocatively. He immediately looks away.
The boat turns into a headwind. Claud snatches off his sunglasses and bends down to put them safely away into one of the duffel bags.
He straightens up and catches the girl in T-shirt and bikini still looking at him. She holds his stare momentarily before turning back to her companions.
The island comes into view and the boat approaches the jetty. The travellers gather their things and queue at the side. Claud waits at the back and is last off the boat.
This image haunted me. I became obsessed with those four people. The young guy and the three people he was watching. The two bags. His sunglasses. The ferry boat and its passengers would not leave me alone, especially when I was meant to be copyediting.
It had been a while since I’d written creatively, but I soon realised the only way to shift the scene that kept floating into my brain was to try and move it on. To see what would happen next. I had absolutely no idea. Yet bit by bit things happened. I got a name. Claud. Without an e. I got a feel for the island. Soon new characters became involved. And pretty quickly I had quite a large cast, each of whom fascinated me enormously.
I began to write in a way I had never written before. In short scenes that shifted focus from character to character. Early drafts were written in the past tense. As soon as I changed to present tense it became clear to me that I wasn’t really writing a novel at all. I was writing a dialogue-driven screenplay.
I had too much story and too big a cast for this to become a feature film. No, it had to be a series. And one that could run and run.
While I am busy writing the next book, this site will be the public record of my attempts to get the first series in front of people who can help make it happen.
This site went live on 1 September 2026, with the storyline of ARIGNI 1 complete and screenplays for a first series ready to be shared.