I have a new story out!

Last week saw the latest anthology release in the excellent 50-years-after-the-fall series, The Last Brigade.

I wrote a novelette called The Sussex Job in an earlier anthology, in which there’s a prison break from Colchester Castle. In my latest novelette, we go back in time, closer to the Collapse. Here I tell the tale of how Colchester got to be in such a ruinous state in The Sussex Job.

The title of the new story says it all, really. It’s called The Siege of Colchester.

History buffs will note that there was an earlier siege of Colchester in 1648. In fact, my dad had a weekend as a metal detectorist and was excited to dig up a cannonball from the siege in a field near our house. He was deflated when he donated it to Colchester Museum to learn that they have a room full of the things.

And there was another, brief, siege in AD 60, from which Colchester received what archeologists call the Boudican Destruction Horizon.

Both are subtly referenced, but the action here is all set in 2051.

It’s a fun adventure I wrote a couple of years ago, and it’s been a pleasure to reacquaint myself with my own story (always a relief when you feel that) and to enjoy the stories from my co-authors. They really are a talented bunch, and Bill Webb has a quality core series that he has successfully expanded with both the anthologies and side-series.

Enjoy.

Next time, I’m going to go into some of the background of the Siege of Colchester. Along the way, I expect we’ll cover my parent’s wedding, an American 19th century circus elephant, one of the most famous fictional battles in literature – the Battle of Dorking — and we’ll shed some new light on another kind of battle altogether: the fight to claim the origin myth of Humpty Dumpty!