Mark Baker's Blog

2026 has been a strange year so far, and we haven’t even reached the halfway point yet.
Handling the aftermath of a sudden death in January has taken a surprising amount of my time and resulted in several unexpected visits back to the UK. Contacting friends and relatives, organising the funeral, sorting out all the financial information and paperwork that was necessary for the solicitor, emptying the house that I’ve now inherited and readying it to put on the market… it’s taken a lot of time and effort. So far this year, I’ve spent more weeks in England than in the Netherlands. Thankfully, I have a very understanding family, who may not have understood why I felt obliged to take on that responsibility myself, but accepted that I did. Somewhere in the middle of it all, we lost Puk, one of our cats: I’ll miss his daily demands for personal fuss time and love of nose boinks. And all the while I’m also trying to plan a wedding.
Perhaps not surprisingly, with all that going on, I haven’t had the time (nor the focus) for writing over the last few months.

As I’m getting closer to my full first draft of “Ghost Ship”, it seems appropriate to begin posting a few short teaser chapters. While featuring some of the same characters (both living and dead) as “Broken Shards”, and explaining how Hauke came to know them, it introduces many new characters. Perhaps more importantly, it tells how Hauke acquired his houseboat, the “Tijdgeest”, and his introduction to Persephone. Although a prequel, set in the years when Hauke was still a teenager (2013-2021) and before he met Sanne, “Ghost Ship” is darker than “Broken Shards”.

After a couple of months in the doldrums of going round in circles (writer’s block), I’ve finally got back in the creative flow again. It was a horrible situation, because I knew what I needed to write, the bridging passages that create a flow between otherwise disjointed actions or blocks of dialogue, but couldn’t find or express the words. Instead, I was tweaking a word or phrase here and there in ways that added nothing new to the text. I tried to convince myself that I was still being productive, although I knew it was anything but that.

It’s only been a week since I returned from a short visit to the UK when I didn’t do any writing, and with a week’s holiday in Spain at the end of May, I have about a week remaining to complete my first draft of “Ghost Ship” or I’ll miss my current self-imposed deadline. Yes! I know it’s self-imposed, and I still hear Douglas Adams’ famous quote about deadlines – “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” – every time I think about that reaching that finishing line, but I do want to get this book completed so that I can get more work done on the collection of “Wandelaar” short stories that are clamouring in my mind.

For anybody looking forward to reading more about Hauke, the Veil-Walker character introduced in my debut “Wandelaar van de Duisternis” novel “Broken Shards”, here is the prologue for the prequel story “Ghost Ship”.