A FORDINGBRIDGE writer Mark Everett has penned two new books.

Mr Gitting’s Oil and Short Cures, which are available to buy online through Amazon.

Mark, who has had an interest in writing since he was a child and writes children’s/ teen fiction, said: “The thing I enjoyed most about writing these novels was the chance to just go with them, go with the crazy flow. Set the characters free, see where we’d go together, where we’d end up.

“Truth be told, in the first instance, the stories just write themselves and so they tend to come on thick and fast. Sometimes way faster than I can type, so I take to pen and paper, to begin with, to give my hand half a chance of keeping up with my brain. Once the dust has settled and I’m done holding my breath, I look to see what I’ve got and then get down to the actual work of it - hours and hours of editing, sculpting and molding, cutting and tweaking, hoping that at the end of it there’s something lively and seriously entertaining left. Something really worth sharing.”

Mark says Mr Gitting’s Oil is about a “reclusive, cheapskate”with a serious problem with noise - even the sound of his own voice - but he has a “rabble-rousing nemesis of truly epic proportions” in Bonnie Threetrees, who is the loudest human being in England. But Mr Gitting stumbles across a weapon that might help him.

“So far as inspiration goes, Mr Gitting’s Oil was inspired by something someone said to me in a garden, as the child’s swing moved backward and forwards, making the most awful racket. “Need to get some anti-squeak oil on that!” she said - and I promptly left the house and, over the next few weeks, turned out 50,000 words about a character and a product that came to me the instant that phrase hit my brain,” explains Mark.

Short Cures is the first in a series of at least three novels that follows a teenage hero Ruthie Short, who has been transformed by her dad’s scientific efforts to help her, through the hours of a succession of very odd weekends. She is in a race against time to get back to her father’s laboratory before it’s too late.

Mark said the second instalment, Short Cures 2, is due to be released in the spring, adding: “After this will follow a brand new book, a story of a very different kind, a departure from the light-hearted and quirky, something a little darker called Wolf’s Apprentice and on it’s way to my editor very soon.”