No news yet on the Lodge at Exeter Castle, which we hoped might be a candidate for the new Syntagma Towers. It’s looking unlikely as I write, for a variety of reasons.

However, since my short, mocking piece on photographs of desks, I’ve been inundated with … pictures of desks.

I’m just going to publish one of them to show you what splendid readers we have here.

This is the “office” — or library — at Humdrumming Mansions, a stately pile in Shakespeare’s Stratford on Avon, occupied by Steve Newman, a Syntagma author of peerless works of literary magnificence, including a novel, The Crime of the Crimea; a fictionalized biography of Ernest Hemingway; and his “blog”, Our Man in Stratford.

Note the volume on Elgar on the table (2007 is Elgar’s 150th anniversary year), and the picture of John Wayne on the wall-to-wall bookcases. A man of many talents clearly.

Apart from being Senior Director and Editor of the Humdrumming Publishing House, Steve is Director and driving force behind the Stratford International Festival of Literature, the first of which is to be held in September this year. The event will feature such mega-luminaries as Colin Wilson and Guy Adams (another Syntagma author), and is being jointly sponsored by Syntagma Media.

What more could you possible desire?

News hot off the presses of three new series starting on Syntagma inventory :

1. If you’re an aficionado of the BBC’s top-notch, mega-hit TV series, Life on Mars, you’ll be interested to know that Syntagma author, Guy Adams wrote the BBC book of the show, and is just beginning on the second volume, which covers the second series.

Read Guy’s story over on The Hack’s Progress.

2. As it’s Edward Elgar’s 150th anniversary in June, Steve Newman is publishing his play : A Summer Garden, over on Classy Classical in eight parts.

Start reading here.

3. The fourth in our Zen Masters series has begun over at Spiritual Nirvana. Catch the biography of Hui Neng, the sixth Chinese Patriarch of Zen, here.

The newest crib on the block for Syntagma Digital is the second of Guy Adams’s three new webtitles : The Dark Room - Literary Worlds of Horror, part of our Allusionz network magazine.

Guy Adams is a full-time professional author and writer, as well as being a partner and senior editor in the British publishing company, Humdrumming.

Horror…for many years a fictional genre that has suffered from a less than sterling reputation.

If ever an argument against over-exposure exists in fiction writing then Horror is the perfect example. For hundreds of years writing about the darker things in life (both real and supernatural) was considered a rich and healthy pastime. Shakespeare was no stranger to the Grand Guignol of storytelling, Dickens was a sap for the ghostly tale…a glance at a school syllabus will see old staples as Stoker and Shelley deemed perfectly valid ‘classics’.

Also watch out for Guy’s The Hack’s Progress, which will be up and scribbling next week.

Read The Dark Room.

If you have ever dreamed of moving to an exotic, sun-kissed location overlooking a sapphire sea, you’ll want to follow the adventures of Guy Adams who did just that. Helpfully he’s now writing about it in Syntagma Digital’s newest webtitle : Where Lizards Play, part of our LifeTimes network magazine.

Guy, his partner Debra, and their two children moved from England to Spain’s Costa Blanca with a view to a view — over the Mediterranean, that is. Now read on …

Guy Adams is a full-time professional author and writer, as well as being a partner and senior editor in a publishing company. His reasons for moving to Spain are quite simple :

Everyone’s doing it you know. We’re all moving out here now. Where once you couldn’t move for thick accented fishermen and ‘Marias’ beating their front step clean with their noble mops, the Costa Blanca is filling with escapees from other walks of life. And why not?

I now live my life with the ocean in front of me and mountains to the rear. I live and work in the shade of mountains…this, for me, cannot be understated as a fine reason to swop England for the Costa Blanca.

Life is an adventure, always, this will be where I share mine.

How could you resist?