What's it about

This blog exists to promote the writing of David Payne, an enthusiatic but as yet unrecognised writer who has traded crunching computer code in the early hours of each day , for the incredible pleasure of writing stories. He is not planning to give up his day job as a Compliance Consultant in the UK Financial Services industry but rather sees the two things as broadly similar. Both exist to satisfy certain human needs and both seem to involve a certain level of imagination, if not fantasy. In this blog you will find samples of different writing projects that are being worked on or are already complete. Some are available to purchase in the Amazon Kindle store and all support is welcome! Others writings are included for interest and hopefully a modicum of entertainment. All feedback and comments are welcome.

If you are looking for David's Compliance Blog instead, please head off here...


The Collector of Tales Trilogy

This is a tale of everyday life in an ordinary but slightly different world that could be one variation of our future. I don't want to use words like 'post-apocalyptic' to describe it but it is a couple of centuries into the future and after a series of events that have led to a break-up of the madness that we live in today and refer to as the modern world. The population of the planet has been drastically reduced as a result of some global virus pandemic and various other undescribed events have led to an absence of many technologies that we take for granted today. The result is a kind of medieval world in parts of the planet and a type of classical civilisation in other parts. Against this our story opens.

Two men meet in a chance encounter on the road. They share a meal and the younger tells the older man a story about a colourful group of people (The Fire Dancers) who live in the northern lands that he has just travelled from. The older man is the main character and the Collector of Tales of the title and he is prompted by this tale to head north when the next occasion arises to seek out the story and the people.

Thus The Collector finds himself at a bifurcation in the road in the cold and the snow early one evening where he has a choice to make. Either he can camp rough and risk bandits, bears and wolves or he can make for the nearest settlement a few miles further on. Despite the possibility that this village could in all possibility be a nest of bandits, murderers and rapists he chooses the company of his fellow creatures. In doing so, although he doesn't realise it, he hands over responsibility for everything that subsequently befalls him in the tale to randomness and chance.


It is unfortunate that the almost medieval village and the inn (Champneys) where he stays are inhabited by an uncouth people whose language is as harsh and barbaric as they. Their cow-like brown eyes look out on a world through pupils too large to be accounted for merely by the effects of the light. Yet he has the good luck to meet a merchant who happens to be related to the village story-teller and through him comes to hear his first rendition of the Fire Dancers Tale. He then continues on to the northern town called Trellsheim where he expects to acquire the tale in full. He is mistaken, for fate would have it that the library that he seeks burned down some months ago.

This is a pre-industrial world and so travel is by foot, beast or wagon and The Collector is has the good fortune to meet an itinerant spice merchant who is also heading for the town. He is offered a lift and joins the man and his pet bear in the bitter cold of the wagon as it makes its slow way northwards in the snow and ice behind the oxen that are pulling it.

The spice merchant, known as Welcome, seems to be more than meets the eye but in a twist of fate, he appears to be murdered soon after they reach the town. This leaves The Collector even more at the whim of chance encounter. He stumbles upon a new place to stay, run by a couple of men (The Bos'un and Jimas) whose gay boutique-style of accommodation provides a stark contrast to the bed-sharing lack of hygiene at Champneys despite the fact that they share the same brutish language.

Randomness and chance step up a pace in Trellsheim and the Collector is exposed to a series of meetings, events and encounters as he travels around the town in search of the Library and more information about the Fire Dancers tale. As events unfold, the Collector believes that he starts to see pattern and association where in fact there is none. This leads him into a form of paranoia as he spots footprints in virgin snow, sees caped and hooded characters apparently following and gathering near him and eventually finds a young red-haired woman in his bath in his lodgings.

She is naked, there's a fire and they have wine.The next morning he wakes up alone and with no real recollection of what has actually happened and which bit was dreamed. He also finds that he cannot move his limbs and he drifts in and out of consciousness as he vaguely hears the voices of the Bos'un and Jimas discussing what to do with him. He has contracted an illness that the hoteliers see as business threatening and they soon dump him outside the town in the cold and the snow, presumably to die. Here in one of the few acts of random kindness in the book, he is rescued by some travellers, Jeff and Judith, who are on their way to a winter festival.

They turn out to be the real thing: the true Fire Dancers and not the absurd legend or myth that was told to The Collector back in Champneys. Judith, with her own brand of earthiness, nurses the Collector back to health somehow in the back of the wagon that they are travelling in. By the time that he is more or less recovered, they have arrived at the festival. Here, he participates in part and witnesses the fire dance in real life.

The novel ends abruptly soon after the fire dance with the Collector heading back to the wagon to sleep. As he covers himself with a net to keep off bugs, thoughts of the earlier and now clearly inaccurate myth of the fire dancers are in his mind. As he falls asleep he is bothered by a phrase from the earlier telling of the tale: a phrase that he knows is important but that he may not actually have grasped.

The novel is a tale about a journey and about the interplay of random events that appear to coalesce into some almost meaningful form. Although he is looking for the one tale, the Fire Dancers' Tale, in truth he is collecting the stories of all those people that he meets and interacts with. He is a collector of tales just like each and every one of us. The book in an allegory of our own lives as we rush forward to achieve goals, ends and rewards. In the event we overlook the pleasure of the journey itself: so busy are we looking forward that we forget to look around.