Saturday 1st June saw me travelling up to Brixton for the launch of
Writing our Legacy’s Hidden Sussex anthology at the Brixton Ritzy Cinema and cafe.

It was great to see the launch attended by so many people, and to have been able to listen to a number of the writers read extracts from their work. Something that made the whole experience very personal. With the readings over, people had the chance to buy copies of the anthology and get them signed by those authors present.

It has to be remembered that projects and events like this don’t just happen on their own. Behind the anthology a dedicated team led by the amazing Amy Zamarripa Solis from This Too Is Real have spent many, many hours toiling away to make it a success.

Click on the book cover below to go to Writing our Legacy’s website

The anthology aims to debunk outdated but still current stereotypes of Black people through a reimagining of the Sussex landscape from the Black, Asian and minority ethnic perspective.

Twenty-three contributors from across East Sussex, West Sussex and Brighton tell their own very personal stories and narratives.

The anthology tells stories of many firsts –
First trip to Afro-Caribbean hairdressers, first sexual awakenings, first visit to the Chattri War Memorial to fallen Indian soldiers in Brighton.
The writing also deals with middles and ends –
Such as raising children, solitary pursuits, and the deaths of friends and family.

The book transports the reader not just to local places of interest such as Cuckmere Haven and Brighton Pavilion, but also farther afield. To Pakistan, India and Iran. Some of the authors deal with pressing issues of contemporary Britain, including Brexit and the Windrush scandal, while others cast their eye over history and the natural environment.

Contributors are: Georgina Aboud, Jenny Arach, Sheila Auguste, Alinah Azadeh, Priti Barua, Bebb Burchell, Josef Cabey, Suchi Chatterjee, Lisa Climie, Joyoti Grech Cato, Sally-Claire Fadelle, Josephine Hall, Jasmine Harris, Maggie Harris, L Oluwafemi Hughes Jonas, Farah Edwards Khan, Dulani Kulasinghe, Georgina Parke, Annie Richardson, Zaid S Sethi, Hayat Nezameddin Shehab, Sonny Singh and Nina Thaddeus.

Hidden Sussex is available in ebook from Amazon
and in paperback for £10 plus postage & handling from This too is Real

Event photos courtesy of Bip Mistry

Nearly there!

Just a quick update on the progress to date of my first full-length anthropomorphic novel New Shores.

Currently editing away and now into the last quarter of the book.

Word count is 58k and expected to go up by 2-3k (lol more like 5k!) 🙂

Once finished, it’s off to the beta-readers, quick re-edit to correct anything they pick up, then off to be formatted.

At the moment it is only planned to release the book as an e-book. However, if enough people want a print version to make it cost effective, I’ll release a paperback version.

Estimated release date is still summer 2019.
So keep an eye on developments here, Twitter, Instagram, or on Furry Network

Rough Image Publishing and author Sean Catt
are pleased to announce the official launch of


Between States 2 (Into a Darker Place)


The long awaited sequel to Between States
the first part of the shapeshifter series of stories featuring cougar shapeshifter Jake Palmer and wolf shapeshifter Billy Thompson.

THEY SAY CATS HAVE NINE LIVES

However, cougar shapeshifter Jake Palmer has just the one, and he doesn’t intend to go down without a fight. Picking up from where the first book in the Between States shapeshifter series left off, author Sean Catt once again hauls us out of our cosy, familiar world, and pulls us down into the dark, shadowy world inhabited by shapeshifters.

Convinced the dangers they faced during their trip from Utah to California are all behind them, Jake and Billy embark on a ‘get away from it all’ road trip up to San Francisco. However, their world is about to be turned upside down once again.
In a hail of deadly gunfire, Jake is snatched by a crooked bio-tech company willing to go to any lengths to create hybrid human soldiers using shapeshifter DNA.
Held captive in an underground research facility in New Mexico with violent human test subjects who know only how to kill, and keep killing, Jake realizes he has to break out, and soon, as it becomes clear to him his life expectancy is limited.
However, things are just about to get even worse for the unsuspecting shapeshifter, as a CIA assassin is heading his way. Sent by the head of  the covert CIA black ops unit Jake works for, the asset has orders to kill Jake to prevent him disclosing the unit’s existence.

Jake has one more problem …

Can he stay alive long enough to find a way out?

And so, here is the finished book

Available from all good book sellers or go to my books page and click on your chosen retailer’s name to be taken to their site.
Clicking on the Amazon button will take you to the correct site for your country

Two of the words (verbs in this case) that most often confuse writers, and I include myself here, are ‘LAY’ and ‘LIE’. After much trawling through the interwebs and reading many articles on LAY versus LIE I discovered some to be helpful, and some just downright confusing. So I decided to put this article together in the hope it helps other writers.

So let’s start with the present tense:

All you need to remember here is that ‘LAY’ means to put down. You would lay a book on the table, just as a bricklayer would lay bricks.

‘LIE’ on the other hand, means to recline. You would lie on the bed, or your cat would lie in the sun all day if it could.

Now, a number of the articles I came across stated that ‘LAY’ must refer to an object, while ‘LIE’ cannot refer to an object.
But surely a cat is an object and he would lie not lay—hmmm.

So how about we say LAY refers to the action of putting something down, books on the table, rugs on the floor, while LIE refers to the act of reclining to have a sleep, or a nap.

EASY EH?

Well, unfortunately, no…  The reason for this is because everything goes all kinds of cranky when we use the past tense or past participle.
Why?
Because ‘LAY’ is the past tense of ‘LIE’, it is not ‘LIED’. ‘LIED’ is used solely for the past-tense of ‘LIE’ as in telling porkie pies, untruths, fibs, etc.
And to make matters worse, the past participle of ‘LIE’ sounds more like it should correspond to ‘LAY’.

Told you it was crazy…
I looked long and hard at LAY and LIE and racked my brains to see if I could come up with some sort of mnemonic. The only things I could think of was pLAYce, and that chickens LAY eggs. Lame eh? Maybe you can find something better or come up with your own mnemonic.
Now let’s look at the tricky bit, how to conjugate these two verbs:

The past tense of ‘lie’ is ‘lay’

Example:
Paul lay down on the floor for an hour as his back hurt from doing too much in the gym.
The dog lay down in front of the fire all evening.

The past tense of ‘lay’ is ‘laid’.

Example:
The contractor laid the new carpet (object) in the lounge this morning.
Alex laid the plates (object) on the table.

The past participle of ‘lie’ is ‘lain’.

Example:
Paul has lain on the floor for an hour.
The dog has lain in front of the fire all evening.

The past participle of ‘lay’ is ‘laid’.

Example:
The contractor has laid the new carpet (object) in the lounge.
Alex has laid the plates (object) on the table.
The present participle of ‘lay’ is ‘laying’.

Example:
The contractor is laying the new carpet (object) in the lounge.
Alex is laying the plates (object) on the table.
The present participle of ‘lie’ is ‘lying’.

Example:
Paul is lying on the floor.
The dog is lying in front of the fire.

If it’s of any help, here’s a table to print out and put somewhere handy.

Click to download