Dickimaw Books Blog 
The Private Enemy Third Edition 🔗
If you haven’t yet come across The Private Enemy, it’s a crime/speculative fiction novel set in a technologically regressed future where the Anti-Technology League collide with demands to restore former levels of technology, rival gangsters battle for dominance, and government agencies are determined to reinforce their message that the world is united in peace and prosperity — by any means necessary. Into this mix comes the last of the Coulgranes of Wynherne, hell-bent on revenge.
If the print price is still to high for you, the ebook version is considerably cheaper and is available from a number of ebook outlets, such as SmashWords, Kobo, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and Overdrive.
Now that I’ve finished sorting out the third edition of The Private Enemy, I can get back to The Fourth Protectorate.
Previous Post
Within FlowframTk, it’s possible to assign descriptions and tags to objects to make them easier to select and find in a complicated image. This post provides an example.Recent Posts
The third edition of The Private Enemy will be available as from 31st August 2026. A crime/speculative fiction novel set in a technologically regressed future where the Anti-Technology League collide with demands to restore former levels of technology, rival gangsters battle for dominance, and government agencies are determined to reinforce their message that the world is united in peace and prosperity — by any means necessary. Into this mix comes the last of the Coulgranes of Wynherne, hell-bent on revenge.Within FlowframTk, it’s possible to assign descriptions and tags to objects to make them easier to select and find in a complicated image. This post provides an example.
The evolution of a vector graphics application inspired by Acorn's !Draw application designed for integration with LaTeX documents, either exporting images as pgf code or exporting document classes or packages that use the flowfram package. The application was originally named JpgfDraw but was then renamed FlowframTk.
There are a growing number of digital historians who are interested in documenting old computing systems from the twentieth century, but much of the information has been lost and coincident names can make it hard to search. This article is about the RISC OS ARMTeX distribution, which provided TeX and LaTeX for the ARM-powered Acorn computers in the 1990s.
The DRM-free ebook retailer SmashWords has its annual Summer/Winter sale from 1st – 31st July 2025. My crime novel “The Private Enemy” and children’s illustrated story “The Foolish Hedgehog” both have a 50% discount, and my crime fiction short stories “I’ve Heard the Mermaid Sing”, “Unsocial Media”, “Smile for the Camera”, and “The Briefcase” have a 100% discount (i.e. free!) for the duration of the sale. Did you know that you can gift ebooks on SmashWords?Search Blog
📂 Categories
- Autism
- Books
- Children’s Illustrated Fiction
- Illustrated fiction for young children: The Foolish Hedgehog and Quack, Quack, Quack. Give My Hat Back!
- Creative Writing
- The art of writing fiction, inspiration and themes.
- Crime Fiction
- The crime fiction category covers the crime novels The Private Enemy and The Fourth Protectorate and also the crime short stories I’ve Heard the Mermaid Sing and I’ve Heard the Mermaid Sing.
- Fiction
- Fiction books and other stories.
- Language
- Natural languages including regional dialects.
- (La)TeX
- The TeX typesetting system in general or the LaTeX format in particular.
- Music
- Norfolk
- This category is about the county of Norfolk in East Anglia (the eastern bulgy bit of England). It’s where The Private Enemy is set and is also where the author lives.
- RISC OS
- An operating system created by Acorn Computers in the late 1980s and 1990s.
- Security
- Site
- Information about the Dickimaw Books site.
- Software
- Open source software written by Nicola Talbot, which usually has some connection to (La)TeX.
- Speculative Fiction
- The speculative fiction category includes the novel The Private Enemy (set in the future), the alternative history novel The Fourth Protectorate, and the fantasy novel Muirgealia.
🔖 Tags
- Account
- Alternative History
- Sub-genre of speculative fiction, alternative history is “what if?” fiction.
- book samples
- Bots
- Conservation of Detail
- A part of the creative writing process, conservation of detail essentially means that only significant information should be added to a work of fiction.
- Cookies
- Information about the site cookies.
- Dialect
- Regional dialects, in particular the Norfolk dialect.
- Docker
- Education
- The education system.
- Ex-Cathedra
- A Norfolk-based writing group.
- Fantasy
- Sub-genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements.
- File formats
- FlowframTk
- A vector graphics application written in Java that can export to pgf picture drawing code but can also be used to construct frames for use with the flowfram package. Home page: dickimaw-books.com/software/flowframtk. (FlowframTk was originally called JpgfDraw.)
- Hippochette
- A pochette (pocket violin) with a hippo headpiece.
- History
- I’ve Heard the Mermaid Sing
- A crime fiction short story (available as an ebook) set in the late 1920s on the RMS Aquitania. See the story’s main page for further details.
- Inspirations
- The little things that inspired the author’s stories.
- Linux
- Migration
- Posts about the website migration.
- Muirgealia
- A fantasy novel. See the book’s main page for further details.
- News
- Notifications
- Online Store
- Posts about the Dickimaw Books store.
- Quack, Quack, Quack. Give My Hat Back!
- Information about the illustrated children’s book. See the book’s main page for further details.
- Re-published
- Articles that were previously published elsewhere and reproduced on this blog in order to collect them all together in one place.
- Sale
- Posts about sales that are running or are pending at the time of the post.
- Site settings
- Information about the site settings.
- Smile for the Camera
- A cybercrime short story about CCTV operator monitoring a store’s self-service tills who sees too much information.
- Story creation
- The process of creating stories.
- TeX Live
- The Briefcase
- A crime fiction short story (available as an ebook). See the story’s main page for further details.
- The Foolish Hedgehog
- Information about the illustrated children’s book. See the book’s main page for further details.
- The Fourth Protectorate
- Alternative history novel set in 1980s/90s London. See the book’s main page for further details.
- The Private Enemy
- A crime/speculative fiction novel set in a future Norfolk run by gangsters. See the book’s main page for further details.
- Unsocial Media
- A cybercrime fiction short story (available as an ebook). See the story’s main page for further details.
- World Book Day
- World Book Day (UK and Ireland) is an annual charity event held in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland on the first Thursday in March. It’s a local version of the global UNESCO World Book Day.
- World Homeless Day
- World Homeless Day is marked every year on 10 October to draw attention to the needs of people experiencing homelessness.