Galaxy hopping with a bathtub! : Shropshire Star:

Commander Grumble and the crew of 43 Acacia Avenue - Bruce Shepherd of Telford was about a third of the way into writing his first novel when he was hit by every author’s nightmare. “The computer crashed and I had not backed it up,” he said.

Bruce Shepherd with his first novel “I lost quite a lot of the material I had written. I got a bit disillusioned after that and put it on the back burner. I went back to it a couple of years ago, so there’s a bit of an interlude between the start and finish.

“I suppose it was my own fault. I have learned my lesson and everything I do now is backed up in triplicate.”

What the computer was unable to destroy was the ideas that he had kept in his head and the disaster did at least give him the chance to polish and develop them in his enforced rewrite.

“I kept the very start of the book and then went off at a bit of a tangent. The book altered considerably the second time around — hopefully for the better.”

The fruit of his labours has now been published by the Book Guild. “Commander Grumble and the crew of 43 Acacia Avenue” is the tale of a teenage boy who travels the galaxy in a bathtub.

For 46-year-old Mr Shepherd, who lives in Admaston and is a chiropodist in Wellington, his literary exploits all started quite suddenly.

“I woke up one Sunday morning with an idea. I sat down in front of the computer and just started tapping away. It all seemed to flow from there. Goodness knows where it came from. Since leaving school I had never put pen to paper, but it seemed to flow quite naturally.”

Strangely enough he has never himself been a reader of novels.

“I have always been interested in historical and factual things, quite far removed from the story. I have not read a great deal actually. I was brought up with the television. I suppose as a youngster I watched and enjoyed things like Star Trek.”

Married with two daughters, he went to school in Wellington and used to be in a local heavy rock band called “Raven”.

“The biggest venue we played was the Ironmaster,” he says.

With one novel now under his belt, Mr Shepherd seems to have breached some sort of literary dyke as the ideas just keep on coming.

“My wife one day said: ‘I think I have written a little story.’ I thought: ‘How clever. How can anybody write a story?’ But from this first book I now have five or six ideas, all quite different, ready to go.”

His second novel, called “The Crystal Film”, is 80 per cent complete and is a completely different theme. It is a historical fantasy based on a premise that historical images have been captured within crystal balls and can be replayed like film.