The Sequel To Touch

Touch sold an incredible number of copies in October and reached number seven in the overall Amazon bestseller chart. Thanks to everybody who bought the book. The knowledge that so many people are reading about DI Savage and her colleagues is spurring me on to complete the sequel. I hope to have the book out early in the new year. I won't reveal much about the plot but as a teaser I can tell you that Savage finds herself in trouble over events that occured in Touch and DS Riley is, if anything, in deeper water as somebody from his past returns to settle old scores. Don't worry, DCs Calter and Enders feature as well and down in Cornwall DS Tatershall becomes embroiled in the case too.

And the title? Provisional only, but it looks like it will be called Chains.

Kindle Top Ten!

As I write this Touch is number seven in the Amazon Kindle charts. Again a "big thank" you to all the people who have bought and read the book. It hasn't ceased to amaze me that it can rise so high and each jump, even if only one place, is very pleasing and encourages me to work harder on the sequel. There is pressure too, though. Pressure to deliver the next book in a timely manner and pressure to make sure that it doesn't disappoint. Once a writer has established a group of characters and put them out in the world then he or she no longer owns them, the reader does, by virtue of having invested time and money in their lives. It is a scary thought!

Touch Is An Amazon Bestseller.

Touch has been in the top one hundred Kindle books on Amazon for a week or so and I am really amazed at its progress. It has been as high as number eleven in the charts. A big "thank you" to everyone who has bought it: without you the book would be literally nowhere. I am hoping the book can break the top ten but it is a big ask since I am up against One Day and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy amongst others, but fingers crossed DI Savage can do it!

Touch Is Top 20 Amazon Bestseller

Touch has been in the top one hundred Kindle books on Amazon for a week or so and I am really amazed at its progress. It has been as high as number eleven in the charts. A big "thank you" to everyone who has bought it: without you the book would be literally nowhere. I am hoping the book can break the top ten but it is a big ask since I am up against One Day and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy amongst others, but fingers crossed DI Savage can do it!

Charlotte Savage is the number 2 British detective

I am amazed that Touch has broken the top 500 in the Kindle store and even more amazed that DI Savage is now the number two British detective in the whole Amazon UK store (not just Kindle):

I put a new cover image up and it seems as if that has made the difference, but who knows. It could just as easily by the way the wind is blowing or because we now have an "R" in the month.

Still trying to get into the top ten police procedurals though...

DI Savage Top 5 In British Detectives

Touch reached number five in British Detective novels today (all books, not just Kindle). DI Savage and her colleagues also managed to break into the top twenty in Police Procedurals and broke the one thousand rank mark in all Kindle books.

I just want to say a big "thank you" to all the readers who made this possible! Touch has only been out a little over a month and I couldn't have dreamed that it would have been this successful so soon.

How not to write

Here is an interesting post by Nick Wastnage (click) on how he writes, what he does and doesn't do when writing. Sound very disciplined. I Wish I could be more like that. Instead I do what I think most writers do: dither, procrastinate, dillydally...

This involves making numerous cups of tea, checking Twitter, NovelRank, Amazon KDP, KU Forum UK, Kindleboards, the weather, local news (in case of interesting crime stories), various police force home pages (ditto) and so it goes on.

Eventually a little voice in my ear says 'What the **** do you think you are doing?' So I struggle into writer mode (after making another cup of tea, of course) and then sit and look at a blank screen for an hour or so. The little voice returns and says 'Well?' Well what? What am I supposed to do? The voice shouts into my ear 'You are a bloody writer so start bloody writing!' I start typing a scene and miraculously words appear on the screen and they aren't half bad. I wonder why one earth I couldn't have done this three hours ago...

I have Cursed the Weather

I fear that I will never be best friends with the South West Tourism. Although many scenes in Touch try to describe the beauty of Devon they invariably end up a damp, sodden mess since it always seems to be raining. There is wind and rain in the first chapter and the last and the sun rarely shines. OK, the book is set in the winter so bad weather should be expected. However, the problem is the poor weather I wrote about has come back to haunt me and this summer appears to have ended before it has started. Here is the forecast for Plymouth for the next few days:

Miserable :-(

Note to self: Ensure next book is set during a two month heatwave or send DI Savage and colleagues to Spain on an exchange!

Just Finished Reading Matterhorn

What a book! Karl Marlantes took 35 years to write this story about a company of marines in the Vietnam war. It is not for the faint-hearted (it is long), the squeamish (it is graphic) or those who like stories glorifying war (this does precisely the opposite), but if you read it I think the story will stay with you a long time after you have finished it. The New York Times called it "One of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam" and who am I to argue with them?

The good news for Kindle users is that at the moment it is just 99p (not sure of the price in the US but it is cheap): US | UK

Touch is better than...

Graham Hurley, my number one all time favourite crime writer.

No, I don't think so, but yesterday I took a look at my position in the top 100 police procedurals on Amazon and noticed this:

Made my day, although I would have been happier had he been one step above me since in no way would I compare my writing to his!

If you haven't read any of the Faraday/Winter novels then you are missing out since Hurley's writing makes all other UK crime authors look like rank amateurs. The series of books featuring Portsmouth police has created a entirely believable world that few, if any, other writers have managed to match. The only downside is that there is only one book left to be published in the series. After that one of the minor characters (Jimmy Suttle) is moving to join the Devon and Cornwall Police! Look out DI Charlotte Savage... although Suttle and Savage has a distinct ring to it, don't you think?

Touch has Two Five Stars!

And I am not talking about a couple of members of this lot:

(don't know who they are? click)

No, I am talking about reviews. Four things make the world go around when it comes to selling indie books: cover, blurb, sample and reviews. Get all four working and then success will follow... hopefully.

How To Format Your Ebook For Kindle

Look, it is not difficult, possibly time-consuming, yes, but if you stick with it you can do it. The result will be a professionally formatted book and that will put you ahead of the game since most ebooks I read have quite a few formatting errors. And yes, that does include a lot from companies big enough to know better than to put out an inferior product. The process might take several hours, but haven't you spent several months/years writing the book? A little time now will be time well spent.

Here is how to do it in easy steps (note, I am talking about a novel here - if you have a book with tables, pictures, etc. then you will need to do some more research). Before we start get used to making regular backups as you go along. I don't mean regular saving I mean copies so you can always go back to a previous version.

I am going to be asking you to remove text from inside the html tags. For instance later I will say remove the text inside the italic tags: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Text in italic</i> leaving: <i>Text in italic</i>. You can do this by hand or using the find and replace function in Notepad to make changes throughout the document. I find TextCrawler (freeware) a useful piece of software for finding and replacing text in files.

1. Save your document as a webpage. That is webpage filtered in Word. Now I don't know what Microsoft mean by "filtered" because filtered the result certainly isn't as you will see in the next step.

2. Open your document using Notepad or similar and marvel that the mess you see before you could ever become a properly formatted book. Inside it will look something like this:

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-right:432.0pt;text-autospace:none'><span
style='font-family:Consolas'>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.</span></p>

3. Near the top of the document you will see some style tags. Starting with:

<style>

and ending with:

</style>

Remove everything from between the tags and put the following in place so altogether it now looks like this:

<style>
p { text-indent:1.2em;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;}
p.noindent { text-indent:0;}
p.centstar {text-align:center;margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:20px;}
p.cent { text-align:center;text-indent:0; }
h1 { text-align:center; margin-top:120px; margin-bottom:60px; }
h2 { text-align:left; margin-top:60px;}
h2.cover { text-align:center; margin-top:60px;}
</style>



4. Find your chapter headings and strip out all the html around them.

5. Surround your chapter headings with so called H1 tags, like this:

<h1>Chapter 1</h1>

5. Before each chapter heading put the Kindle page break html:

<mbp:pagebreak />

Don't worry about how breaks appear in the text because html does not take any notice of whitespace or breaks. Only code between the tags can effect how the text can display.

7. On the first line of each chapter (right before the first letter) place the following html: <p class="noindent">

8. Find the breaks between scenes within each chapter (hopefully you will already have marked these with something like a * when you were writing). Surround the star with the following html:

<p class="centstar">*</p>

9. The paragraph following a break should, like the beginning of a chapter, have no indent so put the following tag:

<p class="noindent">

10. Take a break and have a cup of coffee! And do another backup.

11. Now you are going to start stripping out all the superfluous html in the document. Each paragraph in your document should start with <p> and end with </p> (except, as we have seen, the paragraph at the start of each chapter and after a scene break which should start with <p class="noindent">).

12. Find any italic tags: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Text in italic.</i> and remove the text in the start tag so the tag looks like this:

<i>Text in italic.</i>

The text inside the tags (what is in the < >) may not look like mine, It doesn't matter, get rid of it.

13. Do the same for bold tags.

14. Now work your way through the file finding and replacing any other tags so that each paragraph starts with <p> and ends with </p> and that in between is nothing else except italic tags <i> or bold tags <b>. You may well see lots of span tags: <span>. Remove them and anything in them.  Between the opening <body> tag and the closing </body> tag (right at the foot of the document) there should be nothing else but the P tags starting <p> and ending </p> and italic and bold tags. The only text inside the tags should be the class="noindent" at the start of chapters and scene breaks and the class="centstar" at the scene breaks. Just to repeat - the only tags should be <p>, <i> (or <em>), <b> (or <strong). There shouldn't be a need for any other tags and you can remove them all. The only exception will be if you have some clever layout you need to use like trying to simulate a newpaper or document etc. or some other special display. In those case you will probably be able to work out the formatting yourself (or Google it) but you must make sure it displays correctly on the Kindle.

15. Go to the top of the document and find the opening <body> tag. Place the following afterwards:


<h1>Your Title</h1>
<h2 class="cover">Your Name</h2>
<mbp:pagebreak />
<p class="cent">Your Title</p>
<p class="cent">Your Name</p>
<p class="cent">Copyright &copy; 2011 by Your Name</p>
<br/>
<p class="cent">This is a work of fiction, etc., etc.<br/>
No part of this book my be stored, etc., etc.
</p><br>
<p class="cent">
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. This ebook may not be sold etc. etc.
</p>


(change the text above to suit. You can also put any other information here, like acknowledgements, although I prefer to put those at the end of the book.)

16. After this should come your first chapter which should already have the pagebreak tag before it (unless you want a table of contents in which case follow the next point).

17. If you want a table of contents then insert the following after the last line of the code detailed in point 15.


<mbp:pagebreak />
<a id="toc" />
<h3 class="cover" style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:20;">Contents</h3>
<p class="cent"><a href="#start">Chapter 1</a></p>
<p class="cent"><a href="#chp2">Chapter 2</a></p>
<p class="cent"><a href="#chp3">Chapter 3</a></p>
<p class="cent"><a href="#chp4">Chapter 4</a></p>
<p class="cent"><a href="#chp5">Chapter 5</a></p>

(add additional chapter links as required)

Now you need to add the anchors next to the chapter headings so go to chapter one and add the following:
just before your <h1> tag;

<a id="start" />

Note the first chapter or prologue must have the link id "start" because this is what the Kindle looks for when a user wants to navigate to the beginning of  the book.

For the chapters following add this code before each <h1> tag BUT CHANGE THE NUMBER TO MATCH. In this case this is where the link above which says <a href="#chp2">Chapter 2</a> will go to:

<a id="chp2" />

Do the same until you reach the last chapter.

If you don't want a table of contents then skip this point (17) entirely.

18. Now you can preview your work by right clicking on the file and choosing "open with" your web browser. There won't be any page breaks - the document will run in one huge page - but everything else should look OK.

19. Now get it into PRC format. You will need Mobipocket Creator for this. Follow the instructions to create your ebook and then drag and drop it onto your Kindle (or preview using Kindle for PC or even better the Amazon Kindle Previewer. Click here and scroll down the page to find it).

20. Read through the whole book looking for formatting errors. Most of these will be because you have missed extraneous html inside tags that does not need to be there. When you find them go into the html file and correct. Repeat the ebook creation process numerous times until you are happy with the result.

21. You should now have a perfectly formatted book.

22. Upload the PRC file to Amazon KDP.

23. Wait for the plaudits to come in!

Please note: As I have said above, this information concerns formatting for a novel with no fancy text or layout. If you have something like that then you need to ask yourself is it necessary? When was the last time you saw such a thing in a 'Big Name' novel? If it is necessary then make sure that you format it correctly and test, test, test. I also have not included information about creating an NCX file - this allows the user to jump between chapters using the five-way controller and makes those little lines on the progress bar. It is a good idea to have one of these, but an awful lot of books by the major publishers don't, so for now see how you get on without one.

Touch (DI Savage 1) Is Now Available!

Pleased to say that after a long wait Touch has made it onto Amazon:

Touch at Amazon UK

Touch at Amazon US

Now for the next in the series...

Editing: No Worse Than a Visit To the Dentist

Actually I am a big cry baby when it comes to the dentist so being no worse isn't saying much. What am I talking about? Receiving my completed edit back from Gary at Bubblecow. Firstly, let me say that Gary has done a great job with the edit and I am very pleased with the results. His editor's report points out weaknesses in the book and also tells me where I am going right as well. I have been through the manuscript and accepted 90% of the changes. Most of these are slight alterations to the text, the deletion of small sections, etc. The remaining 10% is where the pain lies. If you have gone through the process you will know what I mean. Remember that great line at the end of chapter 23 where you knew you had knocked the reader dead? DELETED. Ouch. An off the cuff remark that a character makes that you thought was so clever, so witty? WRONG. It is deleted and replaced with a more prosaic line. Double ouch.

In the end I have accepted and heroically borne the pain of most of these changes too, only in one or two places have I dug my heels in like a stubborn donkey (ass?) and refused to budge.

There are some bigger changes that I have to decide on too and that will be tricky. As a start I will be working on adding some extra description (some people's weakness is too much description, mine is the opposite) and increasing the tension throughout the novel. Then I am going to despatch the book to my group of beta readers and see what they think. Any bigger, structural changes will be made after their opinions have been canvassed.

Now that wasn't too painful, was it? Nothing to be worried about for next time...

Under the Editor's Knife

OK. Gone.

I have dispatched Touch to the guys at BubbleCow. They have won the dubious privilege of editing 93,000 words of pure _____ (fill in your own word, I like ‘genius’ and will go with that for the next few weeks until I get the edit back. At that point I will most likely cry with despair and look for a cliff to leap from).

It feels strange sending off the manuscript (can you call it that when it is just zeros and ones flying up through my telephone line?) because it freezes the text; for the last few months there hasn’t been more than a couple of days in a row where I haven’t worked on it. Now nothing can happen until my baby returns. Not that DI Savage and her colleagues are resting, oh no. They just can’t lie still and are already embroiled in a new adventure. Provisional title is Chains and I don’t know exactly where it is going yet, but going it is. Some while ago I thought that I might like a break and would spend time going over an old science fiction work, but Savage and co. won’t stop hassling me so if I don’t want to spend a few nights banged up in the custody suite at Charles Cross in Plymouth then I had better do as they ask. I can see that writing a series rather than a one-off novel is quite compelling. It is also unsettling because the story arc does not finish. I can quite understand why some authors want to kill their lead character off: it is the only why to shut them up!

Editors

It has been a long time since I posted. The reason? Have been slaving (or should that be slavering?) over the final draft. Now it is done and I have sent off some samples to various editors. I figure it is worth the investment to try a few rather than just one since a few thousand words only costs around £50 to get edited. Not sure how I will choose between them yet, but I am hoping it won't be too difficult. Perhaps I need an uber editor to choose between them.

I have to say I am little nervous with sharing my baby: what happens if they think she is ugly, stupid or worthless? Or all three? Not sure. All I know is that my work is at least as good as a number of the indies in the top 100, a fair few of which have not been professionally edited (or if they have been I for sure could not tell!).

Does the cost put people off employing an editor? OK, it will be anything between £500 and £1000, which is no small sum. However, the book is out there forever and I think writers owe it to their readers to make the product the best they can. After all the writer is expecting to make money out of the reader so it is an insult to put out a badly prepared book (don't even get me onto ebook formatting issues...).

I don't think an editor can turn a bad work into a good one, but they can turn a fair work into a good one and a good work into an excellent one. I don't know where my book lies on the continuum from awful to fantastic, but if an editor can bump it up one or two levels then that is justification enough for employing one.

Is All Publicity Good Publicity?

Not sure...

This reaction by an author to a bad review has gone viral:

http://booksandpals.blogspot.com/2011/03/greek-seaman-jacqueline-howett.html

I have no idea if her book is good or not but the thread that follows the review is very entertaining. I wouldn't mind betting that she sees increased sales after this. Funny old place the internet.

Finished the 3rd. Now for Beta Readers

OMG I have finished the third draft of Touch! No champagne in the house, but I have permitted myself a cup of tea and a biscuit (just the one, let's not get ahead of ourselves since the state of nirvana known as transcendental  Amanda Hockingness has not yet arrived). Compared to the first two drafts number three did not take too long (a few weeks) and it was good to find out that not much needed doing apart from removing ten zillion adverbs. Draft number two was like taking your car to the garage and being told that you'd be better off taking it to the scrap yard instead.

Just a read through now and then it will be ready for my beta readers so if there is anyone out there willing to be one, please let me know as I need some more. I would love to hear from anyone living in Devon and Cornwall, but wherever you come from you'd be welcome. No payment, but you will get an acknowledgement in the book and a whole heap of thanks. Your task will be to read through the book and then answer some questions that will help me to understand what works in the story and what doesn't. I am not looking for you to pick up on spelling or grammar so don't worry if that is not your forte or if UK English is not your mother tongue.

If you are interested then please tell me the last three crime novels you have read and your favourite author (from any genre) and I will get back to you

Third Draft: Hunting Those Adverbs

Oh yes, my favourite pastime: hunting down and slaughtering adverbs. My first and second draft are full of them and that won't do. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find those pesky critters and blast them out of this universe.

Why?

"The man ran quickly down the street."

What is wrong with that? Nothing, the adverb "quickly" provides a shorthand that tells us how the man ran. In first draft mode it is fine because it gets me through the story. Come the third draft and it needs attention so I cut it.

"The man ran down the street."

Hmmm. That doesn't sound right. "Ran" now seems weak, but by cutting the adverb it has encouraged me to think about the sentence.

"The man sprinted down the street."

Better: the weak verb "ran" has been replaced by a stronger one. Now I am rocking, but I want  to convey more.

"The man sprinted down the street, narrowly avoiding a young woman with a buggy."

Oops, I have sneaked another adverb in there, that won't do.

"The man sprinted down the street, stumbling as he tried to avoid a young woman with a buggy."

See what is happening? Each time we cut an adverb we are forced to fill the hole with description. Compare the first sentence with the final one:

"The man ran quickly down the street."

"The man sprinted down the street, stumbling as he tried to avoid a young woman with a buggy."

Which is better? Now go to one of your favourite authors and count the number of adverbs in the non-dialogue text on the pages. There probably (! - could I cut that, yes!) won't be more than one or two, if any.

Note I said non-dialogue - I don't mind a few adverbs in dialogue because that is the way we speak, but if you do decide to cut them here too then that's fine.

BTW: don't get intimidated by grammar. I am useless at it but realise that it is worth making the effort. An analogy would be with musicians and their attitude to music. Some great musicians haven't been able to read or understand music, but for those without natural talent the more knowledge they have the better.

Right now, load up your gun (Ok, place your fingers ready over Ctrl C), and go hunting!

Stuck Plot

I was reading something on a forum the other day about getting plot ideas and about getting stuck in a rut and not being able to climb out. I don't do much outlining so if I get in a similar situation it can get tricky. Don't panic! If you don't outline then the way to get out of that rut is to write your way out. Take the particular character you are dealing with and plonk them in a setting. It doesn't really matter what the setting is - familiar or strange, relaxing or stressful. Then start writing. For me the act of writing tends to produce something useful. I don't know how it happens, but it is like my muse pops out from where she has been hiding and says "Hey! Try this!"

To be clear, the piece of writing that results doesn't have to be used. In fact in most case it gets shoved in my snippets bin. But in nine case out of ten a plot element, a new character or some trait emerges and can be used later on.

I think this is why I don't like outlining: I find the process of how these ideas come to life quite incredible and when I outline it all seems a bit too clinical.

Try it, put your character in a:

Supermarket
Minor car crash
Doctors surgery
Swimming pool
Divorce court
Hospital bedside
etc.

and see what happens. Sometimes the more ordinary the situation the better, possibly because if you are trying to describe your character going shopping all the stress of trying to work up plot points has gone allowing free rein for writing. Then, bingo! Out pops a new baby you can nurture and help grow.

Spotlight on the software I write with

I use Writemonkey as my word processor. The observant of you will have noticed the link to it in the menu column. I am thinking of setting up a page dedicated to the reasons why I like this software because I rate it so highly. The latest update is even better.

So what is so good about it? Firstly it takes over your screen so you can see nothing else. There are no buttons or menus it is just you and the text (or a blank screen if you haven't written anything lol!). That's the way it should be, right? I mean you are not sitting in front of the computer to Tweet, check or write emails. surf the web, chat on IM or do anything else, are you? You are there to write. So write, don't do the other stuff. If you had a job would you be doing that? No. Your job when you are writing is writing and Writemonkey lets you do that.

You are also not supposed to be mucking about with formatting - no changing the text sizes or fiddling around with paragraphs. Once you have set up Writemonkey the way you want there is nothing to distract you in that department.

Writemonkey also has a very useful feature called jumps. I use these to mark the start of scenes and chapters. I use it to insert the timeline and "to dos" as well. You create these jumps yourself so they can be whatever you want. Once set up it enables you to jump around your story with ease because the jumps sit in a panel you call up and click (it might not make much sense, but when you get Writemonkey you will see how it works).

There are many other features inlcuding a word frequency counter that can help you cut down on overuse of certain words (we all do it and this highlights your failings!).

There is also the repository. You access this by pressing a key and are taken to an area that is outside of your main text. Here you can store all the bits you have discarded, ideas you might use, synopsis, whatever you want. Jumps also work here so I set up my scenes with details of the characters, the location, weather, etc. Since it is outside the main text it is not counted in the word count and doesn't get in the way.

And that is the best thing about Writemonkey. It frees you up to not only write, but also to be creative with how you work.

As I say in the panel to the right, I honestly wouldn't have finished Touch without Writemonkey and if it disappeared from the face of the planet I would have to spend a couple of years writing my own version. It would be my number one desert island software choice over everything else on my computer. I can't recommend it enough so why not try it since it is free?

The Writemonkey website

Sales Numbers Don't Equal Success

I think indie authors are too hung up on sales numbers. Having thousands of sales at 99c (approx 70p) does not mean that the author is more successful or better than one who prices their book at $2.99 and sells a few hundred. I know I have bought several books at the lower price on impulse without looking at the sample (lazy, I know) and then ditched the book after only a few chapters. With a 2.99 book I do take more time to buy and I am more likely to continue reading.

As authors we need to also think like business people. Because of Amazon's split royalty rate the percentage you get for a 99c book is half that you get for a $2.99 book. So:

35% of 99 = 35.

70% of 299 = 210.

210/35 = 6

So you need to shift six times more books at the lower price to make the same amount of money.

For anyone who missed the last line that's SIX TIMES!

To put it another way an author who sells just 166 books a month at 2.99 is making the same as one who is selling 1000 at 99.

Or another way: to make $10,000 selling at 99c you need to shift 28500 books. At $2.99 you need to sell less than 5000!

What do you need to live on? $50,000 (£31,000)? At 99c you are going to need to sell close to 150,000 books. At 2.99 just 25,000.

The trouble is there is a weird sort of kudos that seems to be attached to selling 1000/10,000/whatever books a month (see for instance this thread on Kindle Boards) when it doesn't really tell you anything about the quality of the work compared to books priced a higher amount. Note: I am not saying that higher priced books are better, I am just saying the items shifted seems to be the measure that a lot of indie authors use as their yardstick.

Of course introductory offers, loss leaders into a series or aiming at a particular market (YA for instance) may necessitate having a low price. That aside I feel my work (when it is published) is worth more than the 24p I would get if I priced at 99c.

Oh, and happy Valentines Day!

Dreams

Have you ever had one of those dreams that appears to solve everything? In this case I am talking about my novel. Last night I had a dream where everything fell into place. Plot points cascaded from an empty sky to land one after another in a perfect pattern. An ingenious twist was conjured from somewhere and the whole thing was iced with sugar. All was good. Until I woke up. Then I couldn't remember a blind thing. All I can say is come on Google, please try to find some way of storing my dreams. I don't mind paying for extra storage, I really don't. Oh, and if you guys can make sure it is integrated with Google Apps as well then I would be eternally grateful.

Down To Work

So why on earth am I writing this?

Still in second draft purgatory and having read through my old SF novel (see previous post) I am now wondering about the somewhat meandering plot in Touch. There a lot of threads and they are in a bit of a tangle. Of course my readers are super-intelligent and well able to sort out the plot... or are they?

Never overestimate the cleverness of readers (I am one, for starters). What seems obvious when you are writing something might be a complete mystery to a reader. That little sliver of information you poked into the corner of a scene expecting a reader to grab and shout out 'clue!' will probably be overlooked and pages and pages later the poor reader will be wondering how your main character managed to get hold of the diamond/gun/girl/****.

Ok, so down to work. Ah, but first this author's favourite delaying tactic: a cup of tea!

Dusting Off

So I have been dusting off and old science fiction novel I wrote a few years ago. I thought that I would be shocked at how bad it was but it was the other way around. It was actually quite good. It had done the merry-go-round of agents but to no avail. I guess that put the scuppers on it in my mind. Of course this was before the rise of the ebook indie revolution and one thing I now realise is that we shouldn't let those old-style gatekeepers (the agents and publishers) have the sole say on whether a book is good enough because they don't necessarily know best. So... I am going to get it out there and see what the real people thing. Yes, I know, real people are kind of scary because they can write reviews and things (things? - well, they can email you and tell you how rubbish you are for one), but in the end if the real people don't like you then you ain't any good, are you? Ok, ok, so it isn't always the cream that rises to the top, there are the occasional floaters as well. And I am not talking about those spots in your vision - I mean something rather more lavatorial in nature...

Misbehavin' Characters

Charlotte has been behaving herself recently, which is nice. Unfortunately some of the others haven't. They keep getting ideas well above their stations or else they try fading away into the text leaving great bloody holes that need filling. Second drafting is like that: it is a see-saw, a tug of war, a game between two sides, sometimes a game where the loser kicks the board and all the pieces fly into the air and one or two disappear under the sofa never to be seen again. Just when you think you have thrown a six and are about to cross the finish line you step on a snake and slide halfway back to the beginning.

Analogies over. The truth is it is tough to keep going, but the answer, for me at least, is to write your way out of trouble. Write, write, write and then miraculously something appears to solve all the problems. Until the next set rear their ugly little heads at least...

So When Is It Finished?

Is that finished or famished? Sometimes I am not sure. It goes like this:

Read a few chapters. Think 'Wow, this is actually Ok. No, maybe it is even good.' Feel smug. Make congratulatory cup of tea. Pick up latest Graham Hurley novel. Open at page xxx. Read a chapter. Go back to own writing. Read a few chapters. Think 'Bollocks. What a pile of absolute crap. Couldn't make minestrone soup from the meagre content in here.' Revise proposed completion date to sometime around 2017.

Missed the er... Dagger

Have just seen that the CWA Debut Dagger competition is about to close (5th Feb.). Considering entering, but since I don't have a synopsis finished I think it would be a bit of a rush. Looks like a worthwhile thing to do though, even if you don't win, because various agents and publishers (really? wow!) look over your work. A number of authors who have won or reached the shortlist have been snapped up.

In the beginning and all that.

So, this is it. After years and years of developing websites for others, of coding hundreds of thousands of lines of VB that have been hidden in the depths of the web, of designing databases stuffed with all manner of junk, I have finally got round to having MY OWN SITE.

The purpose, of course, is to promote my writing. That is something that writers are often loath to do. They prefer to sit, anonymous, hiding behind their words as if those words are all that are needed. How I wish that were true. Unfortunately it is not. Ho hum.

Soon my first novel will be available in Ebook format on Amazon and then it will time to face reality. I am going down the self-publishing route while at the same time submitting to agents. A year or two ago this would have been merely the electronic equivalent of those vanity presses, but quite suddenly it seems like the way to go. In a very large part this is down to the Kindle. People are actually beginning to consume ebooks in quantities that make it worth publishing in ebook form alone. The major publishes are in danger of missing the boat unless they change their model soon. Authors can now self publish and get 70% royalties through Amazon. Many people are selling thousands of books a month solely through the ebook market. Check out Joe Konrath, an author who argues the case for abandoning the conventional route to publishing success. His figures make pleasant reading for anybody contemplating going down the ebook road.