And I’ve never seen anyone quite like you before

Inside Ed’s Head 2023-11-13

Hiya!

#Music

This week’s music is to celebrate the expanded reissue of New Order’s Substance compilation, which was a sort of gateway drug into the band (along with 1994’s The Best Of. Hey don’t @ me, as the kids say.)

Note, this is the far superior ’87 version of the song that was used in the Trainspotting soundtrack. And it’s absolutely glorious. I think an early version of Ghost in the Machine featured this track as well as Sleeper’s version of Blondie’s Atomic. But the way they’d rework their old songs as technology developed (and they were riding that wave as it formed back in the 80s) inspired me to edit some of my early books so I had a definitive edition, a fight I constantly try to avoid. Anyway, I do digress.

#Last Week

Last week’s goal was to finish my read-edit of Fenchurch 10, which I feared I might not achieve. But I did! Now I’m back into a bit of a groove without a lot of travel and some time at home, I’m able to get on with things and get into my groove. In the end, it was a smidgen over 76k, which is pretty respectable. It’s a solid story, I think, full of blood and death and murder. One thing I tried to do, given this is the final book in the series, was to include elements from each book in the series, usually in the form of characters but occasionally in locations, while also making sure the story was entirely new. This is something most people won’t even notice, but I had fun doing – picking out a minor character from, say, book 2, which I haven’t really thought about in the 3.5 years since I got the rights back (it feels like last week, I swear) or the university from book 4 or a certain character who appeared in book 4 throughout. Anyway, that was some daft fun to get me through writing a book – I hope you can spot all of those characters when you get around to reading it.

I finished it on Friday and it’s off to copy edit now. Should get that back this week, so that’s actually very close to finish, way ahead of the release on 31st Dec – I had pushed it back by 30 days because I was getting a bit stressed about meeting that timeline. Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll do such long pre-orders in future as it sort of killed a lot of the enjoyment of writing for me and put unnecessary pressure on me. While I’ve benefited from it, financially, it’s taken quite the toll on me...

I had a Friday of twiddling my thumbs. Of course I didn’t – I spent the day messing about with getting all fourteen Police Scotland novels up onto Bookvault, so I can sell them on Grey Dog Books, my online store. This meant updating the interior files to include new material, such as the latest Also By section and an updated About the Author page, etc. Anyway, that’s all done and I did a couple of cheeky things like splitting the LONG chapters down into scenes for some books, so there were 40 chapters, but 110 scenes. It’s interesting to see how I used to work – now I’d tend to have 1:1 between chapter and scene, with the Marshall books being something like 70 chapters, but back then I’d have 2-4 scenes per chapter, and some would be 3,000 words long. James Patterson was the pioneer of that ultra-short chapter thing, which does make the feeling of progress through a novel – I haven’t gone anything like that, but they’ll hopefully feel a lot pacier. We shall see!

#This Week

Now that’s all out of the way, I sat down this morning with a blank page and a file full of nuggets of ideas. And at the end of the day, I’ve got three book ideas I can attack and develop. “With Soul So Dead”, “His Path of Darkness” and “This World of Sorrow” are the working titles for Marshall 5, 6 and—indeed—7. I’ve already swapped 5 and 6 around because they make more sense.

A fair chunk of work to do with them, such as a devising the character arcs across the three, so that the main players (Marshall, Kirsten, Elliot, Jen, Struan and Jolene) all have their story arcs mapped out. One of them will die in these books and I’m not telling you who. Currently looking at main locations of Whitley Bay, Peebles and Selkirk, with obviously other places to fit in amongst that when I get around to developing the ideas further.

What I’m currently lacking—and will spend a lot of time developing—is the substance to the stories. I’ve got three big crimes but only one has a villain, and that’s a name. But I did siphon off another idea for the sequel to OPERATION HIGH CONCEPT (or whatever it’s called). I want to do another two in that series and spread out something a bit more that’s maybe happening a bit too quickly in book 1.

Anyway, this week is one of those where I get to stick on loud music and do a lot of thinking, which is bloody nice and a real privilege.

Have a cracking week!

Cheers,
Ed