Good God, how did it get to be the seventeenth of January? Swear it was New Year’s Day only yesterday.
Anyway. Thank you for reading these and helping me keep myself on target to achieve my goals. I appreciate it.
This week’s music is Ashes to Ashes off Bowie’s 1980 record, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). Not my favourite of his albums, but one of his very best singles.
He never explained how NASA’s security allowed an astronaut to sneak a large supply of heroin onto a rocket, or how they hadn’t detected opiates in his bloodstream before he took off. Unless… Unless it’s an allusion to Bowie himself and his torments in the sixties?
Anyway, it’s crazy to think he died six years ago and he would’ve turned 75 on the 8th of January. His career is an incredible lesson in reinvention, filled with highs and lows from his sixties desperate wannabe days to his seventies commercial success (Ziggy Stardust onwards) then creative heights (Berlin trilogy) followed by his eighties mega-success (Let’s Dance, but don’t mention the dreadful follow-up with his worst songs and the worst cover every) then a commercial nadir (I actually like Tin Machine) and reinvention in the nineties (starting with Buddha of Suburbia soundtrack), culminating in his best album (Black Star) released just before his death, but a record that’s still too painful to listen to. A stark reminder to anyone in the creative world who is struggling that success might be just around the corner. And to enjoy success while it lasts and not let it go to your head.
Last week
Okay, so last week…
Well, I finished first draft of SECRET SCI-FI PROJECT’S PREQUEL (PART 1). Cleared 25,000 words, which I know will expand greatly as a I edit. I’m very much an expansive writer, adding as much as 20-25% of words as I go through my skeletal first cut and add some flesh to the bones. That first draft is, for me, equivalent to shooting a film then pulling together an assembly cut, which gives the director something stable to edit and shape, cutting and expanding where needed. This morning I fixed 25 action points I’d captured during writing, including one that became eight separate tweaks to chapters. I made these changes in isolation or, like that one, as a group. And I don’t edit as I’m writing, I note what needs to change and do it all in a batch after finishing the draft. Assuming I can finish it!
Now it’s all ready for another read, focusing on character and maximising tension. Usually by the second finished draft, my book’s are pretty solid and fill the space they need to occupy, ready for editing by editors and pruning back, more than adding by me. They’re what they’re going to be.
I want to get this book to that point early this week, then write the second part, which is half the length of the first in terms of chapters, but will be a fair bit shorter. I’m expecting the whole thing to end about 40-45,000 words, which is the length of the latter Cullen and Bain books. I like that length a lot, lets the characters and story flow but without getting bogged down like longer books can do. It’s definitely a length I’ll explore more with my future crime books — after all, it was perfect for Ed McBain, James M. Cain and countless other noir writers of the mid-twentieth century, rather than the latter trend of bloating spine widths as a way of compensating readers for the increased prices to compensate declining sales. Those authors regularly sold millions of books, whereas 100,000 nowadays is a big success.
Anyway. What else did I do?
Oh yes. I finalised my 2022/23 release plan:
1. LOST CAUSE, to self-publish 1st May 2022.
2. THE GUILTY (Dodds 5) for 1st August 2022
3. THE LAST THING TO DIE (Fenchurch 9) for release in December 2022
4. THE LOST (Dodds 6) for 1st August 2023
5. Tentative Fenchurch 10 for 1st December 2023
The current preorders for Fenchurch 9 are ahead of schedule, with 21% of the £££ target met in 13% of the time, but I expect that rate to slow over time. So, I think I’ll be writing a tenth, which is good to know now. Keeps me fresh and looking for new ideas for the old curmudgeon. The next one is a riff on something, and I love the concept.
LOST CAUSE is mostly done, just needs a reasonably substantial edit to improve what’s there. It’s a long novel, but I’m proud of it. It’s something different, a tangent away from my usual books but similar enough.
I’ll also be writing one prequel novella and three novels in SECRET SCI-FI project this year. I know that’s a lot, but it’s keeping me sane. And keeping me fresh. Writing back-to-back Police Procedurals for ten years has taken a toll.
This week
I hope to edit SECRET SCI-FI PROJECT’S PREQUEL (PART 1) this week and make a good start on the first cut of SECRET SCI-FI PROJECT’S PREQUEL (PART 2), which is set on Earth and so a lot less physics based but is also character-based and I know the buggers now, so that’s entirely possible.
Also, all the usual ads management too, which is a bit onerous just now but still fruitful. It’s a constant background headache.
I’ll be taking young Bessi up to stay with my parents at the weekend, which will be an acid test of how well she’s getting on. She’s super chilled right now, but still just doesn’t like other dogs and went mad at some dogs who had the temerity to walk where she was at lunchtime. I washed her Icelandic coat on Saturday and it was MINGING. Took four full handwashes to get it clean. Filthy hound had done a doggy roll on our hike up Yair hill, which was in something I suspect came out of a fox. Lovely beasts, dogs.
Hope you have a cracking one.
Cheers,
Ed