I rattle your bones

Inside Ed's Head 2023-10-30

Hey! No stupid photos of me this week!

#Music

I’m heading into Edinburgh to see this lot on Wednesday night. Hip hop is very stagnant nowadays (IMHO) or just abrasive, so it’s nice to see someone doing something new in the genre. And local lads too!

#Last Week

Okay, so last week I wanted to get the outline to OPERATION HIGH CONCEPT finished. Which I did! And I’m pretty pleased with it. Being an absolute mentalist, the outline is just over 25,000 words, which is even longer than the outline for THE TURNING OF OUR BONES (DI Rob Marshall 1, in case you’re new to this). Rather than write with the outline in mind, I tend to expand out my outlines into a narrative, so my writing process is as much an editing process. It’s a great tip I read from someone in the screenwriting world – the only time you have a blank page is right at the start, when you’re scoping out the story. Everything after that is taking the polished pebble of an idea and (doing some process to it that my tired brain is struggling to turn into a succinct analogy) expanding it out. I’ve spent a lot of time making sure that my outlines can be read by other people, for the purposes of editing, so it gets a few passes.

I think one of the problems people have when starting to outline is thinking the outline is a simple process – it’s not. In my book, it’s where most of the editing happens. All the rough edges get smoothed off and sanded down. All the structural stuff is broken apart. There will be issues when it comes to writing the book, no doubt, but hopefully no major ones – you know where the book is going and, at each stage of the process, you know what the protagonist(s) are supposed to be doing or thinking. So spending a few weeks editing and refining the outline isn’t just a luxury, it’s essential. Even on my final read-through on Thursday night, I was coming up with a little tweaks I could make in the next version, but haven’t yet.

Anyway, that was last week!

#This Week

A chunk of stuff to do around the launch of Marshall 4 tomorrow, including doing a live event in Stow. A shout out to anyone who has a ticket and can’t go – please can you let the bookshop, as there’s a sizeable substitute list of people who want to come along but didn’t have a ticket.

And I’ve got the edits back for Fenchurch 10. Hopefully it’ll be a few days of unpacking and tweaking the manuscript, then a final read through and edit of it. It’s a wee bit on the short side just now but these books usually expand out as I edit.

Back with the cardiologist on Thursday to review how the operation went and decide next steps in my treatment. Feels a bit like an ongoing thing, but I’ve been exercising a lot, dieting in a sustainable way and losing weight. I’ve got a target I want to get to and I’m about nine or ten pounds in that, depending on when I weighed myself!

Anyway, have a great week.

Cheers,
Ed