Inside Ed's Head: And would you stop me if I tried to stop you?

Status Report 2022-07-11

I was obsessed with Mogwai as a teenager. While I still love their music now, this was my gateway drug into the music I listen to most of the time. Dark, emotional, instrumental (though this has a vocal) music. And they were Scottish, making a career out of doing pretty unique soundscape music. I first heard this on a Peel Session back in 1998 when it was called “Country” – “Cody” stands for “Come On, Die Young”, which is the album title it comes from. God, I miss John Peel.

Last week

Pretty tricky week, have to say. Expected to finish SHUNTY’S FIRST DAY on Monday, with a quick edit on Tuesday, but it all fell apart. So I went back to the drawing board with it and came up with a plan B I could get to the end of.

And that was rubbish. Argh! Too convoluted, too many moustache twirls by the villain.

I went back to square one with it and resequenced the outline. Looking at it at a helicopter view rather than an ant’s view let me see what the story should be. It was too basic and vanilla and wasn’t important enough to the central character except for a throwaway line. That throwaway line let me focus on the trauma DS Siyal had experienced that led to him becoming a cop and let me tie that in with the case in question.

I really liked doing this. It fleshed out a lot of backstory from THE TURNING OF OUR BONES and explores the characters in an interesting way. I feel like I know four of them pretty well now, which is a really good place to be in.

Oh, and it’s finally got a title. FALSE START, thanks to a few writer pals who suggested some good ones, but Michelle Davies got the best one. It works really well, a lot better than SHUNTY'S FIRST DAY!

I’ll hopefully have an idea of when I’m going to release the books soon. I said October, but I think that’ll be cutting things a bit tight.

And that was pretty much all I managed to do last week. I typed the last words of it literally just as my parents arrived. I spent the weekend building new back door steps with the old man. Though I say with, when really he did the bulk of the work with the bricks. I was there for lifting the big slabs (50mm thick 45kg ones), mixing concrete and shifting the best part of a ton of ballast from the lane around the house. Still, I'm very pleased to say I laid some slabs on my own, so I've about six to do myself to finish the area off. It’s looking really cool and so much better than the rotten decking that pretty much fell apart itself.

This week

An edit of FALSE START, then I’ll be getting stuck into Fenchurch 9, which I’m actually looking forward to. Be nice to reacquaint myself with that grumpy sod.

Also, might be able to re-publish the old audiobook editions for the first five Fenchurch books. The first two don’t match the current books, so Whispersync won’t work, but it’ll be nice to have another chunk of books ticked off with audio editions.

Hope you have a great week.

Cheers,
Ed