Inside Ed's Head: Just take my hand and be brave

Status Report 2022-06-27

I’ve a feeling I’ve done that song before, but sod it. It’s absolute genius. What a monstrous video too.

I was a massive fan of them in the 90s and 00s, but they split up before I saw them in concert. I saw them on their comeback tour last year in that London. And they were astonishing. Enjoy, but I suspect most of you won’t if my Eagles comments were anything to go by, so here’s a bonus for the rest of you -- Paul McCartney’s full set at Glastonbury at the weekend:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0018sfr/glastonbury-paul-mccartney

Notable mentions for Wolf Alice, Sam Fender and Phoebe Bridgers. The recurring theme was anger against the disgusting decision by the US Supreme Court to overrule Roe vs Wade after almost 50 years. The far right have spent a long time installing their judges in the real seat of power in the country. It’s a takeover against democracy. Hypocritical and morally bankrupt. It’s okay for people to own guns with minimal checks and safeguards on the grounds of liberty, while restricting the choice of women and not giving a single shit about the lives of those children once they’re born.

Anyway, rant over. If you disagree, please unsubscribe.

Last week

A lot of writing and editing on the book formerly known as FOLLOW THE LEADER. Got there on Wednesday and felt pretty pleased with myself. A calendar month to write and edit a whole novel. I’m trying a different approach now, and focus on quality rather than speed. Previously I’d spend two weeks on the first draft then a fair amount of time editing. And a lot of tearing my hair out! This time, though, I didn’t find many plot holes as I was writing. A few things I embellished and tweaked, but no big howlers. I spent a LOT of time working and reworking the outline, so the biggest problem was taken out way in advance of writing. I need to remember that lesson for the next thing I write! If I trust in my method, it usually works really well. When I don’t, it’s a disaster. Or can be. Or just needs a lot of work.

As I wrote, I added in a load of comments, which I went through one by one, either fixing simple things or noting down the bigger ones. Ended up with about forty big yins, including writing three new chapters to give a stronger start to the book. All done now and it’s just over 100k, which is my longest thing since... the first draft of Dodds 1 in 2014.

And here’s the draft cover:

Aye, I’ve called it THE TURNING OF OUR BONES. The title reflects the theme of the book, how we can be tortured by our past in a few different ways and choosing to let go so we can focus on the present and built a better future. (Almost sounds like it’s written by a smart person rather than this idiot.) A criminal profiler turned DI leading a team of cops in the Scottish Borders to investigate a twisted murder.

This week

So that’s off to my first-pass editor. Now it’s planning the release(s). I want to do a rapid hit of them, so I think I’ll publish this in October, then book 2 in January, book 3 in April and 4 in July. It sounds like a lot but my process is pretty optimal now so I’m confident. And I hope enough people buy them to make it worthwhile! It’s been a long time since I did a new book 1, so it’s quite a scary thing.

Anyway. Other things are underway.

Did a document outlining the changes I need to make to DIE ON MARS – before I make them! – which my agent/editor loves. God knows when I'll get enough time to make them, but I’ve written over 80k, so it’d be daft to leave it sitting around too long, especially as it’s close to being a really solid thing.

And today I did an outline for a new novella. I don’t have a title for it other than THE BAG MAN or SHUNTY’S FIRST DAY. It’s a prequel to THE TURNING OF OUR BONES, about one of the support characters who I grew to really love and one of the characters who wasn’t even in the outline but now has a strong back story. And sod it, I’m going to write it this week and publish it to the mailing list pretty soon. I like it, it’s bonkers and is based on a daft real-world cop story I heard from Neil Lancaster – if you haven’t read his books, please do.

Next off the rank after that will be doing the detailed outline for Fenchurch 9. I looked over my sales stats over the weekend and the 8th book has done surprisingly well for me in not that long a time, so I'm thinking I'll shift up the publishing schedule so they come out every six to eight months. Certainly won’t be as long a gap as the last few, which have been a year apart. Upshot is there’s unlikely to be any more in the Cullenverse for a loooong time.

And I want to get summarised outlines done for Marshall 2 and 3.

Anyway, hope you have a cracking week.

Oh – this is an interesting and entertaining read from my chum Mark Edwards about his painful writing career:

https://www.writing.ie/interviews/my-writing-life-no-place-to-run-by-mark-edwards/

Cheers,
Ed