Shadows & Ink 2025-10-13

Hey you. I didn’t quite get this out last night, but it’s here!

#Last Week

What I said last week which I was going to do this week:

“Hopefully I can this effing editing finished with enough time to do a good edit of the pair of the books this week (which will slip into next, let’s be honest). I’ve got the copy edit of Marshall 9 sitting there, but I want to get these nailed down to see if there’s anything I need to amend in that about Winter’s backstory. And there’s something concrete I do need to fix.”

Well, the reason this is a wee bit late is because I was finishing the edits... on one of them. Seem to have underestimated how long it was going to take me, but I’ve been through the screenplay for Winter 1 and I’m pretty pleased with the flow of the story. It needs a bit more of Winter herself in the next draft as it’s quite minimal, but I wanted to get the plot and other characters nailed down. In the end, it’s pretty far from the source material and will feel very different to those old books.

But I did have enough from the initial edits of both these books to finish off the Winter parts of Marshall 9 -- basically removing a plot line which will be threaded through the later books.

There’s an outside chance I’ll have paperbacks ready way ahead of schedule to sell at this event in November:

https://eastgatearts.com/events/ed-james-fear-of-any-kind/

#This Week

Plan for this week is to get the second book nailed down, starting today. I did a lot of work on simplifying and tightening the plot, so it’ll be interesting to see if I made it better and if it reads well now. I need to make up eighty pages of screenplay so they’re about the same length...

And after that’s done and off to be edited, I’ll have a think about Marshall 10.

Won’t be a missive next week as I’m planning a few days off (for once) at a very random time of year to finish off my big summer garden project. On Saturday, I shifted five tons of dyking stone, which had formerly been in a dyke. That’s a wall, so stop smirking at the back. I need to lay some sleepers in concrete then put down a couple more tons of pebbles in my drive. It never ends, or does it just feel like it?

#Stuff

If you like Wordle, then you might love this word game:

https://wordwormdormdork.com/subtext/

You get a word and you have to make anagrams from it. And you get points and point targets for the various tiers -- I try to get linguist every day. (There’s a hidden tier above where you get ALL the possible words.)

Example: WASTED is the word. You’ve got WASTE, EAST, DATE, DATES, SATE and SATED, just off the top of my head. It’s quite satisfying to keep dipping in over the course of the day.

Anyway, see you in a couple of weeks.

– Ed