Okay, so last week came and went without an update. I’ll try to send these on a Monday morning, which is what I used to do before I stopped and then restarted. Hopefully it’ll be a better experience.
(Though my fingers aren’t warmed up and that paragraph took a lot longer to type than I’d have liked.)
That was the week that was
Last week, I managed to read-edit the eighth Fenchurch book, A HILL TO DIE ON, which is due out 1st December and has a healthy number of preorders. Having done 32 police procedurals, it’s almost like I can write these things on autopilot, but there’s always some bloody hellish nightmare in there, and usually towards the end. Anyway, it’s done and off for some initial editing of story and police procedure.
I’m pretty proud of it, now it’s done, but I really need a break from writing that genre. I’m just burnt out.
What next?
Well, I’ve got to do the final proof of The Last Drop, the sixth and final Cullen & Bain story, which will take a few hours. That’s due 1st November and it’ll feel good to get that closed off. Not planning any more books in that universe for a good while.
And my focus over the next month or will be:
First, I spent a few weeks this summer, as well as an enjoyable few days up in the Highlands, reworking my old vampire novel, SHOT THROUGH THE HEART, into a psychological thriller. Nothing much survived, but the setting and characters. And it was a bit of a mess, to be honest. I couldn’t finish it, so I’ve got some ideas on how to alter the characters and motivations to make everything work very well. It’s now called LOST CAUSE and, all being well, should be out in Spring next year. My experiment for this book will be on doing the audiobook to launch at the same time as the ebook and paperback, which should be fun. This might delay things a wee bit, but we shall see.
And the other stuff will be time spent on developing ideas. I took a few weeks in January to ease myself back in to working after my heart issues last year, and developed three or four ideas, none of which I actually wrote because I decided I needed to work on police procedurals. Ach well. Anyway, my list of solid ideas is now into the teens.
The difficulty I had earlier in the year was deciding what to write and when. If I do a Cullen, a Dodds or a Fenchurch, I kind of know there’s both a floor and a ceiling to sales, so it’s hard to be disappointed as the expectations are set right at the start. But doing something new, well it could be a massive success (obviously, you have to imagine it will be), but it is more likely to be a crushing failure (see the aforementioned vampire novel). While LOST CAUSE is much more on-genre, albeit not a police procedural and a standalone, it’ll help pay the bells, while three of those ideas are different genres and settings, so it’ll give me some space and time to work on stuff.
So yeah, that’s me.
I still miss Misty and thanks for all the lovely notes I got back. I think I did a lot of grieving for her while she was still alive, and then I had a few days where I was a complete mess, but I realise I miss the dog she was, rather than what she’d become towards the end, and living with an ill pet is extremely stressful.
Anyway. Onwards!
Let me know if you’re enjoying these and any thoughts for what else you’d like to see in them. Have a great week.
Cheers,
Ed
We lost our Westie, Jess, last year suddenly, so for us that stress was missing but the grieving was hard and I still miss her. I hope your happy memories of your time with her will help you through this.