This is the New Year and I don't feel any different

Status Report 2022-01-03

It’s Monday, that means it’s more from inside my nut.

Happy New Year!

Hope you had a good one. I had a pretty quiet one myself, though I was out for a walk and some food with two friends on the 30th. We’ve got restrictions again up here, so it’s wise to play it safe.

Christmas gets a lot of songs—good, bad and very ugly like that McCartney one—but New Year doesn’t get so many. Just Auld Lang’s Syne and this that come to mind:

I’m a big fan of Death Cab For Cutie. The vocalist has a really unusual singing voice, but has a way of creating some evocative and emotional music. Also highly recommend his album with Dntel under the name The Postal Service, which is more electronic. Hope you enjoy that (though it’s not their best song, that would be I Will Follow You Into The Dark).

Also, the band called The New Year are very good if you like angular American indie.

Last week

So, last week was a working week and that meant a lot of thinking, chewing things over and more thinking.

Amazon told me I’d sold no books yesterday, which was a bit of a concern and had me in a mad panic. Turns out their system wasn’t reporting them, so they’ve all hit today and skewed some of my reporting. Hey ho, at least my career isn’t broken like I feared!

On the topic of Hunter, this came out on Hogmanay, exclusive to my mailing list, so can get it for nowt by signing up here:

Cuddly Toy (a Craig Hunter short)

(you can grab it and unsubscribe straight away)

The rest of the time?

I listened to a podcast today about a lawyer giving up his legal practise to follow his passion and he talked about “running downhill”, that feeling that you’re just doing all the time, without necessarily thinking it through. And it’s a struggle that resonated with me and all the work I’ve been through in the last year.

The idea I had was to do a couple of quick Hunter books this year, so I sat down and started outlining the first one, but I just couldn’t. Something got stuck in my head. Not writer’s block, but writer’s apathy. I’ve been writing crime novels for over ten years now and some of the stuff I’ve covered has taken a bit of a mental toll on me, especially a certain topic I’ve covered more than once. So I think I need to take a break from that kind of thing. Upshot is that I’m still planning on doing the next Hunter book, THE PRISONER OF WAR, for April/May/June, which will be a pretty easy thing to write and edit, whilst giving all the fans of the first three something nice and chewy. But, at least for now, THE GUILTY won’t be happening. Sorry if that’s annoyed anyone, but I just can’t.

So, what have I actually been doing?

Writing again! Two days in a row. Science fiction too, a two-part novella that will become clear in time, letting me dramatise the backstory of the two leads, but focusing on one of them. And it’s really strange writing sci-fi again. I did a novel over a couple of years called FUTURE SHOCK that was an absolute disaster. A lot of words in search of a plot. This time, though, I’ve got two novellas and three novels with very clear ideas and a clearer strategy on how to execute it.

But there’s something about writing in that genre, which must be similar to historical fiction, where everything feels so much harder than writing crime. A police procedural has its police procedure for me to get wrong, obviously, but really I’m just writing about everyday people in everyday situations in places I know well. If I’m writing about the future or being in space or whatever, everything needs careful thought. Everything! I had to replan two chapters this morning when I actually did some research into the physics of a certain aspect of the story. I’ve got a degree in mathematics, but physics absolutely baffles me. Still, I managed to get enough of an understanding of it, and it gave me a few twists of the knife for the main character.

So, it feels like it’s going to be well worth doing, if very painful. My progress so far has been a chapter a day, which is very slow for me. Part of this exercise is to see if I like doing it. And I seem to, just need to factor in that extra time. Or maybe I’ll get better at researching. I spent a whole day tidying up ten years of research in DEVONthink, an app that houses tens of thousands of news stories I’ve saved over the years, on various subjects. A useful way to spend the time and gave me a nice clean feeling afterwards.

This week

This week’s going to be one of those ones where I just get my head down and write as much as I can manage. Get through it. Try to enjoy it, not push myself too hard.

One of my favourite walking paths is (mostly) open again after Storm Arwen, though the trees at the top are a mite buggered, so I have to David Bellamy the hell out of it, cutting a swathe through the low branches. Meeting a few other dogs and Bessi is getting a wee bit better at not losing her sh— mind when she sees one, but she doesn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between a dog and a cyclist, the dafty.

Anyway, I hope you have a good week. Let me know what you think of Cuddly Toy, if you read it.

Cheers,
Ed