When I see you smiling

Status Report 2022-02-14

First, some sad news. Lost a cat on Thursday. Poor wee Pickle (I’ll not traumatise you with the details). She was a feisty wee bugger, had her since March 2009 and she was at least fourteen—the downside of rescuing animals is you rarely have their exact details. I think she must’ve been feral as you couldn’t even touch her at the start, but she eventually got so tame that I could carry around the house. That said, her vet record did have CARE written in giant red letters, and with good reason. Not many cats leave a literal mark like that.

Still, two cats and two dogs in six months has been brutal, so this week’s song is something a bit more uplifting.

This is from Richard Ashcroft’s recent album, Acoustic Hymns Vol 1. Whether there’ll be a second volume, who knows, but that collected some of his more poppy songs from the Verve and his solo years. This one features Liam Gallagher and is a kind of duet between them. Amazingly, Liam actually sings on it too, as opposed to growling (he pretty much ruins Echo and the Bunnymen’s Nothing Lasts Forever with his WAH WAH shouting).

This song has a personal resonance with me. Back in my first year at university in 1996, I was obsessed with the Verve. This was before their comeback with Urban Hymns, which was pretty mainstream, so was the space rock of A Storm In Heaven and the bluesy A Northern Soul (my favourite by far). Word got around that there was a demo of their next album on bootleg and—lo and behold—my mate Scott Wilson (now Sports Editor of the Northern Echo) managed to get a hold of it. It had six tracks, three of which were on Urban Hymns, but my favourites were the ones excluded. Song For The Lovers and Oh Sister (never released) were really raw and emotional, but Come On People had a real hook to it. And positivity.

I mean, yes, it does rip off The Four Tops, but there you go. Hope you enjoy it. God knows I need a bit of sunshine just now!

Last Week

I managed to do a pretty solid edit of LOST CAUSE, which is what I set out to do. In the end, I made some fairly severe changes to it, but when I finished editing on Saturday evening (aye, that’s how rock and roll I am now), I said out loud, “That’s pretty bloody good.”

I’m not going mad, promise.

I finished it at lunchtime and took Bessi for a punishing hike up through Plora Woods near Walkerburn and Innerleithen, one of my favourites, except for dodging the vans ferrying lazy mountain bikers up to the top — surely cycling is about going uphill too?

That book was supposed to be a quick hit, taking something I’d written years ago, which was a massive failure, and turning it into something nice and simple. It’s been four massive drafts to get here, and I would’ve been much quicker writing something new from scratch.

Those old books, with their seductive written words, whispering in your ear, “Just finish me, Ed, it’ll be so easy, it’s like it’s already done.”

Well, the written words only help if they’re the right ones.

But they’re very right now, I think. The story has a real emotional journey for the protagonists, as well as a physical one, and I’m really happy with it.

I’ve agreed a narrator for the audiobook edition, so barring a catastrophe, that should come out on the same day.

This Week

So, what’s on the docket for this week? Truth is, I just don’t know. I’m pretty exhausted. Hell of a lot of stuff I could do, it’s all about whether I should. Sorry it’s not more specific, but I think a good chunk of this week will be spent on replanning. Probably wise to do that after every project.

One of the things I’m thinking about is a brand-new series of police procedurals. The last new one I did was Hunter back in May 2016, which actually feels like yesterday. I suppose I technically started Cullen and Bain two years ago and have turned SNARED into a four-books-and-counting series for Vicky Dodds, but I can’t help feel I need to start something new and meaty. A lot of the bigger successes just now seem to be new stuff launched in the last couple of years.

There’s a very detailed outline done for a book one that I haven’t had the courage to confront writing. The block wasn’t the story so much as the format, so there’ll be a lot of thinking about that over the next few days. I’ve been playing around with some book covers for the first three in a series, so I need to give the actual stories some shape and attention. I might try doing a series bible for it, which is a TV thing, outlining where the story should go, as well as the characters involved and their journeys. All part of this year of shoring stuff up, I guess.

Speaking of which, I’ve been messing about with some new covers for the Vicky Dodds books to support the launch of GUILT TRIP in August. I know, it’s an affliction. I am a very sick man. I’ll hopefully finish those two.

And I might tackle editing that vampire novella to make it a bit more daft. It’ll be a freebie to support LOST CAUSE’s launch.

Hope this week is good to you. You deserve it. Let me know if you enjoy these missives!

Cheers,
Ed