Updates...

Well, it's been a busy week for me so far - lots of work.

Proctor:  The Art of Killing

As you may be aware from earlier posts, I'm currently writing Proctor: The Art of Killing.  I'm only 2000 words in to it, but the plot's shaping up in to a nice romp.  I'm not sure if the first chapter starts a bit slowly - the story largely takes place in a single place, so I'm getting the geography out of the way.  I might stick a hook in at the start.

Which brings me to a constant debate among writers (I'm a member in a few writers groups and I see a lot of 'How-To's).  A large number of aspiring writers buy in to the hook and a lot of the drafts and first chapters I see launch in to action with brutal deformed aliens ripping through crowds of civilians and along comes our hero space marine.  Sorry, but for me, that would normally be as far as I'd go.  I try to give a book a fair stab and I'll read a couple or three chapters, but if it hasn't done something that's piqued my intellectual curiosity by then, I'm afraid I consign it to the 'also-ran' pile.  I wonder how many respond to the lack of a definitive hook in my first few pages in the same way?  My hope is that the environment I set is in itself interesting and anyway, in none of my books do you have to wait too long for the action to start coming thick and fast...

So here's the start of The Art of Killing.

"Chapter One

Going underground.

Even just wearing light armour, some of the gaps were a squeeze, and it was warmer than Proctor thought it would be. When he planned his journey through the caves he imagined cold wet walls, and streams running underfoot. He'd been right about the streams, but it wasn't cold. Proctor had been in caves before, but never much further than the cave mouth. He'd been down mines to flush out cowering civilians, though generally the cult-marine approach had just been to lob in a few explosives and close off all the exits. Moved things right along from living and free to buried and forgotten about without all the usual messy middle stages.

When he'd given it a little more thought, it made sense. It occurred to Proctor that the rock and earth above them would act as a good insulator so the caves might well have a temperature close to the average of the land above. Perhaps in most places, caves might be a few degrees cooler, but these caves lay under an enormous mountain range and geothermal vents reached from deep below, bubbling steam and exotic elements through the foothills. It made the air in the caves warm and moist and left a tang of minerals and sulphur on his tongue.

The mountain range swept in increasing height and ruggedness from the northern polar regions, past the equator where it began once again to drop before reaching most of the way to the south polar region in an arc that encircled a third of the planet, starting and ending in a string of islands. The central string of jagged rocky snow covered peaks hinted at the planet's violent history of plate tectonics, and mineral wealth leached out of the mountains both sides. To the west it bordered a vast ocean, but the greatest wealth of the mountain range was to be found to the east, north of the equator where the mountains were tallest, reaching heights up to forty thousand feet. Here, the mountains skirted a broad continent's west coast. The land mass stretched out eastwards through foothills which opened out to broad grasslands and eventually desert then the sea. Hundreds of miles further north, a broad river marked the northern border of the grasslands and deserts. It took water away from the mountains through forests that started as thin scrubby bushes in the foothills and grew in height, density and variety as the river wound it's way through the more temperate regions towards the distant east coast."

So what do you think?  Does it make you want to read on or would you rather a few people got killed early on?


Proctor: The Art of Living.

This has been available on kindle for a couple of weeks now.  Sales have been predictably slow - without a marketing machine behind it, no one's going to hear about it.  That should be partially resolved when Night Time in Shanghai is published and the publisher do some marketing for that.

A couple of people have told me they don't have a Kindle.  You don't need one.  If you have a smart phone, you can download the Kindle App here or through Android/ Apple Stores.  I tend to do most of my reading using my phone, though I also have the Kindle App on my tablet and PC.

Get your copy.

Night Time in Shanghai.

This week saw the arrival of the proofs for Night Time in Shanghai and is the reason why I haven't increased the word count of The Art of Killing.  I don't want anything to delay the publication of this, my first novel, so pretty much from the moment the manuscript arrived, until I'd completed the work I needed to do on it, that was all I did.

There wasn't much for me to do, really.  Typos mostly, and the editor liked the story and was particularly complimentary about the way I build characters and my over-all writing style, so that put a smile on my face.  No major re-writes were needed - a few sentences were changed to make their sense a little more clear, but that was it.  The editing job was thorough without interfering with either the meaning or flow of the story, so I'm very pleased.

It was also very good to see the layout too.

I returned the files the day after.  The next step is to apply all the tracked changes and then the proofs come back to me for a final sign-off.  That leaves the cover and the marketing.  I'm looking forwards to seeing the cover, though it is taking longer than I expected.  Whether this is because the image I asked for is complicated (which it is) or whether other, more pressing jobs, have taken precedence, I don't know.  It shouldn't be long now.

Personal.

On a personal note, I'm slowly gearing up towards the changes that 2016 will bring.  My daughter, Natasha has been invited to Northampton Uni for a look around, and we need to sort out her halls, then, for her, it's head-down and get the results in her A Levels to make certain of her place.

I've been looking at more boats.  I've seen a nice cruiser that's already all fitted out to live-aboard.  I just need to hope that there's things like that available when I'm finally in a position to buy.

In the mean time, I have a lot of stuff to get rid of and other stuff I'll need to put into storage for a little while.

Interesting times ahead.....