There's a famous Chinese curse that saays, "May you live in interesting times". I think I understand it fully now; this year has certainly been interesting.

January to May - wall-to-wall work. Long hours, frequent trips to Chicago and Boston, presure, reports, meetings... hectic!

April; Redundancies announced. Engineering and certification going to Barcelona, manufacturing going 300 miles up to the north of England. I'm offered a job as a Certification Engineer at Barcelona, but it's a step down and certainly nowhere near the wage I was on.

I was last in a redundancy situation during a recession in the mid-eighties, and all I can say is: a lot has changed! No more handwritten letters, stacks of envelopes, sore tongue from licking stamps: the Web has certainly revolutionised job searching. I made a resolution  to apply for at least two jobs a day, and I was able to do so. Also unlike the last recession I was caught in, there do seem to be jobs around now.

April-June - if I'd been working "hard" before, I was working "diamond" now, trying to crystallise 11 years of work so someone else could take over from me. Interspersed in the panic and chaos were three job interviews, and the third one did the trick. A job starting at the beginning of July, for slightly more money, in a job sector I wanted to get into.

June 30: Redundancy Day. I didn't get everything done, but what the hey? At least I managed to list what needed doing.

July 1: A day of freedom. 11 years' redundancy. 24 days' holiday pay. A month's wages. I was flush for the first time in a long time. As my morning commute was going from 20 minutes to an hour, I bought a new car, a diesel, to up my MPG. It would mean getting up at 5 in the morning as well, since my route was mostly on the M1 southbound and the M25 anti-clockwise towards Heathrow Airport: two of the worst roads in England.

July 4 to date: Work, Jim, but not as we know it. I actually have time to write reports and prepare for meetings, and I'm actually getting stuff done. The morning traffic's not too bad in the early a.m., and the site opens at 7:00 anyway. Since the company operates a semi-flexitime policy, I can start at 7 a.m. and finish at 3:45 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 3:30 on a Friday. And nobody looks sideways at you if you leave on time, either. So I think I can say I'm enjoying it.

And these early finishes are giving me the opportunity to write again.  I'm 50,000 words into Book 7 and looking to finish it. Being slightly stuck at the 50k point, I've decided to write the book climax to the end, and that's going pretty well. I like what I'm seeing.

So apologies for not giving updates more regularly, but after a nightmare year, I am now writing again. I am aiming for a November-December, 2011 release.

Well, the last day of 2010 sees my books at #1, #6 and #7 bestsellers at Whiskey Creek Press. I'm now 11 chapters into Book 7 and looking forward to finishing in February.

Thanks to all those who have bought or downloaded my books (except for the pirates), and I hope you all had a marvellous Christmas and wish you a happy and prosperous New Year!

Book 1 is the #1 Whiskey Creek Press bestseller for October 2010. My books are also #2, #5, #6, #7 and #10.

I'm beginning to feel guilty about this monopoly of the bestseller list!

"Questor" is #1 at Whiskey Creek Press for September, and "A Mage in the Making" is #6. Up to 5 chapters of Book 7 on fanstory.com now, so perhaps 1/5 of the way through.

I have started putting Book 7 chapters on www.fanstory.com under my old handle Big Al. I'm pleased to say, they're receiving good reviews.

If you're interested, you can see the book as it evolves there.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I got a lot of the way through Book 7 (provisionally entitled "Redemption"), only to toss it in the bin when I felt it wasn't going anywhere. Since then, I must have typed 50,000 more words, only to trash them.

However, after countless false starts, and a lot of encouragement with quite a bit of kicking from my publishers, Whiskey Creek Press, I sat down and started to think hard rather than typing blind.

I reasoned that for a 100,000-word book, I would need about 22 chapters of my habitual 4,500-word length. So I started to type out 22 chapter headings with brief synopses - something I've never done before. It was then that I realised that the new ideas I'd had rejected (because the beginning didn't seem to lead to anything, and the imagined ending didn't seem to come from anywhere)  could, with a little tweaking, very neatly bookend the 72,000 words of pointless fluff I'd tossed in the proverbial bin. They gave the concepts a reason, a background and a resolution - in other words, the making of a full-sized book.

I'm still not out of the woods - there needs to be a considerable amount of revamping and segueing-in - but I am a lot happier now and believe I can do this thing.

It feels good!

My first book is No. 1 at Whiskey Creek Press again... and others are at nos. 4, and 7, and 9!

To those patient and kind people waiting for Book 7, apologies again. Work is a monster at the moment (and has been for over a year. I would love to be able to spend all my time Grimming, but I do need to finance it with a day job (proverbially, I'd be foolish to give it up!) 

So I plug away...

...and use a lot of ellipses!

Three years and still going strong! "A Mage in the Making" is the #1 bestseller for Whiskey Creek Press once more, and for the second time is #1 in Fantasy at Fictionwise.com. Two of the other books are in the WCP top ten, and all six are in the top 20 on Fictionwise!

A Happy and Prosperous New Year to everyone!

I have had a few inquiries now about Book 7, working title: "Redemption".

This time last year, I thought I was comfortably on course for a November, 2009 release. I had something around 85,000 words, ³/₄ of the way towards a good-length novel. However, 'round about April, two things happened:

• I realised the story I had been writing was going around and around, not getting anywhere
• My workload increased dramatically

Initially, I tried to patch up what I had of Book 7, but I soon lacked the free time to work on it.

Now, in late December, 2009, the situation is as follows:

• I have a new beginning for the novel, which, I believe, sets up a pretty exciting showdown
• In developing the plot, I am seeing how I can work into the new structure the best of the work I had already written
• After faffing around for ages, I now have a solid first couple of chapters which form a good basis on which to build

I am currently hoping for a release by the summer, but will update this blog as I go along. Since I already have a mass of unused material on which I can call, my estimate may be on the pessimistic side: I hope so.

To everyone who has expressed an interest, thank you for reading, and watch this space! 

My pair of short stories, "Frozen Stiff" and "The Last Laugh", sold under the compilation, "Whiskey Shots Vol. 4" will be selling for 99 cents throughout January.

A work of fiction may have breathtaking descriptions of great, rolling vistas and a plot more cunning than Past Masters Night at the Guild of Super-Spies. The narrative may be so devoid of fluff and redundancy that it is held up by eminent professors of English as the ultimate model of crisp, efficient literature.  Perhaps your droll, inventive, downright-hilarious asides make Thurber and Wodehouse seem like Creative Writing 101 drop-outs in comparison.

However, narrative is fine as far as it goes, but it is limited pretty much to the single sense of sight. Human beings have at least five senses, and emotions to boot. If your book is truly to immerse the reader, they need someone to sample the world’s delights for him or her, and to pass it on to them undiluted. The world you have created is likely to need inhabitants or characters to act as a reader’s avatars in your fictional world.

Effective characters don’t have to be human – you did cry when Hazel died, didn’t you? – but they do need to have something in common with your presumably human target audience. Do most rabbits’ demises have that effect on you? Is it possible that the Watership Down rabbits were a little more human than most real rabbits? That was an artistic choice by the author, Richard Adams, so he could avoid having to use the dry Omniscient Point Of View (of which more in a later post) and involve his readers directly. The same trick was pulled by Richard Bach in the 1960s hit hippie novella, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

It’s hard to see a book describing the real behaviour of either real-world rabbits or seagulls catching on, let alone becoming bestsellers. But by adding some senses, emotion, dialogue and struggle, the reader becomes involved to some extent.

But of course, I’m preaching to the choir. Of course your novel has characters; interesting ones with fascinating back-stories and roles, I’ll be bound.

However, characters involve far more effort than many first-time authors would believe. Among the most common reasons for rejection letters are failing either to develop characters or to make the reader care what happened to them.  I will touch on fleshing out characters and developing them in more detail later on, but the more common failings would seem to be:

·         It is difficult to ‘get to know’ the character due to lack of specific characteristics. What do they look like? What do they like? Who are their friends?

·         The character is perfect in every way – boring! The protagonist’s evil nemesis is far more interesting

·         The action is only expressed in description, or at best what the characters see and hear. There’s no smell, touch, taste, thought or emotion

·         Any emotion is only handled by adverbs in dialogue tags (e.g., ‘”Get out!” he said angrily’), instead of expressed by actions (‘He balled his fists until the knuckles turned the colour of ivory. He hissed through clenched teeth, “Get out!”’)

·         The characters are all similar: you know the next good guy will be perfectly saintly, and a bad guy must be irredeemably evil

·         The characters never learn from mistakes, or they never make them. They never suffer from self-doubt, indecision or frustration

·         The characters never eat, drink, sleep or do anything other than their day job

"A Mage in the Making" is the Whiskey Creek Press #1 Bestseller for December 2009, as it was in June 2007, July 2007 and September 2007!

"The Dark Priory" is #4 and "Dragonblaster" is #5.

There really is only one basic way to become a writer. There are several variations on it, such as writing words on paper, carving it in stone or typing it into a word processor. You could have the most incendiary idea for a novel ever to hit the crowded world of pubishing, but if you don't make the (often considerable) effort to write it, nobody will ever know about it except you.

This may sound trite, but it never fails to amaze me when people talk about "my novel" but have nothing to show for it. I know a lot of people who are convinced they have some stonking ideas that will set the literary world ablaze, but haven't written a word of it down. They have only the shadiest concept of even the main protagonist, little idea of setting, pacing, conflict, resolution... and they'll never have more unless they start to write.

I have all the original handwritten drafts of the Grimm Dragonblaster series up to about halfway through the third book. It's awful. It's way over the top on adjectives, adverbs, dialogue tags and verbiage, and it's nothing at all like the published versions. But what it actually is 270,000 words of writing that turned me from someone with an idea into a writer.

It's not all that important what you write, or even how good it is at first. Just get used to writing regularly and often. That really is all there is to do it. Writing doesn't make you a #1 New York Times Bestseller, but it does make you an author.

And I can tell you, that actually getting to the (actual or conceptual) words, "THE END" is more than the whole, vast legion of wannabes with vague ideas ever do except in their dreams. And it feels great!