Everyday is like Sunday

Poor Andy Murray – heartbreaking really.  That’s his best shot at Wimbledon, I think – next year he’ll get spanked by Nadal in the semis, no doubt.  He broke a national hoodoo but I think he’s got a better chance in Australia or the US.
Anyway, that’s a typical distraction from me – focusing on tennis rather than writing.  In truth, though I’ve done a lot this last week.  I’m back in my usual commute – no bloody London trips for the foreseeable future but that doesn’t mean they won’t happen – so I get roughly 1500 words written a day.  I’m up to 58% of the latest draft of DEVIL IN THE DETAIL, which is really extending it from novella length to full novel.  In all honesty, I’ve not stretched the story past breaking – if anything there are a few scenes I’ve under-baked that I’ll go back to and fix in the next draft – and it’s flowing well.  I’ve not come across the huge problems I had with GHOST where I had to perform radical surgery on it to make it work, this story flows a lot better. I’ve pretty much run out of old material, and it’s into writing new stuff from scratch – I’m finding that to be a lot easier and higher quality than picking through the old stuff.  The hell that I took myself to in DEVIL is really paying dividends just now.
I get asked a couple of questions on twitter a lot – is GHOST coming out in paperback, and when is DEVIL out?
The first one is easier – I’ve got a copy editor going through it just now for me, and I hope to get stuck into it between drafts of DEVIL.  That would mean that I’m about 2-3 weeks away from devoting some time to it – I might set aside a couple of evenings this week to correct the manuscript.  The service I’m using is Amazon’s CreateSpace (yep, all roads lead to Amazon for the indie author) which gives a print on demand (POD) service for a low-ish cost, and avoids the upfront costs the vanity press have.  It won’t be 99p, unfortunately.
DEVIL due date?  Well, you can see above that I’m firing through it – I’d expect to take another 3-4 weeks after this draft to really hone the manuscript (at a more line-by-line level) and then send it to my editors.  I’ve had a really good offer from a reasonably well-known crime author to do some editing which I will definitely be taking up.  I think I’m still on track for the middle of October and that includes a lot of work from me, and from others.  That’s a stretch but the wait will be worth it to the readers, I think.
Final thing – sales of GHOST are going well, had my second best week ever last week.  Given that I haven’t done much of the Amazon hacking that’s prevalent I feel pretty pleased with it.
Okay, final final thing – something I forgot to add to the end of GHOST – if you really liked it (or even if you didn’t), it would mean a hell of a lot to me if you could take some time to post a review to Amazon.  I’ve currently got four 4-star and eight 5-star, which is really blowing my mind.
Keep an eye on twitter for my progress updates through the week.
— Ed