Muse

I’m keeping myself busy just now while my editors paw all over DEVIL IN THE DETAIL. My muse shows no sign of giving up so I’m keeping a few irons in the fire as it were.
I’m just about there with the GHOST IN THE MACHINE paperback – using createspace seems just as much fun as KDP. I love Amazon and the opportunity they offer but it’s very reminiscent of hand-coding websites in HTML in 1998…
I’m carrying out an experiment in using Scrivener instead of Word for the writing process. I’ve blogged before about it but it’s essentially not just a word processor – it’s got a lot of workflow and outlining tools as well, and crucially keeps all your notes in one place, rather than the various spreadsheets and txt files I’ve got underway just now. I’m finding out that it’s not perfect for the very start of the process – I draw lots of tube map diagrams and have a spreadsheet which helps assess the quality of the scene. I have used the spreadsheet to track and detail the flow of the story and this is where Scrivener comes in.
What I’ve been using to road test it is WHISKY IN THE JAR. I wrote this as a short story but in reality it was a bit compressed. What’s been a 3k short story will be a nearer 15-20k novella. I plan to get it up on Kindle soonish, though the cost for a POD version would be prohibitive. It’s set a few months after DEVIL and I’ve got another novella set in the same timeframe, ALL IN A NAME, which I plan to get cracking on at some point as well.
I want to use the next month to nail down the other stories I’ve got – DYED IN THE WOOL (book 3), BEAST IN THE SHADOW (book 4), DROP IN THE OCEAN (a buddy cop novella), and a couple of others I haven’t got titles for – a family one and one about animals…
Keeping busy, and I’m really happy with how things are going. I’ve sold over 250 novels, had 25 4/5* reviews and this morning I had an advert from Amazon, advertising GHOST IN THE MACHINE at me…
— Ed