Aye, that’s a Steely Dan lyric:

When I was doing karaoke a few years ago, that came on randomly when the fella was setting up the machine. So of course I had to sing it. Never had so many complaints in my life.

Anyway, today’s been a Steely Dan day. I used to hate them, then they became a guilty pleasure, but now I have no shame in admitting I love them.

Station Ident

I’m Ed James. I write crime novels, mainly police procedurals, mostly set in Scotland or London, but not exclusively. You signed up to read my weekly witterings, so here is this week’s dose.

Last week

Well, thank you all for the positive vibes around THE TURNING OF OUR BONES. Still not got concrete plans around its release yet, but in the last week I’ve written a prequel short, now entitled FALSE START. Which is a better name than SHUNTY’S FIRST DAY. I thought I was going to be able to finish it today, but the story didn’t make any sense when I got around to the ending, so I’ve just spent a few hours unpicking it and coming up with an alternative that I like a lot better. It plays into the main character’s backstory nicely. The story’s about DS Rakesh Siyal, who is DI Marshall’s sidekick in the main book, but this is the story of how he come to be known as Shunty. What started out as being a daft throwaway piece has grown arms and legs. It’s currently sitting at 15k, and will probably hit 20k in the final throes. A round of edits, then it’ll be ready for people to read, which I’m pretty excited about.

In other news, GUILT TRIP came out on Friday. DI Vicky Dodds’s fifth outing and it’s doing nicely, way better than I expected. A lot of really positive reviews on Amazon and healthy sales. Whether they’re healthy enough to warrant another book is another matter entirely, though. We shall see!

Did a chunk of work re-sequencing DIE ON MARS. Not much has changed yet, a lot of splitting some whopping big chapters up, splitting them across two POV characters rather than one. There’s a big section at the end that’s shifting to a third POV character and happening concurrently with the stuff on Mars, along with about 3-4 new chapters from her perspective. I’ll try and get the shape of it done this week, then refine some of the story interactions and get the B-story beefed up and working.

Next week

Well, it’s going to be finishing and editing FALSE START, which I think is a nice wee novella in the style of CUDDLY TOY. Comes in, says hello, messes about it, then clears off leaving you wanting more. And once that’s done, I’ll try and get the changes made to DIE ON MARS. That’ll leave me clear to get on with Fenchurch 9, which is starting to weigh me down, but I think I’ll enjoy getting reacquainted with the grumpy old bugger.

Anyway, that’s me. Hope you’re okay. It’s a bloody weird world still. Take care of yourselves.

Cheers,
Ed

source https://edjames.substack.com/p/inside-eds-head-sharing-the-things