I could definitely find a more gruesome video with that soundtrack, but that’s really weird.

And it’s September. This has been a hell of a quick year, hasn’t it?

Last week

This is going to be one of those weeks, I’m afraid! Managed over 20,000 words last week, which is higher than it feels it should’ve been. The way I’m writing it is making it feel like I’m doing something I’ll be proud of in future. Not all books are like that, some I have big reservations about (Hunter 2, for starters), but this one is feeling good. I like the flow and the character stuff. There’s a new guy I’ve added to this book and I’m enjoying writing him. It’s not subtle, but then Fenchurch never is. And part of the joy of not being subtle is twisting the knife in further down the line when you think you know certain facts.

This week

Well, it’s going to be touch and go whether I finish this week or early next. I’ve got nothing much on, whereas last week was an absolute nightmare for meetings and so on. If I get that same kind of output, then I’ll push it pretty close. It’s going to be a pretty long book, way longer than the last three, which is weird. I didn’t intend that, but it’s quite thick and gooey in a way. Strange!

Picking up a few tweaks to the story, such as adding characters into earlier scenes in the background to make feel them more alive, or tweaking bits of the story flow to tighten things up. So another couple of days on that, then a week to read it all through and see how it’s come out before editing.

And then… A lot of other projects in various stages of editing, which is a nice place to be. This is the last big project of this year that’ll come out this year, so I’ll have that sense of freedom and liberty back, to get on with more Marshall books for next year.

Speaking of next year, I think I’ll do another Dodds, tentatively called THE WILD HUNT or just WILD HUNT. Think I’ve got a really interesting idea for it, which will match nicely with GUILT TRIP.

I had a lovely walk in the (unexpected) sunshine in Edinburgh yesterday with some old pals from uni and it made me realise how much I love that city and kind of miss writing about it. This morning, I had a realisation that a story I was throwing around a lot early last year but ultimately rejected would work really nicely with Luke Shepherd involved. That’s burning away at the back of my brain. At some point I’ll open up the old loose outline and see if I can salvage it; I did a lot of cool character stuff in there and it was all thematically linked in a nice way.

That’s it on the writing front, but I posted this on Facebook on Saturday:

Spoke to a friend of a friend yesterday who'd been "offered a publishing" deal. You can probably see where this is going already. A 'hybrid' publisher offered to charge him £4.5k to publish his book. Bottom line – you are paid by publishers in exchange for your intellectual property, which they publish. You don't pay publishers to publish your book. There are tons of charlatans out there who will abuse the hopes and dreams of people. Beware of them.

This whole scam used to be called vanity publishing – it targets people who want to get their book out there, usually with so many lies (“we’ll get your book into x hundred shops”). All they’re doing is printing the book. Not publishing. They might edit and design covers, but it’s not the same as a publisher licensing your IP. It’s hugely profitable for them and you end up with a garage full of books you won’t sell. If anyone you know is talking about paying to get their book published, please have a kind word with them.

Anyway, enough from me. Have a great week.

Cheers,
Ed

source https://edjames.substack.com/p/inside-eds-head-clowns-to-the-left