The Queen died last week, which has saddened a great many in the nation. It’s also a huge change for this country, a change that’s a few generations in one go, given her seventy years on the throne. It’s a testament to her service that she got off her deathbed to accept Liz Truss as the new Prime Minister just two days before she passed away.I don’t know anyone who remembers what life was like under a king – my parents are in their early 70s, so while they did live under the last king, they were way too young to remember (and my mother lived in India until she was five). These interesting times we’ve been living in have just got even more interesting.

Last week

Anyway. I finished Fenchurch 9!

Well, the first draft of it. Managed to clear 24k this week and get to the end of the first draft. It needs a fair amount of work to it, but holy hell it’s an ordeal for my two protagonists this time around.

Left it a bit late this time, but I think I’ve got time for this to come out okay.

Fenchurch is a bloody rogue in this one, but hopefully a sympathetic one. And the other viewpoint character goes through a real maelstrom. I can’t wait to get this out to people to see what you think. Just under three months until it’ll be on your Kindles!

This week

As I went through the first draft, I made a ton of comments and notes on things I need to fix. A lot of them were forward looking, i.e. make sure I do something in the chapters I’ve yet to write, but most were in previous chapters, so adding in some details or correcting some potential plot issue. That’ll be a few days worth of work to tidy up, but it just needs one more read through from me and it’s ready to be edited. Phew.

Aside from that, I’ve got a bit of space this coming weekend to figure out what to work on next. I’ll be back to my natural habitat of juggling multiple projects at once, which keeps me sane.

DIE ON MARS, my sci-fi novel, is the next cab off the rank as they say. Hopefully it’ll be a couple of weeks worth, then I’ll be back to the world of DI Rob Marshall. And I’ve got some ideas on what to do with Fenchurch next. How to move him into a new world, which I find pretty exciting.

I’ve typed this on my new keyboard – a Logitech MX Mac one that Mark Edwards recommended over the Apple Magic Keyboard. I seem to batter through them in two years, so hopefully this one will last a bit longer, but it’s taking a bit of a while to get used to it. It’s a bit wider than the old one and has harder key travel, so I have to type a bit harder on this. And there’s a weird thing about the sequence I have to press the keys in. And I’m not used to where the arrow keys are I’ll get there – it’s not like I don’t have a lot of books to work on…

Have a great week.

Cheers,
Ed

source https://edjames.substack.com/p/inside-eds-head-end-of-an-era