DEVIL's due

Been a busy week for me, averaging over 2,000 words per day (and on some days hitting 3,500).  That might seem superhuman, but it is a mix of new writing and editing old stuff.  In all honesty, it’s the old stuff that’s the hard part, as there’s up to 3,000 words in some scenes and some of the detail has changed and so on.  Taking it from a 22,000 word novella to an 80k novel is a challenge but I’m finding it’s not stretched – there had been big chunks missing that I have not expanded into multiple scenes, a lot of the scenes that I had written have required expansion, and of course there’s a big subplot or two that I’ve put in, and some stuff that deals with the fall-out from GHOST IN THE MACHINE.  One of the big things I want to get across with the SCOTT CULLEN books – and I’m glad to see it reflected in some of the reviews – is that he’s young and inexperienced.  Most modern Detective books open with the embittered, alcoholic, divorced DI (I think Rankin is the one that set the tone in the mainstream, the others follow) and that’s great but not the story I want to tell.  Cullen is going to make his mistakes and receive his plaudits on the page.
Anyway, that digression aside, progress is good – I have completed 87% of the current draft, just 5,000 new words and 5,000 old words to get through.  And on that note:

DEVIL IN THE DETAIL will be published on 14 October 2012

There is a hell of a lot of work to get through between now and then.  I’ve got another two edit drafts before it’s passed onto my trusty editors. At some point in the next week or so, I will do the very minor redraft of GHOST and release that in a print version.  There is also a gap of about a month in there while it’s getting edited that I should really spend having a break but will inevitably spend plotting DYED IN THE WOOL and writing ALL IN A NAME.
Anyway, I’ve got a lot to do so that’s all from me.
(The super awesome picture above is courtesy of Society 6 – you can buy it as a poster.)
— Ed