Just a note to say that GHOST IN THE MACHINE is now available on non-Amazon sales channels – Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, Sony, Apple iBooks plus a few others.  Here are some links, but check your usual site (DEVIL is still tied in to Amazon till mid-January, unfortunately):
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ghost-in-the-machine-ed-james/1113887414?ean=2940045100175
http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Ghost-in-the-Machine/book-G7XvLvSTakyeYRx8HHhOaQ/page1.html?s=rRvF4LCjXE-1vMOzGDQy0g&r=1
Do let me know if you’ve actually bought the book through a non-Amazon channel – 99.9% of my sales have come from Amazon (86% UK, 13% US and 0.9% Createspace UK), so it would be good to see if I’ve actually got some non-Amazon fans out there…
— Ed
 

Just a quick note to say that I won’t be publishing FIRE IN THE BLOOD on 19th December.  I’ve currently only written 31 of 62 scenes (over 50,000 words) so I’ve got a long way to go, what with editing, reviewing and proofing.  I’ve put it back to 19th January, which is attainable and gives me enough stress to deliver – I only thrive on pressure, which isn’t healthy but it’s how I roll.
Thanks for the interest and just to confirm that this will be SCOTT CULLEN BOOK THREE, and that DYED IN THE WOOL will be BOOK FOUR.
— Ed

Just spotted another five-star review for GHOST –

“Despite the fact that Ghost in the Machine was written by an indie author, instead of a famous one, did not have the benefit of a professional editor [yes, there are a few typos but only a few], and did not quite have enough character development for my tastes, the story was such a good read that I intend to buy the next book in the series.  I’m also putting Ed James on my Watch List because he is a young author going places. Highly recommended.”

http://acflory.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/ghost-in-the-machine-a-review/
A positive review – comparisons with Rebus and Rankin – and quite an insightful one.  One of the intentions with Cullen is to avoid starting with the cliched detective who is a DI/DCI/DCS, an alcoholic, a divorcee, who drives a classic car and who has a troubled relationship with his offspring (Rankin established the template, it’s the people who follow that I have a problem with!).  Cullen is young, idealistic and will make the mistakes and fuck-ups on the page.  Just you watch…
Buy GHOST IN THE MACHINE (Scott Cullen book one)-
UK Kindle – http://amzn.to/Ih2ros
US Kindle – http://amzn.to/IzknfQ
– Ed

Had a five star review from ebookwyrm for GHOST –
http://ebookwyrm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/ghost-in-machine.html?m=0

A very well written police procedural novel set in and around Edinburgh that may well lead to comparisons with the likes of Mark Billingham and Ian Rankin and in my opinion those comparisons would be well deserved … As a first novel this was a highly enjoyable and accomplished effort.

Buy GHOST IN THE MACHINE (Scott Cullen book one)-
UK Kindle – http://amzn.to/Ih2ros
US Kindle – http://amzn.to/IzknfQ
— Ed

I’ve just knocked a whopping 22p off the UK price of GHOST IN THE MACHINE, Scott Cullen book one.  It has just received its 65th review on Amazon – 41 x 5*, 23 x 4* and a single 3* – so it’s very highly regarded by the readers:
UK Kindle – http://amzn.to/Ih2ros
The paperback version is still available (for £8.09 – nothing I can do with that price, sadly) –
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ghost-Machine-Scott-Cullen-Book/dp/1479124842/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1334604582&sr=8-1
Go and enjoy it, if you haven’t already.  It’s book one of an ongoing series so get it, love it and then get stuck into DEVIL IN THE DETAIL…
— Ed

This is just hell. I look like a karate instructor that’s gone to seed in a mid-90s Adam Sandler comedy. Sorry, “comedy”. One of the ones where he plays a simple redneck that’s amazingly good at a sport. I feel like Chuck Norris. Now where’s that pile of bricks to ram my hand through…?

Donate to the Movember and sons cause – http://uk.movember.com/
— Ed

Had a real bump in hits to the blog today based on my previous housekeeping post about scrivener, so I thought I’d give an update on where I am with the application after almost a couple of months of being Mac bound…
First thing to note is that I’ve just bought Mac Microsoft Office ’11…
… but that’s mainly for Excel.
I love Excel and I just can’t find anything that comes remotely close to it – the open source Offices are ridiculously clumsy, I’m offline most of the time so Google Docs isn’t practical and Apple’s Numbers is just rubbish.
The writing things that I used to use Excel for were (i) outlining, (ii) tracking progress, (iii) tracking sales and (iv) tracking my characters.
Scrivener does (i) absolutely amazingly, (ii) pretty well and (iv)…   Well.
I can’t quite get my head around how I personally can use Scrivener’s character features but then I’m a spreadsheet monkey, so I’ll stick with my little Excel database for now. Feels like there’s some really good features possible in Scrivener just now (eg name generation, tagging scenes) but it could do with some tighter integration across and separation from documents – what I personally would love is a character and location database that can link to documents and act as tags.  Hopefully that will come with time.   But for now, I’ve got Excel and tags so it’s pretty good.
The other thing I would love is slightly different progress updates – just now the death bar is purely on word count, it would nice to have some scores on scenes complete, etc to motivate me through the harder bits but which is obviously customisable.
The other Office thang I’ll use is Word for interacting with editors and proof-readers. Don’t know if there are any good Scrivener proofing use cases out there but I’d be glad to know of any. I’ll be researching it anyway.
Hopefully I can break my office habit but I’ll still need it for work and my sales tracking spreadsheet.
Now, onto how I’ve been using Scrivener itself.
You’ll have seen my post last night on book three – FIRE IN THE BLOOD. It’s pretty much all been written in Scrivener, since it was a short story. It’s been a good exercise in learning the tool and adapting my process, but also in learning best practice from the app itself.
Two main points about Scrivener, really –
First, there’s a bit of a gap in it in terms of structuring and getting ideas down. The corkboard is a bit of a gimmicky way of structuring and, while the outliner is good, it is focused more around synopsis level work. Fortunately, the literature and latte guys have worked this out and have developed Scapple – I won’t bore you again, but it really helped me unpick my mistakes with FIRE IN THE BLOOD. Once I’ve got this out of the way, I’m going to draw a diagram for DYED IN THE WOOL based on my outline and check it’s good enough. Once Scapple is in full release, it will really complete it – I may be able to get rid of Mindnode in my process, or relegate it to different parts of the process.  I need to check the integration with Scrivener but I suspect it’s going to be good.
Second, it’s just a fucking amazing program to use. They’ve got what can’t even be expressed as a fraction of the budget of MS Office but have a product that is comparable in terms of stability and feel, but is perfectly honed for its main task. I’m still getting to grips with it but every other day I discover a really cool function. Someone on the forum posted some amazing background images for the full screen editor so now I’m writing on a cool typewriter… Everything about it makes it feel so much fun to write.  And it outputs beautiful Kindle files with very little effort – going to fiddle about with it to get it perfect but it is just amazingly good.
If you’re serious about writing, then check it out –
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/
— Ed
Buy GHOST IN THE MACHINE (Scott Cullen book one)-
UK Kindle – http://amzn.to/Ih2ros
US Kindle – http://amzn.to/IzknfQ

Anyone who has been looking at my blog and tweets over the last few weeks will know that I’ve been wrestling with the Scott Cullen novella WHISKY IN THE JAR.  The wrestling has been about the fact that it’s a novella and I got some “robust” feedback from Alpha readers and I’ve been working out how to rework it – remember that it was a short story before.  I’m actually pretty shit at short form fiction – I don’t read much of it and I just can’t be bothered with it.
The upshot is that it’s going to be expanded from a novella into a full novel – though probably not as long as either GHOST or DEVIL (though who knows…) – and become SCOTT CULLEN BOOK THREE rather than book 2.1.  And it’s got a new title –

FIRE IN THE BLOOD

I got really fed up with WHISKY IN THE JAR as a title – it’s cheesy as hell and sort of makes a mockery of the SOMETHING IN THE SOMETHING title system I’ve got so far.  FIRE IN THE BLOOD is much more in keeping and works really well with the final story.
I’ve been bashing through it this week, getting a third of it done in a week.  A lot of that has been editing the previous stuff and I think I’ve got the bulk still to write, but I’m confident of a pre-Christmas release.  Having three novels published in the same year is quite a mental idea.  (I don’t think this will have much impact on DYED IN THE WOOL which should still be roughly April next year).  I’m pleased with it so far – it’s a direct sequel to DEVIL in a lot of ways (some of the subplots and character arcs mainly) but it’s very much its own story as well.
Anyway, if you were waiting on WHISKY IN THE JAR novella coming out then I’m sorry but have a little patience and you’ll get something really good next month.
— Ed

Just a quick update based on the post from the other day. I’ve got both alpha readers comments back now – the second was somewhat less … robust, but pointed out some good plot holes (or bad if you’ve written them).
So the upshot is that I’ve re-outlined and resequenced the whole thing – looks like it’ll go from 27,000 words to about 60,000. And tomorrow I start writing again.
It’s just moved DYED IN THE WOOL to book four…
— Ed

This is absolute agony. 18 days left.
— Ed

So…  I have this process where I send my “finished” drafts to alpha readers (this is similar to software development, where you have alpha testing by a very small group of people and then a wider beta test) and they should destroy the work.  This is very different to final proof reading and is more about checking that my story is good, what stupid mistakes I’ve made and so on.
I had been hoping to publish WHISKY IN THE JAR next week (19-Nov) but the feedback for it is not great… Not enough humour, the ending is a bit rushed and generally it’s all very rushed.
So, I’m being brave and taking it back to the drawing board.  I’ve got a load of ideas based on some work today and I’m replotting the whole thing.  Looking through it, it is rushed and lots of the details aren’t followed through on.  It was an experiment in using Scrivener and it showed a lot of the power of that tool – but it also showed that I need to plot things out properly beforehand and Scrivener isn’t the tool for that.  That said, Literature and Latte (the guys behind Scrivener) have releaseda beta of Scapple, a sort of free-form ideas tool, similar to a mind-map but more right-brain and less hierarchical (I do still see a valid use for Mindmap programs).  I’ve been using that to structure my thoughts before I rearrange the manuscript.

Bear in mind that WHISKY started life as a short story of 3,000 words and is now a novella of 27,000 words – and DEVIL went from 22,000 to 105,000 – you can see where this is going…  WHISKY is likely to be uplifted from novella 2.1 to book 3…
I’ll have to put the release of this one back – I should be able to get it out for a little Xmas present to yourselves, say 19-Dec-12.  It does mean that I won’t be starting DYED IN THE WOOL for a wee while, though it does have the benefit of 1) the ideas in DYED can percolate a bit and I can take pressure off of that, while still maintaining April as a release date, and 2) you’ll get a proper book with much good quality.  Christ knows what I’ll do with ALL IN A NAME, though…
— Ed

(Image from http://stylecrave.com/2009-04-03/most-expensive-whiskies-in-the-world/)

I did a blog post linking to an article where Ian Rankin wrote about writing.  Last night, I watched a documentary about him actually writing his new novel, STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN’S GRAVE –
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01nw51c/imagine…_Winter_2012_Ian_Rankin_and_the_Case_of_the_Disappearing_Detective/
Fascinating insight into his writing process, which seems very chaotic and organic.  He basically starts writing and then sees where it takes him – I’ve tried it and I am shite at it.  My anal retentive nature means I plan the whole thing out before I start tapping away.
His new book came out yesterday, patiently waiting for Amazon to deliver my hardcover – got 65pp of a Jim Thompson left to read as a stopgap.
— Ed

SCOTT CULLEN book one, GHOST IN THE MACHINE, is free on Amazon today!
UK link http://t.co/tPhCVOJX
US link http://t.co/2fQ1jgjS
If you’ve already got it, why not gift it to a friend?
— Ed

Just noticed that I’ve had the 10th review of DEVIL IN THE DETAIL, all of which are FIVE STARS!

Buy DEVIL IN THE DETAIL (Scott Cullen book two) –
UK Kindle – http://bit.ly/EJDevl
US Kindle – http://amzn.to/EJDevU
— Ed

I think I’m done with the plot in the mind map file –

it’s been very useful.  I started with a few ideas and I’ve pulled it into a pretty good story, with at least three plots going on concurrently, and a wealth of subplots.  I know you can’t read it, but it has two days of pre-story activity at the top left, then starts filling in the investigation down the left hand side, before continuing top right.  The level two nodes are days, level three are Chapters (or off-story key activities, e.g. Post Mortems that Bain goes to that Cullen doesn’t).

Next steps are to bung it into Scrivener and flesh some of the parallel plots out.  With reference to the writing tips I published yesterday, this is the biggest selling point to me in Scrivener – you can add custom “columns” (or metadata as they’re referred to in my trade) to the file and set up the parallel bits of plot going on.  One of the biggest challenges with a police procedural, other than knowing police procedures, is tracking the multiple plot threads going on.  I’ve got something like 12 police officers to track during the investigation – Cullen is my window into the world, but I need to know what Bain, Caldwell and the other officers are doing.  I could (and have done) just make it up, but I found quite quickly that I either had too little going on with the other characters or that I lost track of it.  This way it’s pre-planned and any reference to it in the text is backed up by plan.  This might sound alarming, but it’s actually fairly easy and it helps layer up the onion of the plot.  (Note that I make up for it by having pretty sketchy character notes, so I’m not like totally OCD with this shit, though…)

Check out this discussion for some info on how JK Rowling used this concept and how it could be applied in Scrivener.  (Note that I cannot stand her books, but by Christ I would like 1% of her money…)

Feels pretty good to have pressed on with another novel – should be writing soon!

— Ed

Quite a basic one this, but whether you’re of the “let the magic happen” brigade or, like me, prefer to plan it all out before you start writing, then one thing you need to get good at is plotting.
There are loads of rules, written and unwritten, that you need to acquaint yourself with – Chekov’s Rifle is probably the best (no, not that Chekov, the Russian playwright) that I can think of.  Follow that and you’ll avoid the hell of Deus Ex Machina endings.  I like to have my plots guessable but that doesn’t mean you actually can – there should be sufficient conflict and confusion to muddy the waters but there should also be a clear path through the story.
The main reason why you want to get good at plotting is that it is a bloody nightmare moving around 90,000 words of a novel, slicing and dicing and relinking everything (even though tools like Scrivener make it easier, they could never make it easy…).  You either need to plot it out and shift a few hundred words around, or get so good at it that your instinct gives you a framework that has a good plot.  I have had to edit long novels a few times now and I’ve made so many mistakes that I can mostly stop them from happening now (not to say that I won’t…)
In all seriousness, wikipedia has a lot of really good articles on writing and structure – follow the Chekov’s rifle link above and learn…
— Ed
 
Buy GHOST IN THE MACHINE (Scott Cullen book one)-
UK Kindle – http://amzn.to/Ih2ros
US Kindle – http://amzn.to/IzknfQ
 
Buy DEVIL IN THE DETAIL (Scott Cullen book two) –
UK Kindle – http://bit.ly/EJDevl
US Kindle – http://amzn.to/EJDevU

Just a quick plug for a book written by a friend of mine – Gus Ross, TO WHOM THE DARKNESS COMES.  Fans of Stephen King and Dean Koontz will lap it up –
http://www.amazon.co.uk/To-Whom-Darkness-Comes-ebook/dp/B0095SZAV2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1352038867&sr=1-1
Cheers,
Ed
 
Buy GHOST IN THE MACHINE (Scott Cullen book one)-
UK Kindle – http://amzn.to/Ih2ros
US Kindle – http://amzn.to/IzknfQ
 
Buy DEVIL IN THE DETAIL (Scott Cullen book two) –
UK Kindle – http://bit.ly/EJDevl
US Kindle – http://amzn.to/EJDevU
 

Trying to get over this disgusting cold I’ve acquired.  Today I’ve researched how best to use Scrivener (pro writing tool – http://www.literatureandlatte.com/) across a series, such as my Scott Cullen one.  It’s a great product, allowing you to outline and structure your work in a way that a linear tool like Word just can’t (imagine the document map in Word is a looking glass into Wonderland, and Wonderland is full of outlining tools and so on and you’re there).  The downside is that it’s possibly too flexible.
I used to use MS Office to write – Word, obviously, but also using Excel to plug the outlining gaps.  Most of the reason I used Excel for is that I’m a trained spreadsheet monkey at work and, even though I’m a Programme Manager now, I do my staff’s collective heads in by insisting on using Excel to catalogue things, rather than Word tables (which are just shite).  It’s a very flexible programme – possibly too flexible.  Oh.
My main bugbear since moving to the Mac a few weeks ago has been the shoddiness of the spreadsheets in OSX.  I’m not prepared to pay £80-130 for MS Office when most of my work will be done in Scrivener and I doubt I’ll actually use Word (outputting to Kindle files from Scrivener is bloody good, much less frustrating than the tear-soaked nights in April trying to format my manuscript).  I’ve tried Apple’s Numbers (part of iWork) but it’s feature-poor (no pivot tables – eh?).  I’ve tried the Open source ones – OpenOffice and its forks LibreOffice and NeoOffice – which are just clunky and unusable.
So, my solution is to try and get everything inside Scrivener as much as possible.  And it turns out that best practice is having all your books in a series in one project.  It doesn’t seem to kill performance, either.  So far, I’ve got GHOST, WHISKY and the rough outline for ALL IN A NAME in there together.  I’ll have to put DEVIL in, too.  It will hopefully help significantly when I’m writing DYED IN THE WOOL – questions such as “does McNeill have a brother or was it her friend’s brother’s floor they stayed on?” can be answered a lot more easily (it was her mate’s brother).  I need to consolidate the notes from the various spreadsheets and tag the files, etc, but it will really help for future projects.  It would have really helped for WHISKY and DEVIL.
Note – I have no affiliations with Literature and Latte, I’m just falling in love with their product.
So, I’ve got WHISKY off to the alpha readers now, time to focus a lot of attention on DYED IN THE WOOL (does that need a new title?), housekeeping and bothering to do the DEVIL IN THE DETAIL paperback.
— Ed

Just had the fifth FIVE STAR review for DEVIL IN THE DETAIL just now.
It’s very nerve-wracking having a new book out there and not knowing if I’ve made a glaring blunder or if it is not as good as book one, etc. Thanks to everyone who has read it and fed back!
— Ed

I know I’ve been all about DEVIL IN THE DETAIL recently – it only seems that way, other than doing the print version, it’s all yours as I’m focused on the two novellas and DYED IN THE WOOL – but at some point last week I broke the 500 sales barrier.
It’s absolutely staggering – bear in mind I’ve given it away 3,500 times – but 500 people have bought my book. Wow.
Now go and buy DEVIL IN THE DETAIL – that one ain’t never going for free!
— Ed