Category: Blogpost

Time to check out how book #4 in the Tempest adventure/thriller series is shaping up… What do you reckon?

I’m thrilled to be able to tell you that we will be appearing at the 2024 Newark Book Festival on Sunday 14th July.

If you’re in the area (look, this is the original Newark, not the Johnny-come-lately one in the USA), feel free to pop by. You’ll find us on stall #28 with a supply of sweets as well as copies of Tempest, Storm, and Hurricane, which we’ll be selling at a specially discounted boxed-set rate for visitors to the book festival.

Unfortunately we’ll have to leave the spaniels at home, but why don’t you come along and see what we’re like when we’re not herding dogs? We’d love to see you.

Of course, if you can’t make it for a geographical (or other) reason, you can get Tempest, Storm, and Hurricane from this website at a discount (though not as much as the discount we’ll be offering at Newark).

Or you can get the books on Kindle or paperback through Amazon.

But if you can make it to Newark, we’d rather see you there; that would be nice.

I’m thrilled to be about to tell you that the third book in the Tempest series – Hurricane – is available as a Kindle and a paperback.

If I had to describe the three books so far, I’d say that Tempest is pitched at a medium-fast pace; it’s about the speed of one of the better Jack Reacher books. About 50% of Tempest is set in the USA, 40% is in Latin America and 10% is in Europe.

Storm is a more collected/considered read because the story is told by two voices. The story is about 80% based in South Africa and 20% in the UK. Both Tempest and Storm have a moderate degree of violent scenes.

Hurricane is a return to a single narrator. The story is almost entirely based in the Far East (Japan/Korea); it’s the fastest ride yet and Hurricane has an astonishingly high bodycount.

The news from here (sorry I’ve been quiet, I’ve been even busier than I normally am!) is that work has started on turning Storm (book #2 in the Tempest series) into an audiobook. It will be a slightly different listener experience from the first audiobook in the series because Storm will have two ‘voices’.

I needed a distinctive English voice for one character, while Laura’s voice continues from the Tempest audiobook. It was relatively easy to write for two voices, but making it work in the audiobook is a different challenge.

I have had to modify the final chapter to make it ‘fit’ the narrative the two voice actors will bring – this is distinctively different to the ‘voice’ a reader of the paperback or the ebook will have.

I’m tremendously excited by this project, and can’t wait to hear the finished work. I have chosen two top-class voice actors to narrate the book, it won’t be too easy for them, but they’ve risen to the challenge!

You can click this link to see Tempest and Storm on Amazon. Or, if you prefer, you can get both paperback books here at a special discounted price.

The big news is that the completed manuscript for Hurricane (book 3 in the Tempest series), has arrived back from my editor. What should I do with it next? Stephen King says (and who am I to argue with him?) that when you’ve written a book you should put it in a drawer and forget about it for six weeks. I sort of am going to do that – and sort of not.

The first thing I did when I got it all back was go through every suggested change and either agree with it, disagree with it, or rewrite that sentence, paragraph, page or chapter. There wasn’t too much rewriting, but my editor’s suggestions sometimes threw out either how I’d missed the point I was aiming for, or how I could have been more precise, or articulate, in making it. But mostly I accepted her suggestions; she has a deft touch. The complete manuscript now stands at 88,580 words.

So what I’m going to do now is nothing at all on Hurricane. I will continue working on Tempest Origins (book 4 and the final book in the series). I shall read a few books for fun and relaxation. And I will probably watch a bad film or two. Or maybe a good film. Then I’m going to format the set-aside Hurricane as an eBook, email it to my Kindle, and read it once again.

After that I’ll email the (updated/altered/revised/unchanged) Kindle version out to a couple of gullible fools trusted readers for their views on how it sits. And then I’ll get back to the book 4, the Tempest Origins piece. I do wonder, in my most sleepless of nights, what I’m going to do when I’ve finished writing this quartet. I think I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

When I’ve finished a manuscript, and I’ve given it a whole-piece read through/revision, I’m very particular about what happens next. I set it aside and I’ll read a book. Or maybe two. Possibly even a third.

Then, when I’ve felt enough time has passed, I’ll take my recently finished manuscript, format it for eBook and email it to my Kindle. Then I read it all over again and that Kindle read-through usually throws up a lot of things. Maybe misplaced punctuation, maybe typos, maybe examples of horrible, inarticulate writing, and maybe even timeline/logical errors in the story. I photograph all the things that need revision, and make the necessary changes (usually the next day).

Then I send the updated manuscript off to my editor. She splits the manuscript up into evenly-spaced sections. A 100k-word manuscript will get split into ten sections, and she usually sends me a section a day for review, and this is where I talk about the quiet revolution.

Anyone who regularly uses Track Changes in Word knows that the floating bar moves around. You can’t leave the cursor on ‘Accept change and continue’ and just keep hitting the mouse button because the ‘Accept change and continue’ button moves around the place. You might end up adding a comment which wasn’t your intention. Or doing something else which also wasn’t your intention.

What I’ve done, to get over the floating ‘Accept change and continue’ button is to create a keyboard shortcut for the ‘Accept change and continue’ function. I’ve mapped the shortcut to CTL-A. This means that when I’m reviewing post-editor changes, I use CTL-A, CTL-Z, and CTL-S , and I don’t need to muck about with moving the cursor at all.

This has improved (and speeded up) my post-editor review process so much, I am finding it difficult to believe I hadn’t done this last year.

Anyway, if you haven’t already fallen on this happy upgrade, grab this change with both hands. It’ll revolutionise your (writing) life.

One of the early things I spend time trying to figure out, when I commence a new project, is how much to put my protagonist through. How many experiences? How much pain? How many events? At what point does it become enough? Where does it become too much? Where does credibility/believability begin – and end? If you’re familiar with the main plot device in the Tempest series you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I’m currently working on Book Four in the series. Book Four is, in a truly contradictory style, the easiest and the most difficult of all four books to plan out. The reason for this is Book Four is the Tempest Origins story. How much pain do you put your protag through in an origins story? That’s where my head is at right now.

My planning spreadsheet has mapped out significant events from the protagonists childhood. And early adulthood (twenty-six counts as early adulthood, right?). And I’m about to take this big spanner from beside me, and throw it into the works.

But how many times do I throw this spanner into the works? How many times do I do this thing to the protag? This is the question I’m trying to answer.

What a thrilling ride (and a thrilling write) that was! Book Three in the Tempest series (Hurricane) begins its proof-reading journey before it goes to the editor. Hurricane is the fastest-paced book I’ve written; it left me breathless, and I knew what was coming next! 98,321 words (inc chapter headings)

I’ll begin by confessing that I’m a serial editor. Tinkering with text just happens. I can’t leave it alone. I don’t believe I’m ever truly happy with the way something reads, though I can get close to it (through continuous tinkering). The trouble is continuous tinkering with a paragraph (or even with just a sentence) can quickly lead to a whole chapter rewrite. And then I’ll hit the page up button and start to tinker with the way the previous chapter ended. Then that whole chapter gets edited. Then page up. And thus* it goes.

So, I’ve begun doing things a little differently and I don’t know if my editor will agree, but I think this new way of working has improved the finished product of my writing.

I convert the work in progress to Kindle format and email it to my Kindle (well, der). Then, every evening when I am able to move the dogs around and they allow me to climb into bed, I read a chapter or two. I photograph what I don’t like (whether it’s a typo or a clumsy word or an inarticulate phrase). Only reading a chapter or two (about 1,600 words) a night is, I find, the key to success.

And then the next morning, after dogwalks and breakfast etc, I fire up the manuscript and make the changes. As I make those alterations, I see how those updates to the manuscript can reshape a piece, a chapter, a couple of paragraphs, or even just a sentence. And I allow myself to make those changes before saving the update and cracking on with the actual writing.

The interesting thing is, when I re-read the whole piece after going through this new process, I don’t have that same strong compulsion to tinker. It seems to be that I make my changes and then I’m done.

Re the serial editing: it’s early days yet, but we shall see what we shall see. But re the writing style: this method is a definite improvement.

*Anyone else think we don’t use the word ‘thus’ enough this days? Just me? OK then.

Hello. This blogpost (we don’t believe that’s a word) is a collaborative effort. It is being written by us four spaniels (stop doing that, Chewie). We are doing this to tell you what life is like while the human with the hairy face (daddy) taps and tuts and taps some more.

Life is hard here. We are forced to endure periods of time when he ignores us (stop doing that, Chewie). It isn’t fair that he taps and tuts and taps some more almost non-stop (CHEWIE!) from when he starts until when he finishes. We would tell you when that is but we can’t tell the time, sorry.

He does stop for lunch, which is good. And he does make sure we get our lunch, which is how it should be (Pugsley, stop trying to eat Mavis’ face). But five days a week he sits and taps and tuts and taps some more and he only takes us out into the garden twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon. Yes, he does take us all for a big walk around the village before he starts tapping, tutting, and tapping some more. And he does take us all for a big walk around the village after he has finished tapping, tutting, and tapping.

(Mavis, have you farted again?)

And he talks to us which is lovely but he doesn’t give us enough treats which is not lovely. He tells us things. Things about what he’s tapping, tutting, and tapping some more about. He tells us people’s names. And he tells us what they’re doing. There’s this one person called Kim Mi-cha who sounds like she needs a dog in her life. Her first name is Mi-cha and her family name is Kim and none of us dogs here can understand why it’s that way round but it’s probably not important.

There’s this other person who kissed this other person (you know what I mean) and then hurt them and we don’t understand that because we’re only dogs but we do like kissing and we don’t do hurting, except for Robyn when she sits on you because she’s a very heavy girldog even if she is an actual princess.

Anyway, that’s the news from here from us four. We would love to have some choklit but daddy says we can’t have any because it’s bad for us and then he eats it all and that just seems unfair. He says he’s nearly finished tapping and tutting and tapping some more on this book, whatever a book is. But he also says he’s planning to do more tapping and tutting and tapping on another book when this one’s finished and all we want to do is play and sleep and eat. If you could tell daddy that, we would all be very grateful. Thank you (stop doing that, Chewie).

The spaniels