There are a lot of moving parts at the moment and it’s feeling hectic, but there has been a lot of progress on things as well. If you’ve been following my social media, then you might have seen the book cover for the remastered edition of Unhallowed Ground (formerly Abomination) and the pile of pages which represent about a quarter of the first draft of The Ladies Adventure Society.
The Ladies Adventure Society Book 1
Status: First Draft WIP
As of this morning, the first draft is now 30,000 words. It’s picking up steam (pardon the steampunk pun) and is a fun project to work on. It’s still on track (there’s another one) for release early next year.
Unhallowed Ground: Remastered
Status: Uploading
Most of the publishing work on this is done now, and the updated edition is being loaded into all the bookstores. If you go on Amazon, or wherever, now, you could buy a copy and read it immediately, but if you wait a couple of days, I am planning to do a sale for the first week of October. I’m very pleased with how it has come out, and I think the new title and cover are great.
The Vampire Next Door: Remastered
Status: Editing WIP
After finishing the remaster of City in the Fire this morning, I moved straight onto this one. So far, only the first chapter is finished.
Social Media
Status: New Accounts everywhere
This week, in addition to the Instagram account that I already had, I have created and started using a Twitter account and a Facebook account. So far, I am still enjoying Instagram most, but you can reach out and talk to me on Twitter or Facebook as well now.
On Hold
The Ghouls: Remastered
The remaster is complete from my side of things. Once I have finished all the publishing work related to Unhallowed Ground, I will pick this back up and get the new cover done.
City in the Fire: Remastered
I finished the remastered edit on Friday morning. It is now in the queue to be published after The Ghouls.
The Shadow Walker
No updates on this one. The first draft is complete. I am not sure that I will publish it because the way I originally planned it to interact with The Ladies Adventure Society is no longer possible. I likely won’t look at it again until there is some breathing room next year.
And that’s a wrap. A few more bits of work to do here, then I am off to the theater to watch Miriam Margolyes’ new show Oh Miriam!
For the last few months, I have been working on ‘remastering’ some of my old titles and as part of that I have been re-considering the titles and book covers. The first remaster that I am launching is called Unhallowed Ground. I originally launched the book with the title Abomination.
The cover for the new edition came back over the weekend. Here it is:
This was the second version of the cover for this book. I made a mistake with the first one and chose an image that wasn’t suitable. I am thrilled with this one.
A weekly update on the projects I am currently working on.
The Ladies Adventure Society Book 1
Status: First Draft WIP
I started working on this book in August under the series title Twilight of the Angels. A few thousand words into that draft and something didn’t feel right. Rather than force my way through, which I could have done, I took some time away from it to come up with a solution. The Ladies Adventure Society had always been another title for the series, but the title didn’t quite fit with the book. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that was the series I wanted to write. So a bit of reworking later, that’s where I am. The new draft started last Friday and as of today it currently stands at 18,000 words. Or about a fifth of the way through the first draft. Best guess is that I will publish the book sometime next year.
Abomination: Remastered
Status: Cover and Formatting WIP
The re-edited edition is finished, and my designer is working on the new cover. The new-edition contains a lot of updates and corrections that should bring it in line with my original intention. Over the course of the next year, I am going to be doing remasters of all my old work. This one is the first and should be available from the first week of October, all things going well.
The Ghouls: Remastered
Status: Editing WIP
I started the re-edit of this on Thursday. It’s a more recent book than Abomination, and I’m finding there is a lot less to fix. So work is going quickly, and it looks as if it will also be available in October.
Social Media
Status: New Instagram Account
One thing that I have never done a good job at is social media. I am going to be using it a lot more this week and have set up a new Instagram account you can find by clicking here.
The Shadow Walker
Status: On Hold
The first draft is finished. While I work on the remastered editions, this will remain on hold. Hoping that I will release it in the next twelve months.
I have been writing stories since I was a kid. I can still remember lying on the floor in front of the TV with my new Ghostbusters notebook and pencil and writing a story about how Slimer became a Ghostbuster. That would have been when I was around seven years old.
It was all just for fun, but that was all it needed to be.
Many years later, I was still writing, although school and socializing meant I didn’t have as much time for it as I used to. I wasn’t reading so much either. Honestly, if things had carried on the way they were, I probably would have given up on the whole writing business.
Then I read The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition.
If you’ve read it, you know it’s a big book. Certainly the biggest I’d read up to that point. I went through the whole thing in a single weekend, and I was hooked.
From that point on, I read every Stephen King book I could get my hands on. There were a lot. I raced through them all. Some I loved more than others, but every one of them had something special about it. I started reading interviews, and then tracking down the books that he loved, and reading them as well.
And a funny thing happened along the way. It wasn’t just a love of reading that returned; it was writing as well. Suddenly, I was taking the idea of becoming a professional writer seriously.
After that I was buying the writers digest, submitting stories to magazines and following King’s advice from On Writing. I was on the journey that would lead me to where I am today and wherever I will be in the future. None of it would have happened if it wasn’t for Stephen King.
There is a lot of money in distraction. A lot of time and effort goes in to ways to make us spend more time on social media, browsing websites, checking our messages. There is a lot of money on the table for the companies that can convince us to spend the most time on their products and services.
I struggle a lot with distraction.
Last week when I was sick, I spent a lot of time online. Enough to make me sick of checking the same websites repeatedly. Enough that I felt as if I’d read everything worth reading (and plenty of things that weren’t) on Reddit. I didn’t have the energy to do much more. I was distracting myself because I felt unwell.
On Monday, I went out for lunch with my mum. We were talking about reading and she told me she used to read two or three books a week but now can’t concentrate for long enough to read books at all. I told her it was because she had Facebook on her phone. She then told me she’d read they were going to charge for Facebook, which I explained would never happen, but I realized she was waiting for something like that to save her from the distraction.
When the Reddit blackout was happening to protest the API changes, I saw a few posts of a similar nature. People saying it was a good thing because if they couldn’t use their favorite app, they wouldn’t want to use the service at all. There seems to be a similar sentiment regarding the destruction of Twitter / X that is currently happening.
We recognize that these services, and the way we are using them, are problematic, but we are also waiting for someone else to come along and save us from them. Whether that be the hoax of Facebook charging users for the service, or a service becoming less appealing. I don’t see many people taking a stand and making changes because they know it is beneficial for them.
Like I said at the start, there’s a lot of money at stake for these companies. Even if the current ones became unusable, there will be others to take their place. Distraction is big business, and it’s going to be even bigger once companies convince us to walk around with headsets strapped to us all day long. I just don’t see a world in which someone else comes along and saves us from these distractions.
If businesses are going to put in so much money and effort into keeping us distracted, it seems reasonable that we might need to do the same to avoid or escape from them. That’s where I have ended up. It has meant getting over the nagging voice in my mind that says things like ‘just stop using it’ and ‘that’s overkill for avoiding looking at your phone too much’. It has meant accepting that I have to invest a fraction of the time and effort being used to distract me, to escape.
I am typing this blog post (at least the first draft) on an e-ink screen. The first draft fiction that I wrote this morning way typed on the same screen. It is not as quick as a computer monitor, and everything is in black and white, but it doesn’t distract me. There is no part of me that thinks I could do a quick command-tab over to check Reddit, or whatever. My phone (an iPhone, for now) has nothing much on it. If I am at home and want to listen to music, I will use my record player. If I am out and about, then I have an old MP3 player.
There are other things as well, but I think you get the point.
I do not think this is a one and done situation. Technology keeps changing, more money keeps being invested and new systems for distraction keep coming. There will be temptations ahead, and it may cost me more money, and more convenience, to fight back against it. I do not think there is anyone else coming to save me from these distractions, so I am going to have to keep saving myself.
It’s pretty common for movies to be re-released as ‘remastered editions’ or ‘directors cuts’. It’s less common for it to happen with books. And I’m not sure why that’s the case.
I started publishing about ten years ago, and I have learned a lot during that time. I have gotten better at writing and publishing and I want my work to reflect that.
A lot of the stories that I have published haven’t sold particularly well, despite getting some reasonable reviews. Part of the reason for that is that I have done no promotion. One reason I haven’t done is because I don’t feel confident in the books themselves. I wouldn’t say there is anything wrong with them, although I suspect they read amateurishly and don’t represent the best I can produce.
Which is where these remastered editions come in. I am going through all my backlist titles and re-editing them and making them as good as I can today. Once I have done that, I think I’m going to feel a lot happier promoting them to people.
Avoiding the Star Wars Problem
I was born in 1983, just before Return of the Jedi came out. There were no new films produced until I was almost an adult. Star Wars was something I was always aware of and when the original films were re-released, I saw them at the cinema. Star Wars was cultural background, so I heard all about the problems with the new editions.
Although my backlist is not Star Wars, I am keen to avoid changing things that change the stories. I don’t want to have a Greedo shooting first moment. So I am limiting the changes I can make.
These remasters are a spit and polish. They are an attempt to improve what is already there and make it as good as they should have been in the first place. That’s why I’m looking at grammar and spelling and making things clearer where they aren’t already clear.
This is also a question of time. I believe that the best thing I can do to get more readers is to write new stories, and that is what I am using most of my time for. But if those readers want to delve into what I have written previously, I want them to enjoy the experience, not give up and say that my past work is terrible.
The First Remaster
I have gone back and forth on what the first release should be. If I was further ahead, then I would go with the zombie books, which are by far the most popular titles. I have, in fact, already remastered the first book in the trilogy and started work on the second. But then we have Halloween coming up and I thought it would be good to have something ready for that.
The first remaster that I will release is Abomination. It’s a haunted house story. It’s a standalone title. My plan is to have it ready and published in October so that I can promote it for the spooky season.
