Tag Archives: writing

What’s going on at Casa Stanley

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On the off chance that you’re interested in my work, and interested in how it’s coming along (if you aren’t, I won’t be offended, please click away now), here’s a rundown of what I have been doing with my days/evenings recently.

Since stopping all promotion of work that’s more than two month’s old, which is currently everything, I’ve found that I have more time for writing and reading and reviewing. I’ve finished a couple of shorts that are both based around the theme of revenge, with several others on the go, to be included in a short collection that will probably see the light of day sometime in 2014.

Standalone Stanton brothers novella Bone Breakers is out on submission, though I’m not holding out much hope for this, to be honest (It’s been over three weeks since I sent it, and I can already see sections I want to tweak); I’m making good progress on the sequel to The Hunters, The Glasgow Grin, (even though it has changed from its initial incarnation in the redraft process – first and third person narration, for a start – and has consequently got bigger); I’ve also got several Stanton shorts on the go, including one that works as a sort of prequel to Bone Breakers. There are also two other big Stanton projects that I have simmering.

Other projects include three novellas/novels that have either been started, outlined or are close to completion (Cry Tomorrow, When Word Came Down and We Bring The Darkness).

I’ve realised that I write best with multiple projects on the go. If I get bored or stalled with one project I can move on to another and so on until they are completed. I now have so many projects on the go I expect to be tied up until at least 2015 (assuming I finish them all). It’s not a method I recommend; partly because writers who tell other writers WHAT TO DO and HOW TO DO IT bore me bloody rigid, but mostly because you need to be able to thrive within a maelstrom of organised chaos.

And I like organised chaos, so there.

Since ceasing my dull existence of relentless book-plugging I’ve been much happier, much more creative, and I’ve realised there’s more to life than gnawing at my fingernails whilst I check my KDP figures for the umpteenth time that day. However, I did check my sales figures recently and it’s as I expected: during my pimping embargo (now about five weeks) I’ve sold exactly four books, all of which have been in the US. Not good, but I’m not sure the figures would have been that much better even if I did use my usual relentless pushing tactics.

However, I have a two-day sale of The Gamblers coming shortly (partly because I had two free days left before it reverts back to not being in the KDP free program), but you won’t see me plugging it on this blog. In fact, I’m not even going to bother telling you the date.

Why? Well, I figure most regulars here have either read it or have it on their Kindle (to be either read at a later date or not at all), and I hate preaching to the converted. Instead, I’ve paid an organisation about £30 to punt details of the freebie to all the major free book list websites, saving me many hours of work and getting word out to some websites that I didn’t realise existed. I’ll let you know how this experiment goes later in the month.

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A literary vacation

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On Sunday I go off to Spain for 13 days of sun. I have a house to myself, along with plenty of time, and although I’ll be doing my day job during the days, what I’ll be doing for the most part will be writing – lots and lots of writing.

I’ve set myself an adequate daily word count of 2,500 words a day (after which I’ll allow myself to call it a day and hit the local town for tapas and Spanish beer). I’m hoping that the 30,000 plus words that I’ll create will be enough to finish off The Glasgow Grin, which is already 11k in.

A few people have been wondering where the sequel to The Hunters is. Well, in all honesty, it has been delayed by issues I have had with my short story collection The Greatest Show in Town. I occasionally go through periods where if I look at something for too long I start to see nothing but flaws. This is what has happened with my short story collection. Stories that I liked when I first wrote them have been deconstructed and put back together and, in some cases, expunged from the collection altogether. I’m ‘just about there’ with TGSIT but I’m still fiddling, which means that ‘just about there’ is probably a synonym for ‘nowhere near being finished yet’!

My tendency to sometimes fiddle and fuss and fret had affected my writing rather badly in this case. It stressed me out to such a degree that I stopped writing for a while and concentrated on reading and reviewing on my blog. It then took a while to get back into the flow of things, and get my creative juices flowing again.

However I recently started and finished a first draft of a Stanton brothers’ novella, Bone Breakers. It is set before the events in The Hunters and is third person rather than first person. Once I’ve got the first draft of The Glasgow Grin out of the way, I will edit Bone Breakers and have it on sale before the end of the year. It doesn’t need much rewriting – considering that IMO it’s the tightest thing I’ve ever written, and is as lean as they come.

I figured it was only polite to let my three readers know that I’m still writing and haven’t forgotten about the fact that they might wish to see The Hunters’ sequel sometime in the near future!

Apologies…

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…for the lack of recent updates, folks. I’ve been hard at work on my novella, The Hunters, and several short stories featuring the Stanton Brothers, who are likely to be the main focus of my work over the next year or so, which means that I simply haven’t had as much time as I would like to devote to the website (I will add another of my favourite crime novels in the next few days, honest).

Normally, finishing the first draft of a work would be less of an issue, but as I am going travelling in October for several months (and leaving the comfortable job I’ve had for over five years) there is a hell of a lot to do to ensure that the novella and stories aren’t a massive pile of semi-literate crap. Added to which I need to ensure I have things in place to smooth my return to London, assuming I decide to come back (who knows what might happen whilst I’m travelling?).

So it’s go-go-go at the moment.

Self-publishing blues – or digital noise

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Bloody hell, this self publishing malarkey’s time-consuming. If you’re in the same line of business you know what I mean, right?

First you write your novel. It may not be a masterpiece, it probably won’t set the world alight, it probably won’t even dent the lower reaches of the Amazon top 1,000, but you’ve worked hard at it and made sure it’s readable enough that your readers won’t want to commit suicide by the end of the first chapter. Fine, there you are with your work all double-spaced in Word.

Now you want to get the thing on Lulu or CreateSpace or some other paperback POD company, because you like the idea of releasing it in paperback first (hey, you’re a traditionalist). You either do the layout yourself (in Quark or Indesign or Scribus, whatever) or get somebody else to do it. Style-sheets, page-sizes, font styles, font sizes, H&Js, the whole bloody shebang takes a lot of time whichever way you do it. Great, now you have a book, but you need a cover. You get an illustrator and makes sure the cover looks right.

Then you do an ebook. You can either do it yourself using software or get somebody else to do it for you. You look at the text of your book again for the 1,000 time. You’re sick of the sight of it by now. When you’re happy, you release the book on Kindle. You may also release it on Smashwords, although you worry about the shitty formatting of many Smashwords books.

You think it’s over, but it isn’t. It’s just starting. You get a blog/website and realise you have to fill it all the bloody time if you are to stand even a chance of a handful of people noticing you. You get a Twitter account. You realise you are just one of a million voices doing the same bloody thing. You holler like the rest of them – usually hawking your fucking book (which you are now sick of the sight of), occasionally making a banal comment and occasionally finding a gem of an article, which you pass on. You may also get a Facebook page with fans and do the same thing there.

Then you realise it’s all digital noise, interference that gets in the way of the one thing you wanted to do in the first place – write. You realise that time you could have spent on your second novel (you know, the one that determines whether you might be, you know, at least passable at this writing lark) is being spent on marketing and shouting and trying to sell. You realise it’s not easy to do both at the moment, you’re not a great multi-tasker – it’s either/or.

You choose either. You choose to finish what you started. You decide Twitter’s for the birds (for now at least) and your blog’s going to have to wait a while. A few bits and pieces now and then on both, but no more than that. The actual business of finishing your next novel is more important.

So, that’s me done for a while. An occasional best of crime novel update (’cause that feels like fun), an occasional Twitter update, but nothing on a daily or even a weekly basis.

I will be back from time to time, but don’t expect any 500+ word pieces for a while, because my second novel needs the words more.

Adios, folks!

The Perils of PCs

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My Dad gave me an old laptop of his for Christmas because my old, trusty Mac Powerbook is now as slow as a pensioner wading through treacle. I have since been using it for writing and internet browsing.

The problem is that the perennial PC issue of viruses are always there, lurking in the background – even with anti-virus software. Yesterday, instead of writing, I spent a couple of hours trying to get the Antivirus. NET malware off my PC. I needed my Mac, Google, and a lot of patience to get the bloody thing off my machine. I then spent another hour or so, turning off my Avast anti-virus software (as it was next to useless in protecting my machine from this malware) and installing Microsoft Security Essentials, which seems like it is somewhat more effective.

By the time I finished the writing mood had passed and I just lounged around doing nothing!

From now on, I think I’ll stick with my Mac for writing and use the PC for browsing only. Having already lost 6,000 words, due to my own negligence, I’ve got no desire to lose my entire novel due to some bloody virus making it impossible to access my machine.

Writing

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I have one writing tip and one writing tip only – what you write and how you write it is entirely up to you (even if it’s bad): Write constantly.

Even if it’s only a 100 words a day, over your lunch break or some other moments of time to yourself, over the space of a year that’s 36,500 words in a year. Double that figure and you have yourself the first draft of a short novel.

Never stop writing. That’s about it, really.

At the moment, it’s the advice I’m taking to plough my way slowly through the first draft of my second novel.

Interesting article on Guardian website

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http://preview.tinyurl.com/2cypfdn

That old chestnut about whether literary fiction is better than genre fiction has raised its ugly head again.

There’s good writing and bad writing and in some ways that’s all there is to say about it. If anybody is foolish enough to roll out that old chestnut that the best prose writers are all literary, then that person has never reader any Raymond Chandler. Chandler turned out some of the most beautifully honed sentences in English in the 20th century, and his facility with metaphor is almost without equal. Dashiell Hammett’s output was as influential on modern prose as the output of Hemingway – both men seemed to throw off the shackles of 19th century prose at almost the same time. And Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad worked within genre, but nobody would say they were constrained by their ‘limitations’. And in France, try telling anybody that George’s Simenon’s ‘Maigret’ books aren’t literature and they will probably laugh in your face.

Using Larsson and Brown as a point-of-reference for the basis of an article is almost pointless. Everybody knows that Brown can’t write a decent sentence, and it’s fairly common knowledge that the Millennium translations aren’t very good. The fact that nobody picks on Walter Mosley or John Le Carre and tries to suggest that their work is inferior to literary fiction, just shows that the genre’s best and brightest are a match for anybody on their day and that any argument like Docx’s can be blown out of the water.

Anyway, I’m glad to live in a world where I can read Don Delillo’s ‘Libra’ one day and James Ellroy’s ‘American Tabloid’ the next, where John Updike and James Crumley share shelf space, where John Hawkes and John Le Carre are just as likely to be picked up and read.

On Writing

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Not quite sure why I write, but I guess the closest I can get to a reason is that it’s a compulsion or obsession: The overwhelming urge to organise and compile an idea into a cohesive narrative with a decent structure, dialogue and characters.

Also, after a good writing session I’m sure my brain gives me a nice hit of dopamine – somehow I feel calmer, brighter, and generally more content.

Writing makes me feel happy. Even if nobody read what I wrote I would continue to write. The pleasure I get from a well-turned phrase, line of dialogue, or paragraph of description is immeasurable.

For me personally, writing isn’t a hobby (although it can be that) but a way of life. Ten, twenty years from now, even if I never publish or self-publish another thing, I will still be writing.