Progress or Lack of it

It’s been a few weeks since I posted anything. Not that I haven’t had lots to say, it’s just the time to say it. My biggest excuse is of course writing of the main kind. Oh, and of course I work for a living. Still never let anything like earning a living get in the way of writing. I’m sure the mortgage company would agree. can just see that discussion playing out.

“Dear Sir we are repossessing your home”

“But I’m and aspiring writer”

“Would I have read anything by you”

“Probably not”

“An you receive an income for this work do you?”

I can’t see that going well.

Still I do have some news on what I have been writing and designing a cover for Landscape. This was going to be another novel but it’s turned into a short story. It now needs some Beta reading. See what you think of the cover below. Not finished yet but It’s a start:

Landscape

In other writing I have been making progress on An Agent’s Prize the third part of the Demise conspiracy series. Speaking of that series I have an audio book version of An Agent’s Demise underway on the ACX platform. Not sure when it will be finished but sometime in the New Year.

Part 2 of the Observer Series has also had some additions. Still looking for a title.

Then the start of something some readers have been asking for since it came out. Yes a possible sequel to To The Survivors. Again untitled but I have a few chapters written, no idea where that one will go. When I wrote the first part I had no direction at all, it just went. Most of my other writing has at least a target plot and story in outline. That one just goes. Must admit it is hard to get back in the flow of those characters. It was very emotional to write the first time, a real difference from Demise.

Other projects remain stalled or with just a few words here and there. So enough chat and back to the real job – I mean writing!

Creating Editions

Aside

Editor’s Note: In creating editions my books are now published on Kindle or via Amazon for all editions

I am trying to decide if I should create different versions of my latest books to attract more types of readers as not everyone has a Kindle or other e-Reader, nor wants one.

For my first book, An Agent’s Demise, I have Hardback, Paperback, Kindle, and Smashwords versions. The ePub is also on iBooks and B&N therefore on any e-reader like the Nook. I am in the process of creating an Audio version via ACX.

For my second, To The Survivors, I dispensed with the Hardback, iBook and B&N but there are Kindle and Smashwords versions. The book is on ACX but I have had no takers for auditions.

For book three, The Persuasive Man, there are Kindle and paperback versions although I changed paperback format size. There is no Smashwords version.

For the two latest books, An Agent’s Rise and The World of Fives, there are only kindle versions.

All books are in English, (UK not USA,Australian, Canadian or other versions) although there are some dialogue elements in other languages. I have looked at creating translated versions via Babelcube and Fiverr, with no success so far.

So instead of writing new books should I take some time to create the missing Smashwords and Paperback versions? I used Lulu for my initial outings. Then I look at the downloads numbers from Smashwords or the sales through Lulu and think it is not worth the effort. Will audio versions be any more successful? Would translated versions be welcomed in non-English speaking parts of the world?

So instead I have written a blog about the decision to be taken. In the end it will come down to mood and how the creative juices are flowing or not. Now it’s time to fire up Scrivener and see where the mood takes me.

I Must Not Check My Sales Figures

I must not check my sales figures remains good advice as just as frustrating

It’s nearly three weeks since I launched my latest two attempts at world author domination. Three weeks of trying to stop myself going on Amazon KDP site to see if anyone has noticed that I have not just three but five books out now. Not just noticed of course but purchased a copy. Oh the joy of that first sale! Then waiting for the storming up the sales charts and rankings. Then, there would be the interview with local press, perhaps a national newspaper and an interview on Radio 2 as the latest greatest Internet phenomena. I mean do we really need to know about another cat or a baby on YouTube or that some Celeb has done something, potentially breathed or uttered a meaningful syllable.

I have books out pay attention to me!

Shortly after my email and phone would be inundated with demands and offers for publishing rights and of course that film deal. Just a couple more sales and it will happen. Look yesterday three copies were sold, I must be edging up the charts now. I’ll do some more adverts that will generate interest 200,000 views, 2 clicks, no purchases.

My hope is gone faster than an elephant sitting on a helium congratulations balloon. Delve into writers forums – it takes time to build an audience, I have less than you, I’m sure things will pick up the usual supportive platitudes from my fellow writers. Plus the other ones, I only had 4,000 downloads last week I wonder what I am doing wrong!

I’ve emailed and twittered, I’ve added my Goodreads folder comments, no spamming – I hate that. I’ve listed my books on sites, added to web sites and blogs. Told family and friends. I haven’t read the first one yet, I don’t have a Kindle, I’m reading war and peace, I don’t read books. Nothing like support when you need it.

Look another sale! Nearly seven billion people on the planet and I get one sale. Unfair of course on the 99.99999999% of the population who couldn’t care less. I’ll run a promotion, give it away, done that before and… That’s not a sale that’s just a statistic a free download, no reviews not even sure if anyone reads the freebies, they just collect them. Don’t log in again, don’t click on the reports dashboard to find out how many. That graph is infuriating surely it means 100’s or thousands not ones and twos. It must be more than that. Log off. Don’t look. Months of effort, hours of drafting and redrafting. On page 36 you used new instead of knew. Damn, damn, damn, correct, upload new version. Did anyone notice? Why have I found out now? After editing, beta readers, more editing, how can that happen? Is that why no one is buying the book, they try the sample and see new instead of knew glaring at them.

It’s been an hour, I haven’t checked. I can’t check at work, I don’t want to check but the bookmark is right there, I can find out in less than twenty seconds. Someone at work says, “I must give your book a try.” I check the report, nothing.

I can’t very well go and shout at them “I thought you were going to buy my book!”

I check a few hours later, one sale! Was that them, no it’s not in the UK unless they are buying from another ID on another site. I must stop this, I’ll check the reviews instead….

This way lies madness.

I need to write instead. Write something different, something better, don’t use the word knew, edit it another time or three. Spend more on advertising, blog more, comment more, tweet more. That next sales rank is just out of reach just a few more downloads away.

I’d better check the numbers I could have sold a million whilst I was writing this. I’ll check the going rate for that Hollywood deal. Log in, no change.

Repeat – ad-infinitum…

Time For Numbers

Time For Numbers was written in 2014

I have been contemplating numbers and their connection with time for years. What time is it? Do not look at your watch or clock it’s a more fundamental question than that. Recently during the writing of my upcoming Sci-Fi book, The World of Fives, I had to do more than think. I had to calculate and check and that led to more contemplation on the nature of time and numbers. I am not a physicist and I certainly could not express any deep understanding of Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time and it’s ilk. The factual calculations of time, dimensions and particle physics can become exceptionally confusing. Even the concepts and hypothesis espoused are confusing. My own issues concerned why human beings count and have a calendar and clock numbering systems that are the way they are.

For non-Western based societies I will refer to the general calendar in use around the world and the general time system. This means 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365 days in the year (let’s not get into leap years just yet). Then breaking back down to 12 months in a year or 52 weeks of seven days. The question is why these seemingly arbitrary numbers are in use? As I mentioned with the aside on Leap years the Earth does not orbit in 365 days. We correct for the inaccuracy of our counting method. Wikipedia quotes…

“For example, in the Gregorian calendar, each leap year lasts 366 days instead of the usual 365, by extending February to 29 days rather than the common 28 days. Similarly, in the lunisolar Hebrew calendar, Adar Aleph, a 13th lunar month is added seven times every 19 years to the twelve lunar months in its common years to keep its calendar year from drifting through the seasons.”

There are some variations to Leap years for example no 29th Feb every 100 years to correct this inaccuracy and of course the Gregorian calendar only dates to 1582 AD, another arbitrary year based on a possible religious date which is historically disputed. The Chinese and Hebrew calendars are older and adjust leap years differently. Then we have the expired Mayan Calendar – what did happen to the apocalypse?

All this discussion misses the point, why 60 seconds, 60 minutes and why 24 hours? We use base 10 mostly to count probably based on the number of digits on our hands. Why not base 5 or base 8 fingers, or base 20 fingers with thumbs and toes. Base two, binary for computing with hexadecimal base 16 in the mix. The UK used base 12 for currency, pennies in a shilling, then base 20, shillings in a pound, up until decimalisation. Horse racing still uses guineas (21 shillings or £1.05p) to measure prize money or the value of a race horse. Weight measures were even stranger and still are Pound to Kilos then the USA uses a different gallon measurement. No wonder children get confused.

Mathematicians will look at divisors and factors to explain the usefulness of a particular number but that is applying mathematical research to a number that has already chosen. Why 24 hours in the first place? Why not 25 or 20 or 10 or…

Twenty-four has the following factors or divisors 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24, whereas 10 only has 1, 2, 5 and 10. Twelve or 24 hours clocks have an advantage of an exact third of the time period. Decimal is left with the inexact .333333 recurring. Not that there is an exact third of a year, 4 months? Which 4 months have you chosen was that including February in a leap year? A third of a year in days is 121 and two-thirds days; better in a leap year with 122 days. Financial institutions report in quarters, but that is different for each quarter. With the first quarter not always the first in a year but in a financial year.

There is little point in arguing for a decimal calendar or clock although fractions of a second are normally displayed in decimal, but a half and a quarter are all used. My own conflict came in describing time zones and time concepts. As I write this it is nearly Sunday evening in Sydney Australia yet Sunday morning here in the UK with it’s single time zone. Thanks to imperial history and the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and meridian 0º Latitude now called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) we have defined time zones for the Earth. Time is managed by exceptionally accurate atomic clocks, which use a variety of techniques to measure the decay of particles or movement of electrons, which are then translated into fractions of a second which… See where I am going with this? We use a physical event to force an arbitrary number called a second and so on. But I skipped over the interesting bit. If you spend your time communicating or travelling with other nations the concept of time zones becomes common. You can easily end up talking to or visiting someone where it is tomorrow, only of course it is not Tomorrow. We are not time travelling, it is the same time only measured differently in each location, to fit another human construct local clocks. So in Sci-Fi ignoring such inconveniences of light speed travel and relative effects, what do next week, last week, tomorrow etc. mean?

If an alien race operates on different counting methodologies, with different length of days, years how would they split the day. What is a day after all? The reference to day can mean different things. Is it 24 hours or the period of daylight or the period between sunrise and sunset? The day light calculation varies with the seasons and the Earth’s solar orbit. On another planet of different size the day may be longer or shorter, the year longer or shorter and perhaps more variable with a more elliptic orbit.

In my Sci-Fi the travelling humans refer back to UTC but have learned to live with the complexities of the impact between, planetary time, Earth time, ship time and another planet’s time. How do you take language terminology for measurements of time, which fill our vocabulary, and even begin to describe what next week means?

Perhaps our exploring ancestors had the same difficulties with native tribes when they explored the Earth. Did the Aztec or Inca pupils complain that they did not know when next week was when the Conquistadors tried to impose their calendar on the natives’ solar calendars? I think they might have had other things on their minds. These calendars were at least based on true alignment with the solar events unlike the western Gregorian calendar. Seasons vary not just north and south but east and west and meteorologically based on weather patterns. The end of the solar year (end being an arbitrary term) should occur with the winter solstice shortest/longest day in northern/southern hemispheres respectively but of course this is not Geo-spatially correct, as the closets and furthest distances from the sun are not coincidental with the solstices. Perihelion was on 4th January 2014 at 11:59 UTC, that was the closest approach to the sun and aphelion the furthest approach is scheduled for 4th July at 00:13 UTC. In 2015 aphelion will be on 6th July at 19:40 UTC but perihelion remains on the 4th January at 06:36 UTC. This cycle varies every 22,000 to 26,000 years. Religious festivals coincidental to any of these dates have very little to do with it. Working time linked to daylight, daylight savings time, working hours are all arbitrary constructs based on historical patterns. As we finally begin to travel into our own solar system we will have to think differently. A lunar colony will have a lunar day and year based on orbits of the Earth and the sun. A Martian day is approximately 2.7% longer than earth. Its year is 686.98 Earth solar days, or 668.5991 sols (variable) so nearly twice as long as Earth. What will the questions how old are you and what time is it mean to future dwellers and explorers?

Now what time is it?

Writing The Sequel

keyboard

Thanks to several kind reviews I have been asked if I will write sequels for my first two books, An Agent’s Demise and To the Survivors. My third book The Persuasive Man doesn’t support a sequel for fairly obvious reasons. If you check out my forthcoming books you will know that I am writing a sequel to An Agent’s Demise called An Agent’s Rise. So what’s the problem then? Well apart from the ever present risk of writers block, which this article is great about by the way, my real problem is plot.

I had never intended that either of the books would have sequels when they were written. At one stage I was contemplating splitting To The Survivors into two books simply because it’s a big story and there was a lot to write about. The scenario there does allow further stories about the world I have imagined either following the main characters or with new points of view, or even new locations set during the same timeline. My problem here was not lack of potential for a sequel but the willingness to disappear for the months needed to write it. To The Survivors was totally absorbing when I was writing it. Even at 150,000 words I dropped several chapters and plot areas. Now back in full time employment, my writing time is limited. My fourth book The Observer Series – Book One – The World of Fives has been sitting resting unlooked at for weeks. As you can tell from it’s title it has been planned from the start to be a series set in its own future time and place. It’s a space opera and I have started to create a whole world around it with potentially a very large cast. I hope to get some time to work on it over the winter but just now I’m back to the purpose of this article – a proper sequel. So putting my other books aside what is my problem with writing the sequel?

Plot

I haven’t lost it completely, but I created several problems in An Agent’s Demise and in retrospect I wish I had finished the book a couple of chapters earlier or at least left out a few components. I tried to tidy up too much. Consequently, even the start of An Agent’s Rise has proved difficult. Where do I start, who do I start with? The political context was also important. The current timeline for An Agent’s Demise was 2005/6 with the news full of London bombings, and the ongoing rows about dodgy dossiers. If I continue the story what is the political background; more of the same or are there some other incidents I can use to blend in fact with my fiction. I had several starting points and incidents before I settled on one start only to change it completely last weekend. Now I need to follow the plot through and unlike the original when I wrote it I still do not know how it will end.

Characters

An Agent’s Demise was criticised because of it’s large cast and extensive use of aliases for the lead character. Some of this was deliberate, the lead character accidentally creates a name, Mike, which is inadvertently shared with other Mikes, Michaels, and Micks in the story. The large cast prompted me to include a cast list at the start of the book. So starting the new book and wanting to introduce new characters, how do I remove others and narrow the cast to reasonable proportions? This is further complicated by the need to include back story elements. If I kill off a character, well remove them from the story, can I legitimately bring them back. Would the reader want a back story on that part to explain where they had been. No Dallas shower dreams to render huge chunks of storyline irrelevant but the Bourne films managed to bring the lead back from his escape as the main story – nice technique but not one easy to replicate or amend. Of course that process can influence. Police procedural series always have a new case, a new killer because that is the nature of police work, some of these series have led to plenty of books featuring the lead protagonist from Poirot to Morse to Rebus. The Jack Reacher series has several thrillers, but these heroes never seem to get older, slower and don’t forget Bond, the films change the lead character to refresh and has spawned whole new plots that Ian Fleming never envisaged. The plot links are tenuous, suddenly old friends or past incidents that were never mentioned in the first books appear as back story in the new book. Travel never takes time, daily routine never interferes, apartments are always immaculate or sparse, no clothes are washed. Life doesn’t exist in these stories. I appreciate people don’t want reality in a story but that leaves a sequel in more trouble. At the end of every Bond film (not the Daniel Craig series interestingly), Bond is left with a girl but in the next film the girl is gone. The only exception is the killed wife who is occasionally mentioned. Still those sequels have had huge success as books and derived films.

Back Story and References To The First Book

How much back story should be included? At one point it felt like I was re-writing the first book in précis form which was even more confusing due to the large cast. I have backed off from this but it will need further revision. I want the book to follow on, but I also want a new reader to enjoy the book on it’s own. Is that an impossible ask? Are my only readers going to be people who have read Demise? Lots of authors have had to solve this problem even JKR doesn’t try to make the Harry Potter Series as stand alone books. Neither does Tolkien with Lord of The Rings. Some authors do, some more successfully than others, but I have also read works where the book is impossible without having read earlier parts – I just wish I knew that before I purchased the book I tried to read. I have resorted to making some references to the previous story with a quick explanation back story sentence. Whether this technique will be successful or not I’ll have to wait and see.

The Writing Bug

Will this story be it or will it again lead to a new story? A Book Three, at the moment I simply do not know as I do not have an ending. I barely have a middle! The other question is of course should I even write this sequel. It’s too late for that now, I have to write it, it’s now an itch I have to scratch but it’s more than that a need that must be fulfilled, just like writing in general. During my unemployment I wrote a lot three/four books and the starts of several others, now I’m working again I have much less time to write, but I need to, I just have to. I don’t mean blogs or tweets I mean disappearing into an imaginary world, however close to reality, and letting characters that run around in my brain at inconvenient moments put down their thoughts onto my computer’s paper. I was on the tube the other day and a man opposite looked around the carriage immediately my head was full of my lead character doing the same action. Last weekend that incident transformed into a piece of counter surveillance technique on a New York Metro, thanks whoever you were. I explained this compulsion and the characters taking over to a friend at dinner the other night, she had just flicked her hair in a particular way and I said that a little thing like that would appear as a tiny half sentence in a character and she would effectively be in the book, it is already. The dinner was on Friday night, by Saturday afternoon that tiny inconsequential gesture was part of a character. Nothing like my friend but the gesture was there. Is this what psychosis is therefore do all writers suffer from schizophrenia with their multiple personalities as their characters. When I am absorbed in writing whether a sequel or not I disappear, but when the book is finished I want to leave the characters behind, going back to some of them isn’t always like visiting old friends you haven’t seen for ages, sometimes it’s like visiting a school reunion, yes you might want to see how people turned out but do you really want to meet the school bully who made your life hell, or see that old girl/boy who you had a crush on. Visiting my favourite characters for the sequel is a mixed blessing. Still enough blogging more writing, there was another incident I watched that I want to write about, just a police car speeding down Marylebone Street… blue lights flashing as Mike walked by with barely a glance at the noise of the blues and twos…