gloaming

For the last four months Eleven Twelve (the Halloween edition) has been dominating my life. The finished version is a long way from the first final draft which went to my long-suffering alpha readers who both said um, NO.

Oh.

They both said (and they don’t usually agree on anything) was that their main concern is that the book steps right out of the established series, and they couldn’t see how I could get back to finishing the series in its usual comfortable format afterwards.

The only way round that was to publish it as a Halloween edition. That solved that problem, and cheered the alpha readers up, but created a fairly considerable new one—Halloween was only six weeks away, the book still had to be beta read, pulled into final shape, edited, tweaked a little more, it wasn’t possible. On the other hand, since I write novellas, and pop one out two to three times a year, waiting for Halloween 2015 wasn’t really an option either.

Five of my wonderful beta readers stepped up to the plate at short notice. I recruited three new absolute crackers, one of them a powerhouse from ALLi (no pressure there, then), and two lovely series regulars said they’d be interested in beta-reading. My editor promised me a time-slot on 20^th October and suddenly we were green for go.

Long story short: it’s done. Loaded, minutes before the witching hour —hah, because Eleven Twelve has witches, and chapter headings from Macbeth, and is a definite eye-opener for Edge and co. It was riotous fun to write and some readers will love it, and some will probably disapprove completely. The beta readers all finished it, and all had strong, ultimately positive, feedback, which was wonderful. Anyway, as soon as I have the published link I will start pushing it like crazy. This is just a brief blog to say this is one major reason I have been virtually invisible for months, and I am so looking forward to resuming normal life from tomorrow.

Oh, and the series returns to normal with the next book. Promise.

The wedding was great, such fun, and daughter and son-in-law are now getting thoroughly sunburned in South Africa, presuming they survived the dive with Great Whites which she’d set her heart on. I’m being very optimistic and assuming I’d have heard by now if they didn’t. They were going to be in a cage, after all, what could go wrong? (And yes, I saw Jaws too. Hush.)

So, once the excitement of the wedding weekend was over, and the hangover had finally subsided, I wasted a few days getting used to the silence and a few more listlessly doing some bits and pieces and have suddenly realized that my latest book launches in days and needs at least some help from me, eek. Apart from anything else, it had to go from the returned Edit-my-book version into Jutoh format, so the weekend has been spent doing that, and reading the Kindle simulation, and making changes, and re-reading, and making more changes, and today is the final final read-through and it gets loaded on Amazon tomorrow. How scary is that? Frankly, terrifying. I’d recruited more beta readers than ever before and two of them fell by the wayside. That’s not a good start! The ones who finished it, liked it and think it’s the best so far. Really? Five Six will always be my favourite, but then right at the moment Seven Eight is so familiar to me I have to do all the editing tricks in the book (reading it backwards, changing the font size, putting it in columns) just to prevent my jaded eyes from saying yeah, yeah, we’ve read this before, can we move swiftly on?

I do love the Festival, and the book is partly a celebration of the Festival. And Fiona Bentwood swears and smokes and is bitchy, she’s the antagonist but I sneakily rather like her. I really did enjoy writing the final third of the book more than any of the others, but I broke some writing rules with the opening scene and I nervously suspect that will come back to bite me. Keep it simple, the experts say, and quite rightly. The Festival is crowded, and lively, and the opening scene is crowded and lively, and those two beta readers faded on me (just never responded at all) and my nerves are shot. I’ve included the opening on its own tab in this website, and if you read it, and have some useful advice (other than, you know, ‘scrap the whole scene’ because it sets up most of the activity in the book so I can’t) you should definitely feel free to let me know. Preferably before I load it tomorrow night.

I’m doing a soft launch at a lower price up to the official launch, in the eternally optimistic hope of getting a couple of reviews on there, and will soon be twisting beta reader arms to post reviews, but the rest of the pre-launch promotion has pretty much been torpedoed by the wedding. Five Six got a proper planned detailed launch and outsold both the previous books in their respective first weeks so I have no-one to blame but myself if poor Seven Eight falls flat on its colourful little face. It is a book born in my first (and last!) NaNoWriMo, but most of the fifty thousand words written then had to be stripped away ruthlessly, scrubbed, and slotted back in new ways; if not discarded altogether. Writing under a deadline was absolutely horrifying and lends itself far too much to quantity over quality, the editing was a nightmare. It is still the longest book in the series so far and definitely rambles a bit too much in the Exposition but that’s to lull the reader into an easy doze as they are ushered gently past clues and red herrings. I want alert readers to spot the murderer, of course I do. That makes the traps more exciting. But it can’t be too easy. Moving swiftly on . . .

(Ah, just seen the good news on Facebook—they survived the shark dive. Phew.)