*Terms and Conditions apply: you can get a free copy of my first novel, The Darkness Beneath, by following this link - but hurry! Only the first 100 people to sign up can claim a free copy.
Read All About Me, Read All About Me
Yes, when you've finished here and found yourself not sated, you can pop over to Raebeth McGees writing blog spot where there's a rather excellent interview with me (amazingly...)
I Know Nothing (But Fortunately Someone Else Knows Rather More)
I've recently hooked up with the chaps at 90 Days on Twitter (@90daysnovel). In a nutshell these are two brothers who together are writing a novel in, um, 90 days. As they say on their website:
"The challenge is to write, edit, format and publish an entire novel in just 90 days."
Which is a good thing in itself, but what I hadn't expected to find when I visited their site is all the excellent info they've published about indie authoring. It's must-read for all indie authors - and I'm someone who is loathe to use such a term (and especially loathe the double quotes that always hang around such expressions).
The question is, how on earth do they manage to write such in-depth reports AND continue with their novel? Do they never sleep?
Death By Taxes
Well, last Tuesday came and went and I'm still alive. Yes, I did visit the tax office but the people I saw there are just as anxious as I to come to a mutually acceptable and affordable solution. Although the outcome was fairly positive, it is the least worst possibility, so there will still be plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth, crying into my empty wallet and pining for all the goods I can see but no longer own. We're still waiting for the solution to migrate from possibility to actuality (via the gift of print), but this should happen this coming week.
In the upside I'm just about to start some freelance writing work which should help me pay the additional tax burden and allow me to update my CV with a new area of writing, Research and Development, for a company that is involved with the security of set top boxes. I can't tell you anything about the work, but some of it is so confidential I'll have to do the work in their office as it's not allowed to be leave the building, and definitely not via leaky old emails.
Dream Scene - Necessity Or Ego Massage?
I've just finished re-editing the final chapter of The Girl Who Dreamt Of Water, and only have one new section to write now (though there's still plenty of editing and re-writing to do). The main point of this section is to allow the two main characters to subconscioulsy examine and assimilate all the info they've recently aquired in the Big Fight scene, while spending the night in a cell in the local police station.
The scene ties up all the loose ends of their thoughts and allows them to reach a new point in their relationship. Sorry to be vague, but I'm not going to spoil the ending for the sake of clarity. (Though I am looking for readers, so if you are busting a gut to know, please let get in contact.)
But there is another side to writing this, and that is that it will give me the opportunity to write another dream section (I'll stop short of calling it magical-realist but that's what I want to say), and the reason for that is that I REALLY ENJOY WRITING THIS WAY. To be brutally honest, although I love this story itself and have enjoyed writing it for several reasons, the fact is, I really love writing the more surreal/dream like sequences. Without these, I don't think I could have written it at all.
Yes, there it is, out in the open, my confession: what my book is about is not entertaining the reader - it's about entertaining and indulging myself. Actually, I'm not bothered if people think less of me because of this, because I believe (at the risk of dying in obscurity (which I obviously don't believe is going to happen to me)) that writers should write what's best for the story, not the audience. And often that will mean not being commercially viable as far the publishing world is concerned.
I think that as a writer I owe it to myself to write what I want, not what some potential audience or publisher wants. LIfe is too full of compromises as it is: why should I compromise something that means an demands so much of me? Of course I want commercial success, but I also want to write something that is beautiful in itself in the same way that visual artists create objects of beauty. It might seem arrogant to say, but I consider myself and all writers as artists just as much as sculpturers and painters are. And that means creating objects of beauty no matter the conditions and circumstances.
Cheers.