Roderick T. Macdonald's Blog, page 18

The Writing Life: Momentum

Another rapid freehand blog today. Which means five plus edits after publication – my apologies to those of you who get version one mailed to you!

My face is hot. I think because I’ve been talking for hours. To myself. I’ve been reading The Killer and The Dead aloud, and I’m here to say (thankfully not aloud) that it is harder than you’d think to read your words, and actually say every single one of them, and not skip over some.

Of course that’s a good thing – if you notice that you keep skipping over some words in a sentence, then maybe they don’t need to be there. Cut! But what about the times you don’t notice, and blithely pass over those extra words? Well – that’s why there are multiple passes of editing, you give yourself the chance to catch that sucker next time!

I’ve heard tell there are apps now that will read your work to you. However tedious I may find reading my own work (when I’m not descending into giggles at how good parts of it are (and yes, just let me have that right now – I have enough other periods of despair at how awful it all is too!)), I think listening to machine voice read it to me would be worse. But fellow authors have assured me it is a great tool to help you catch mistakes and awkward phrasing in your own writing, precisely because the program does not unconsciously skip over any of your words, and so faithfully renders every syllable back to you, whether you like them or not! I should give it a shot.

Anyway, I’m just about half-way through now, and have hopes I could get near to done over the weekend. One more phase complete, another layer of dust removed from those glass tables. After that I think I will do some Don McNair word searches (plus some of my own I came up with when following his advice last time out and through that recognised tics of my own that needed to be reined in. I won’t give examples because otherwise you will totally notice them!) and maybe then be just about ready to declare myself done and allow others to proofread – so I can inevitably be shocked (and oh so grateful) for all the things they catch!

The important thing is the sense of progress I’m getting again. Momentum has been gained and text is being read, parsed, corrected and improved as I pass. A couple of darlings have been killed, a very random piece of extra lore has been added, and a handful of good notes created for me to address. Continuity niggles to check – I’m having to be mindful of the “what did he know and when?” issues for my narrator, and caught one potential reference to information he should not have had today, though I need to recheck the first hundred pages or so to be sure. It might be justified, but it might not, so I’m going to have to go back and be sure I planted the right seeds earlier, and did not just forget and add authorial knowledge to my character in that scene and accidentally forsehadow information he will only discover 30 pages later.

Writing, it is a headstretcher, for sure.

But this is part of what I love – so much work by now has gone into story and character that you want to get all the touches right, and the novel becomes part puzzle, part engine, a thing to be put together properly so it can run as smoothly as possible for the reader. Copy edits, and these final run throughs are the carb cleanings, the radiator flushes, the fresh spark plugs the book needs for everything to work as it should. I’m really reaching there, sorry!

Once again I can see how easy it would be to fall into the obsessive rabbit hole of perfectionism at this stage. I have on this run spotted a bunch of unintentional repetitions that are not good, sometimes pages or chapters apart, but all that does is tell me I’ve missed plenty of others. The best is when I go looking for one thing, and discover something entirely other that is an issue. On page one. It is fixed now. But this is how I come to understand those authors who never release the next book. This phase can literally go on forever, if you let it.

I’m going to avoid that, if I can. I have momentum, and I have a goal, and I want to share this with others, not hoard it to myself forever, feverishly polishing. I can’t lie, this is (as usual) taking longer than I’d have wanted, and is delaying my timetable for the next book, but part of my sense of momentum today is the feeling that the detailed work is right, and necessary, and as long as I can keep powering into it and it doesn’t turn into a procrastinatory frittering of time, then it will be useful. The skill is to know when that corner gets turned!

Okay folks, see you later – keep writing, and reading, in your outside voices!

 

Why I Write Fantasy: Death and Freedom

I’m not publishing the blog I wrote earlier today. Didn’t quite capture what I wanted to say. So instead I’m freehanding this one, not even a spellchecker to save me!

I started writing fantasy, as I’ve said elsewhere, to create worlds of my own to escape into, after enjoyng the sensation of entering into other universes made for me by writers of powerful imagination. It was all I wanted to do, imagine things and write them down. What could be more fun than that? If only the writing down was as easy as the imagining!

Of course I grew, learned, broadened my horizons somewhat, and wanted to do more than merely imagine, as if that were not sufficient. (It totally can be!) I wanted to say something. Preferably something important.

So I wrote a book that at heart was about death. A very intellectual death, conceptual, with ramifications and social and psychological impacts, the whole nine. Death was foreign to me at the time, so I could imagine it as I wished. I feel death in my bones now, feel it in the judder of my heart, so that early book seems charming to me in my remembrance of its conceits. I haven’t read it in years – know I wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to ‘fix’ it. So I let it be. One day.

Now, when I think about it, I write books about freedom. And power. And redemption. And love. And sacrifice. I am not in prison, or a gulag, I am not constrained by poverty, bound by pride (I had my moments, but have been profoundly humbled enough times to try to keep myself grounded, most of the time!), I do not believe I am trapped in ignorance, though I think we all labour through life being waylaid by the things we do not know, and should have learned about earlier. Still, the idea of freedom (and those others that always seem to tag along) tasks me, for now, and so I shall pursue it in my writings a while yet.

Freedom and oppression. The little guy against impossible odds. The search for redemption, even when it might be denied. The oldest and most contemporary story of them all: how everything came to be, and why everything is as it is. Those are the stories I always imagined, and I’m still just trying to write them down.

This isn’t what I was trying to say either, but what the hell. Capturing a thought with words is another windmill of mine. Another attempt can always be had. Next time with Dwarves.

 

 

The Writing Life: Bandaid Ripped Off

So I finished all the primary adjustments to The Killer and The Dead today. Then I accepted all on every other change in the document made by my editor. (I have read them all in passing, but not focused on them as it is just too deep a rabbithole for me to fall down.) I’m trusting myself to spot any alterations so made that do not align with my sense of how the writing and its subjects should be presented.

Now begins the long dark of reads and re-reads, tweaks and adjustments, Don McNair’s advice echoing in my head, threatening to overwhelm me with the number of things to stay alive to, to notice and adjust. I had hoped after laboriously going through the twenty one steps during the writing of The Thief and The Demon that those lessons would be solidly ingrained, and some have been, but there’s nothing like being systematic to show you how much you missed when you thought you were being careful.

This phase is where I may start actively hating the search function.

I already have an excuse to let it slide: jumping from instance to instance robs me of a sense of context, I shouldn’t make changes like that in isolation. (So maybe I should just leave well alone, is the hint.) Well, that’s why I’m reading it through first, live and in the vocal raw. Red marks and notes will sprout across the newly virgin pages. Then those shall be gone through and tidied away. Most changes I hope will be done in context, as I advance with the book held fresh in my mind. We shall see.

Then it will be time for the search function game, to let it highlight the recurrences my eye has refused to notice. Not everything will be changed, but it behooves me to check, and be sure.

The final completion date of the book keeps scrolling away. This is okay. I can reel it back with some solid work. I have hopes for this weekend, when not finally taking down the Christmas trees! The writing needs to be tightened up, made ready for the sea trials of last proofing reads. What leaks can be plugged now, should be.

Okay, I’d like to start reading now. An hour in before bed. Editing, like so much else in writing, is a marathon, not a sprint. I have to cut the clichés out too, dammit.

The Writing Life: Trust Your Editor and Yourself When Dusting Glass Tables

Hello, and Happy New Year, folks!

(I’ll do a New Year’s thought another day.)

The copy edit of The Killer and The Dead continues in my basement of dust and glass tables. It ain’t for sissies. But the book is awesome, if I say so myself.

I have continued to do 10, or 20, or even a few hundred little edits a day. I had a bunch of editorial questions to answer. In reading and answering them I created more questions and reminders for myself throughout the text, unfortunate things that require additions and revisions, the things you naively imagine you have moved past when you get to the copy edit stage.

But no. You may not have to entirely rewrite a scene, but reimagining parts of it, and then smoothing the edges so it flows naturally might happen. Little things like changing the material of a chimney for instance. It can be much more of a pain in the backside than you may imagine. More insidiously, you might have a great idea to add something in late in the book that beautifully echoes a conversation way earlier in the story, and then have to wrestle with whether you’re being artfully clever, or beating the reader over the head with a dead horse, which generally readers don’t thank you for doing. Horse guts be smelly, and make poor scarves. (Who am I kidding, I’m totally going to go for the echo! I’ll be subtle, honest.)

Yes, I’m punchy tonight. Long day in front of screens followed by coming home to sit in front of a screen can do that do a person. So I’m listening to wonderfully cheesy late 80s and early 90s dance and battering this out with minimal editing! Hey just came across this! Not heard that in years. Not as good as This though! (Well, they are different moods, really, different soundscapes, different dances.) Some good times to versions of those songs, many moons ago.

Anyway, I have 10 questions left to answer. There will be minor rewrites to answer them, so I’ve left them to last. Thinky bits that might be best approached when I have more mental reserve than tonight. Then a few thousand line changes. I am about to make the point I started writing this blog to get to. And I have not been artful about it.

If you pay a professional to copy edit your work, trust them.

That does not mean agree with every suggestion, make every change, no. It does mean consider the changes, think about why they were suggested. But once you are done with those, and what is left is the grammatical changes, then trust your copy editor, and rip the bandaid off.

What do I mean by that? I think I’ve said it before, but I’ll explain again.

I’m not going to read my book over and agonise over every altered comma. I’m going to make a copy of the book with all those red changes intact, and then I will simply accept all changes. Rip the bandaid off. Accept all. Trust the professional you hired to help you.

It is a huge time saver.

This only the first copy edit pass, to be honest. I am pretty intimately acquainted with the words in my book, their order, and intended meanings.

Ripping off the bandaid gets me to the next pass that much faster.

I trust that I will catch any changes that break my intended meanings. If something strikes me as off, I can shift it as it jumps out at me. If it doesn’t jump out at me, how important was it? A tree falling in the forest kind of question there. Most changes won’t register because they work with my writing, help and improve it. A few I will notice and shrug and let it go. A couple I might break out older versions of the digital manuscript (misnomer? I mean, can a manuscript really be digital?) and compare what was before. It doesn’t happen much.

In short – when you get to the copy edit stuff, go through the higher level changes carefully , the questions, the highlighted repetitions (which are a one thousandth of the repetitions you will find over the next 3-5  passes – I already found a bunch for each of the ones pointed out to me. I am sure I have said this elsewhere, but not all repetition is bad. Some of it is even deliberate!), the tense shifts (yes I’m still debating those – but I’m bandaiding a few of them too, to see how it reads when I read the book over again with no red on the page, and see what strikes me as incongruous), but when you get to the grammatical nuts and bolts, trust your copy editor and accept all, leave it for a day or two, then start reading it fresh and see how much you notice!

Trust yourself also – you will see the things that don’t work, you don’t have to slog through all the correct changes to find the problematic ones. They’ll pop out anyway, because even the best editors are going to sometimes read something the ‘wrong’ way – which itself can be instructive, you need to ask what in your writing led to that interpretation, and how to use it, or eliminate it, depending on your goals. You can’t control the reader, interesting interpretations of your words will happen, but do your best to be clear where you want clarity, ambiguous where you want mystery. That is very exciting! Trust yourself to know your own writing, and let your instincts guide you when reading something for the thirty fifth time.

Just kidding, there is no way I’m doing thirty five more passes. Four tops and I’m done. Probably five. Six or seven when you count formatting reads. It is what it is, and every pass makes it better, so I embrace it. There are more stories to tell, and this one is almost ready to share.

The Writing Life: Thinking about Analogy

Today, when not drowning in work, I was thinking about analogies and metaphors and dusty tables.

That is all.

I also decided that I would set myself a small goal, and if I met it, I’d write a blog saying I had met a small goal.

Because that is the kind of thrilling hi-jinks people come here to experience.

My goal was to make at least ten decisions in copy editing my text. A mere ten. I figured that if I managed ten a night, and then wrote scintillating blogs saying I had achieved this feat, well, before I’d know it I’d have made more than ten changes to my book, and be advancing (at a curious pace) down the avenue of Eventual Victory.

Oh yeah.

So I set my goal of just ten. I’m going to brag and say I made more than twenty. Big overachiever, me.

But you know what? It feels pretty good. A q-tip cleaning a smudge at the corner of a glass table perhaps, but progress between long days was made.

I stopped because I got to a thinky change that would require me to concentrate on the contents of more than a paragraph or two to analyse the effects of the possible change my editor had asked me to consider. That can wait until I have more mental energy.

Ten more tomorrow. Tonight, a small win.

See you again soon!

The Writing Life: The Dusty Road to Copy Edit Completion

I’ve been gone a while.

In this period of absence I’d like to say I’ve been finishing off the edits to The Killer and The Dead.

Nope.

I’ve been working, dieting (dieting takes a whole lot of my mental energy, it turns out – I really have to focus on not eating, hahaha!), and doing festive things.

I also had the Georgetown Book Nook to prepare for and then participate in.

It was awesome.

My thanks to the organizers, my fellow authors, the visiting public, and especially to those adventurous souls who bought a book from a sweaty man in a kilt!

I learned a lot from the experience, like it would be a good idea to have an easy to read blurb for your book available. And maybe a sign clearly indicating what genre you write. I also discovered I need to work out how to stand to have my picture taken without fidgeting and feeling as photogenic as a rotting potato. It’s a thing.

But really, I did have a lot of fun, and did take mental (and some actual) notes on what to improve for next time out. I don’t know when that will be, but it shall happen again!

So around all that not a lot of copy editing has taken place. There is one big reason for this I think, and it feeds into a bunch of other reasons that can happily explain why writers can get lost in this stage of editing, crying and screaming and never, ever finishing.

Copy editing is like cleaning hundreds of glass tables in a very dusty room with no ventilation.

You (I, really) think that you are just going to whizz in, wipe down each table quickly, and everything will be done, hundreds of tables sparkly clean just like that.

No. You start cleaning one corner of one table, and it raises a huge cloud of dust, that causes you to sneeze, and send dust and mucous flying in unlovely concert to spatter across other tables. So you put a mask on, and start again. You clean that same corner, fix the grammar, make sure of tenses, (yes, I’m still wrangling with them, and now it is very annoying because I don’t want to have tense choice give away story decisions, or even hint in a way that could make a reader feel cheated later. That. Is. A. Headache.) clean up word repetitions, apart from the ones you want to leave in as a stylistic choice/maintenance of your narrator’s voice, and then maybe read that paragraph aloud to see how it sounds to ensure there are no lingering issues with phrasing.

You have one shiny corner, of one table, in a room full of them. The dust you raised slowly settles, and some of it lands back on your cleaned corner, dirtying it once again. You look at your ‘completed’ section and notice new flaws, realize a fix or two you made created new problems, both there, and maybe later – have you just set up difficulties further into the text – added to the dust on other tables already thick with it?

You don’t want to despair. Not yet. So in addition to your mask, you get a damp cloth, so you don’t raise dust to scatter it elsewhere, not this time.

You know where I’m going with this by now, I hope. Different “you” that time. It gets confusing, this writing business, when you look at it closely. Anyway, back to the other you, the one living in the metaphor…

You reclean your corner, maybe extend it a bit, feel like you are making progress, the damp cloth holding the dust to it, not throwing it up into the air. This pass you decide not to get lost in the minutiae, deal with the most obvious issues, tell yourself most readers will not care about the things you are agonizing over, even as you recall your certainty that it is taking this care over your writing is what can help set it apart. Can both of these statements be true? The demon Doubt dustily laughs his question from over in the inevitably darkened corner where he had been lurking. (I believe both statements can be true, but that’s a chat for another time.)

You look down at your cleaned glass table. Your damp cloth has left great streaks across it, wet smears of dirt marring the surface. And Doubt’s laughter has raised more dust to settle over the scene, leaving your polished glass looking like a rutted field covered in ash.

Now, you despair.

I didn’t say what the one big reason is. I went all metaphorical instead.

And I’m not despairing. I’m gathering my strength, and readying a very powerful metaphorical vacuum cleaner.

Baby steps, multiple passes, each time reducing the dust in the room, punching holes in the walls for ventilation, emptying the vacuum over and over again, but elsewhere, where the dust cannot return to interfere with the next pass.

Eventually the tables will be clean, and maybe that will be enough. Or perhaps you will want them to shine, all of them. So another pass. And another. But you have to be careful not to polish so hard you start breaking the glass…

I’m really torturing the metaphor now, so I’ll stop here.

At some point in copy editing you have to do the same.

That is a ways off for me at present, but the journey has been started. It is a long road, but I know I can do it, I’ve done it before. Writing this has helped galvanize me. How cool is that?

See you again soon!

Why I Write Fantasy: The Self-employed Edition

When I was a young lad, imagining I’d have five novels published by twenty one and be as successful as David Eddings because I was going to write the same number of books (this was Belgariad era Eddings), I never put any thought to the business side of writing. I was going to write, get published (again, I didn’t bother thinking about the mechanics of that step) and then have an awesome time writing five part epics and the odd trilogy, because that’s what my favourite authors did. I envisaged sunshine and roses all the way, and smiled my way through physics classes I mostly ignored.

Reality, as was once said, bites.

This weekend I will be up in Georgetown at the Book Nook, and am very excited to meet my fellow authors and hopefully some of you, the fabulous reading public, without whom we writers would all be lost, our lives entirely without purpose. At Thanksgiving I was grateful for readers, of every size and shape, among many other blessings I try not to take for granted in this world of light and heat and endless fresh water that I miraculously enjoy.

But unlike my youthful imaginings, stuff doesn’t just magically happen when you get published. The work goes on. This is my first sale to the public. So I’ve had to check out sales tax rules. Get a Square account so I can process plastic upon demand, though I will offer a discount to my fellow luddites who still think exchanges of pieces of paper are a fine basis for financial transactions. We are a dying breed, but I will cater to you!

I am taking my first small steps down the road to being a business person as well as a writer. If you are going to do it yourself, this is an inevitability, so be ready for form filling and the beginnings of a tension headache as the stuff you never really wanted to do sits on your desk waiting to be done. When I finally tackled it (after a delay or two), it really wasn’t that bad. So I suspect I missed something, hahaha! Live and learn, that’s all we can do.

And then there is the whole display aspect. This is my first ‘booth’, even if it is more table shaped. My first table, dammit! I have a table cloth. They invented those a while back, so I have that covered. Yes, I went there. Being something of an epic procrastinator I am, again, wildly indebted to my wife for creating posters, bookmarks, bidness cards, even a special treasure chest of goodies to share with visitors to my booth/table. And other stuff that you’ll just have to come up to Georgetown to see!

So this is it, the part of writing that is a business. I’m road-testing this booth/table experience, and if it is as fun as I anticipate, well, then it may become a thing for me to do (paperwork and taxes permitting) of a weekend or three at various wonderful locations around this great state of Colorado. Once you have the display items you might as well make use of them! (Sunk costs and all!) This will of course entail me doing more business type activity I never imagined as a lad, like calling bookshops, contacting the organizers of events, and generally demonstrating a willingness to put myself out there. I’ll tell you, it was much easier just imagining world literary domination as a fourteen year old!

I look forward to seeing you this coming Saturday. I’ll be the one in the kilt.

Why I Write Fantasy: To go to a School and try to Explain Why I Write Fantasy

I would like to thank Steven Craig and Parker Performing Arts School for inviting myself and the ever excellent Cheryl Carpinello in for a sequence of Q&A sessions with four classes of engaged and enthusiastic pupils today. I really enjoyed meeting the students and burbling on at length about many aspects of writing and fantasy fiction. You guys were awesome, thank you for the warm welcome, and the difficult questions!

I learned a lot today. From Steven, from Cheryl, and most of all from the students. In trying to answer some questions: on how to maintain character consistency, on voice, on how to get past creative blocks and stay committed to a work in process I found myself articulating some ideas for the first time, or thinking hard about how I approach problems, and why I build my books the way I do. It was fascinating, because in discussing my processes with an audience I found myself having to investigate what I take for granted, and in the end was explaining it both to the students and to myself. I was kind of surprised a few times, and in a very good way!

It is also always rewarding and informative to hear about how other writers approach their work: their characters, plot construction, elements of style, and process of revision and completion, which Cheryl (and Steven, when he stepped out of his role as teacher and joined in as a writer) did with great clarity, and was much appreciated. There are many ways to write a novel, even if there are apparently only six types of arc in storytelling, but there are as many stories as there are writers, and every one of them can teach you something new, if you are attentive. The origin of our stories was a frequent question today – where did we get our ideas from and how do we turn them into books? Some writers start from characters, some from plot, or situation, others with a compelling theme they want to explore and from there create both plot and characters to exemplify their ideas in action. It is fascinating to hear other writers talk about how they tackle the universal issues in writing – how to make characters relatable, how to maintain tension in a work, how to deal with needed changes in a manuscript you thought was completed, because hearing about how other people have met those challenges helps you to become a better writer.

At present for me everything starts from an idea of “what if?” and then “what next?”, even the time I daydreamed a conversation for months it eventually boiled down to what was happening around the conversation, and why two people who liked nothing more than to insult each other were stuck in a room talking in the first place when it was clear that in any other circumstance they’d kill each other or leave at the first possible opportunity. So the conversation for me was the inciting conflict, the “what if two people are stuck in a room spitting insults at each other?” spark that I then built a situation around, discovered a plot that could generate the “what then would they do?” purpose that allowed the voices to become characters, their insults part of a shared and tempestuous history. And no, it’s not a romance novel, though it could be!

The classes are all reading The Hobbit. And of course, The Hobbit is why I write fantasy. It created a world I desperately wanted to participate in, and when after ten billion rereads I realized I couldn’t get any further into the words and the world, I knew I’d have to write my own stories to get that same feeling, and hopefully help someone else have the fun of discovering a strange new world filled with interesting (sometimes horrible) people they could enjoy spending some time with (see come to a sticky end!).

So for this week folks, that is why I write fantasy. Thanks again to the pupils and staff of Parker Performing Arts School for the fun day of sharing ideas and excitement over the books I’ve loved to read, and the books I love to write.

(And no kids, I did not outline, write, rewrite, edit, and then proof this article. They kind of just fall out like this, I fuss at them a bit, and then hit publish. Frequently after that point I spot typos and other glaring errors, and sometimes I clean them up before going to bed, other times, they just stay there a while!)

The Writing Life: Patience

Sometimes in the grind of writing, editing, marketing, and then selling your work it is easy to get lost. You forget the vibrancy of first ideas, the thrill of plot creation, the joy of characters growing beyond their first sketches and pushing against the boundaries of their originally envisaged roles. The slog of to do lists can occasionally obscure the thing that all those lists are meant to augment, to promote, to share: the writing, the imagining, the creative heart of all your efforts. The fun. The sheer fun of writing. And you can’t allow yourself to forget that, because if it stops being fun, then the game is over, and writing has become another dreary job that people like to read books to escape from.

I think that a lot of writing is being patient with yourself. Sometimes it’s when you can’t write fast enough to keep up with your ideas. That is a good problem. Other times it’s when you need to let it go that you can’t face a keyboard that night. Not a good problem. I’ve found that self-flagellation doesn’t particularly help – you can’t write any faster than full-speed, and facing the keyboard when you’d rather just space out in front of the TV just produces flat prose. Unless you get lucky and something unexpectedly purple rolls along, puffing and pickwickian, unashamed of its exuberance and in desperate need of being edited into better shape, but jolly all the same!

I’m trying to wear a lot of hats right now, and I only have one head. Patience helps me remember that I can do one task at a time. Patience tells me to do what I can when I can, and not to sweat the other stuff waiting. It will still be there in the morning, but with some patience, and its firm ally determination, the stuff that waited will also be gotten through, in time.

Strange to be a writer in a rush. It isn’t a profession that lends itself to speed, though some of my colleagues out there do have prodigious output. In a rush, yet with not enough time to do everything desired seems to be my current dilemma. So: prioritise, do what you can, and leave the rest. Easy to type, harder to do.

I got my copy edits back last night. A new mountain to reduce to a molehill. I also received my first draft of the cover for The Killer and The Dead. It looks amazing – I can’t wait to share it with you, but details, always details to be worked on first. Another week closer to my Georgetown Book Nook appearance, which can be as simple or as complex as I want it to be. There is a choice there, and with patience and its pal determination, I’ll find my way to the best spot for me, at that time and in that place.

Behind all of this activity, beyond all the plans, is a simple thing I like to remind myself of from time to time.

I love writing stories. They make me giddy, and giggle, and dance and sing (badly, both), they make me enjoy life and everything in it. When I write stories, I am where and when I should be, and it is good.

So be patient with yourselves, writers, and remember these two things amidst the myriad tasks you may have set yourself in order to ‘succeed’: the reason you write, and the reward you derive from it. Then go watch TV.

Happy Thursday everyone!

Meet the Author… and buy Christmas presents for the readers in your life!

This December I will be a vendor up in Georgetown CO, at the Christmas Market Book Nook. It runs over the first two weekends in December and showcases a great deal of Coloradan writing talent! Fiction, non-fiction, genres of every flavour, there is something for everyone, and all wrapped up with a bow of getting to meet the author! How can you possibly resist? I make my appearance with twenty four other writers of quality and charm on Saturday December the 8th from 10am to 4pm, and will be available to talk books and writing. (Or the weather, I can do weather talk all day – benefit of a Scottish upbringing!) I will also be selling copies of The Thief and The Demon, and will have some promotional material for The Killer and The Dead, which will be closer, but not yet at the cigar stage by then, I suspect!

So come on up and meet some Colorado’s authors in historic Georgetown! We are jolly purveyors of Christmas presents for the happy readers in your lives!

I will also shortly let you know when pre-orders open for The Killer and The Dead, and will be sharing a first look at the cover art! Stay tuned folks!

Here endeth my latest foray into exclamation mark abuse. I truly apologise to those scarred by this grotesque display.