Jen Black's Blog, page 52

Life

Editing can get tedious. I know I'm reaching that point because I find all sorts of excuses  not to knuckle down to it - even though I know I'm almost finished Banners. There's no chance of me touching it before I take Tim for a walk, and then I must have a coffee. Then I find I've drifted off onto checking my blog stats, my Kindle stats, and then collecting info before I have a look at the Nielsen website. Doing this, I've discovered that I have the same ISBN for Abduction of the Scots Queen on the Kindle version and the print copy. Not too sure what to do about it. I suppose the easiest thing would be to assign another to the Kindle copy, or to remove it completely. 

I actually received a tweet from Peter May yesterday. I had read The Critic and couldn't see why the last few lines of the book told me no one knew who killed Braucol the puppy and almost killed Enzo MacLeod. "He's still out there." Had my copy a chapter missing? So I tweeted him, and he tells me the answer comes in Book 6.  Nice of him to respond, but I'm not sure I like the ploy - I'd rather have the answers without reading another two books!

The weather this morning was glorious for  our walk.Some of the trees are green now and the grass has been growing for a week or so. Now it is splattered with dandelions and everything looks wonderful. Since I got home the sky has clouded over and the sunshine has disappeared, though we're not quite at the dismal state we were a few days ago - see pic!

First re-draft

Pretty soon I shall be at the end of my first re-draft of Banners of Alba. Then it will be time for a read through to see if it makes logical sense and the transitions are smooth. At that point it will probably be time to decide where I am going to make further cuts to bring the story down to 100,000 or less ( if I can). 
Have I begun the story in the best place? Have I made motivation clear? Have I shown their loves, their hates, their faults? Why things happen? (Do I need to do this? should it not be clear without that?)Does each scene make a point? Does something important change? If not, should I cut the scene?Have I conveyed necessary info in narration? Can I lose secondary characters?
After all that, I'll need to go through and check for those terrible habit words - the ones that keep cropping up but are really not needed.

Editing is hard work. I can only do it in snatches before my eyelids begin to droop.

How am I doing?

I’ve spent several hours collating stats only to come to the conclusion that I cannot compare like with like due to the many changes Amazon have made in the last few years. 
In 2011 books were sold and we authors received a royalty. In December of that year, the first change appeared - books were either sold or borrowed. By the end of June 2014 we had the introduction of KU/KOLL units. I understood that KU stood for Kindle Unlimited, but I was never sure what KOLL stood for. (Now I know it is Kindle Owners Lending Library)
By July 2015 we saw the introduction of “Net Units Sold or KENP Eead.” Otherwise explained as:  Net Units Sold or Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP) Read. According to Amazon people bought books but never read them, so this was an attempt to pay only on pages read in an effort, so they said, to weed out the dross that was self-published. 
When KU came in, KENP made some kind of sense. Members of KU didn't buy the book, but "borrowed" it, so no royalty accrued to authors. KENP means that for every page read the author is paid a tiny amount, something like 0.0016 of a penny. On a 400 page book that would amount to 64p. It was as much, sometimes more, than the original royalty payment on low-priced fiction. 

So far, KENP Read is still holding. The only way I can see that I might be able to tell if I am doing better or worse is by tracking the money. Is the money that comes to me via KENP pages read better, worse or equivalent to my payments back in 2011? Who knows? Looks like another few hours doing stats. Even then,  other things have moved and changed since those days, so I won’t ever be certain whatever the stats tell me.

Broadchurch 3

It may be that I'm out of step with many, but I am not enamoured of Broadchurch 3. Apart from the police duo and Beth Latimer there isn't a character to really like. They're all slightly odd embittered people, many of them up to suspicious activities. As snippets of how a major incident affects all the people within the community this series is  puzzling. Unless the underlying theme is rape in all its manifestations, the various snippets we get - such as Hardy's daughter's problem - become distractions. Yes, it may be telling that a policeman's daughter is silly enough to make pictures of herself available and the male teenagers seem obsessed with catching porn on their computers - and yes, the policewoman's son is guilty as hell - but is this a reflection on society in general, or the fact that even police personnel don't take note of what their offspring are doing? Computer porn certainly seems rampant in Broadchurch, with Trish's husband and nearly every other male involved to some degree.

 I'm not even sure that Trish the victim is quite what she seems, and there are so many characters who could have been the perpetrator of the crime that it seems silly to try and guess, much less work it out. With so many possibilities, the rug could be pulled from under our feet at any time. We may not have even "met" the rapist. Now that other ladies have come forward with complaints, the rapist may not be a Broadchurch inhabitant at all.

While the acting is very good, the weakness (for me) is the storyline. I think the only way this series can conclude is if the rapist actually confesses and tells all, because there doesn't seem to be any route of discovery otherwise. Almost everything could be a red herring, or it could be a real clue. I think I will be glad to have it all sorted on Monday night.

Writing news

I think I’m missing a trick here, for rarely do I mention my books on my blog. I hope everyone finds the links to the book pages and leave it at that, but maybe I should do more. As I’ve said, I’m re-editing Banners of Alba, which I published ten years ago in the US. It astonishes me to see how wordy I was back then, and I’m desperately trying to edit 147,000 words down to something closer to 100,000. Currently I have 100 pages to go on a first run through and I’ve “lost” 10,000 words. Still room for lots more to go.

I’m experimenting with shorter chapters, too. In many cases I am attempting to keep a chapter to one scene, or two scenes at best and I’d prefer it if the characters remained the same. In order to accomplish this I may need to do some re-jigging, place scenes in a slightly different order, but it will all be for the best. The reason for this? It saves skipping from one POV to another too often. 
Would the pic on the right make a good new cover? 

What I should be doing

This good weather is doing nothing for my writing. It is so tempting to be out with the sun on my back that nothing, absolutely nothing is getting done as far as editing Banners of Alba is concerned. Nor am I getting much promotion done for the simple reason that by the time I do come indoors I am so tired with the fresh air and activity that I slump in front of the tv and watch all the stuff I recorded over the last few days. I am also romping through L J Ross's books about DCI Ryan all set in the north east around Durham and Newcastle. 

I should be promoting The Matfen Affair, which became available on Kindle mid February for the princely sum of £1.20. It is a happy tale of Leigh Fenwick, who travels to Matfen Grange  to be bridesmaid to her cousin Lucy and encounters a ghost. 



https://tinyurl.com/zvl7s2c  (US) https://tinyurl.com/z246enk

Wasted journey

A freind has recommended L J Rpss, who writes crime stories set in our local area. So I tried the first, Holy Island, and enjoyed it.  As luck would have it, the day I finished reading, an e-mail from my local bookshop informed me that the auhtor would be speaking in Corbridge on 27th April.  I drove into Corbridge yesterday morning get tickets only to be told they were sold out.

Wasted journey, but we did have a lovely walk with a super-excited dog through the east woods along the river bank. Everything is so green it is amazing. The hawthorn is in flower, little white star flowers against the black branches, cowslips poking up through the grass. The river is running fast, but not in flood. If I walk in the other direction, I walk around fields where rapeseed is coming into flower and the ripe musky smell is faint as yet.

I've also finished a Jack Reacher novel yesterday night. One Shot, about a Russian gang setting up a sniper. A good, nicely-paced thriller, and of course Reacher wins and walks off alone into the sunset. That makes htree good books in a row if I count  Rankin's Even the dogs in the Wild in the trio. Long may it continue, Seems ages since I read a really good historical.

It's all change

It's all change in the Black household this weekend. DH is back from Oz after five weeks away, we picked up a new car last niight and I did the grocery shopping this morning. I walked out of the store, shopping complete, at 9am, which I must admit, is a first and may never happen again.

I've discovered a pet hate this morning. People who stand at the checkout and bag every item and load it into their trolley then - when all is done and the cashie is waiting, start rummaging in their capacious handbags for the credit card with which to pay the bill. Sometimes it takes ages. Why not have it ready, hand it to the cashie and then carry on bagging your goods? That way the cashier's time is not wasted and the queue moves a hell of a lot faster. This morning the person did not budge until she had put the card in her purse, zipped her handbag and got the strap to exactly the right position before she moved. Deliberate obstruction, I feel.

I bought a book this morning. A Lee Child book. I might have bought a second title since it was part of an offer - 2 for £7. Unfortunately my view of a third of the rack was blocked by a member of staff with two wire cage things  he was unpacking. So Tesco lost a sale there because of staff thoughtlessness. It isnt often I buy a real book these days, but my forys into Kindle purchases have been dire lately.Am I getting harder to please? Tv is also dire at the moment. Not much I want to waste my time watching. Thank goodness for re-runs on the Drama Channel, that's all I can say.

Could this be summer?

A glorious day - 21 degrees in  the garden, which faces full south. Tim and I have been out for a lovely walk on the north side of the river up the hill behind Ovingham. It is uphill, but steady and follows the edges of the fields which this season are sprouting sprouts (I *think* they will be sprouts.) It is in full sun, too and it is fairly dry except for the odd muddy patch where water drains off the fields. Birds are singing, the trees are showing a hint of green and we had it all to ourselves. Passed one couple walking their two dogs on the way back down to the field gate and no one else in sight. Unless people have a dog, they don't seem to venture out much these days. 

It was like this yesterday, too. Long may it continue, but I expect it won't, and if it did we'd be in drought condition by July. Nothing is perfect and we are lucky to live in this temperate climate where we don't live in fear of bush fires, dust bowls, avalanches, floods and tsunamies, not to mention volcanic eruptions and days and days of snow blizzards. We get changeable weather, sure, but it is (usually) incovenient rather than deadly.

Now, back to editing. Didn't do any at all yesterday, and feel guilty. 

Grey days

This perfectly illustrates the weather today. After heavy rain all evening - and all night, for all I know - I did not take Tim for his walk on the fields this morning. They were back to a muddy quagmire yesterday, and today I'd be likely to land on my backside in six inches of mud and water. We made do with a walk on pavements, which is good for wearing down his claws. He enjoys the doggy smells  on every fence post, tree, etc.

The trees are starting to flush with all the shades of green and brown that indicate new leaf growth, and down in the valley by the river hawthorn blossom looms out of the gloom like a white ghost. Birds are chasing each other round the garden but I don't think we have any frogspawn yet. All we want is some decent weather.

Editing is continuing. As yet I don't have an idea for a new Affair title, but one will come if I let it percolate around while I'm editing. Not certain I will  bother doing a paperback version. Sales are low, presumably because of the high price (plus postage) on Createspace copies. Lovely as it is to hold one's book in one's hands, I think I'll stick to Kindle versions.