David W. Robinson's Blog: Always Writing, page 24

Spookies Are Here

With the launch of The Haunting of Melmerby Manor, the first Spookies Mystery, here’s an excerpt from the book.

Pete has gone off searching one part of the manor house, leaving Sceptre and Kevin alone in the Long Gallery.

***

Given the choice, Kevin would much rather have spent the night in the bar of the Rose & Crown than this spooky old house. As he shuffled slowly down the Long Gallery towards the rear door, his heart beat loudly, and his teeth would have chattered if his jaw hadn’t been set so tight. He and Sceptre squatted on the floor of the great hall under a Stubbs original of a horse called Mombassa, their torches switched off, and all he could see were dim paintings on the walls, display cases between them and the entrance hall, and the outline of the rear doors several metres away, the stables beyond them backlit by a thin winter moon.

Sceptre began to speak in a soft, sibilant voice. “Show yourself.”

Assuming her words were directed at him, Kevin said, “What? Here?” He shrugged, and a silly grin came to his face. “Well, if you’re sure…” Kevin began to unbutton his shirt.

“I’m talking to the spirits,” she whispered urgently.

He smiled sheepishly. “I knew that, really.”

Sceptre suppressed a smile and rolled her eyes upward. “If you’re frightened, why don’t you get on with thinking of a business name for our efforts?” Once more she raised her voice, speaking to the room. “Show us who you are, tell us what you want. We’re not here to harm you, only to understand.”

“Shh,” Kevin whispered. “Don’t encourage them.”

She frowned him into silence and continued talking to the room. “Give us a sign.”

She fell quiet, and suddenly silence was the only thing around them. Outside, even the wind and rain had ceased.

“Give us a sign,” she repeated, her voice not much above a stage whisper.

Nothing happened. Kevin picked up the CB, saying, “I wonder how Pete’s getting…”

“No, don’t,” Sceptre interrupted, snatching the handset from him. “The spirits can be shy, you know. Some will turn out only when they’re confident no one will hurt them. If we’re quiet, they may appear.”

“Great,” Kevin grunted. “One spook who doesn’t like whales and another hiding behind the curtains.”

Sceptre ignored him again. “We mean you no harm. Just give us a sign that you’re here. Give us just a tiny sign.”

SLAM! From somewhere beyond the gallery came the boom of a door whamming shut.

***An excerpt from The Haunting of Melmerby Manor, the very first Spookies Mystery, released today by Crooked Cat Books. You can come along to the launch event on Facebook, or if you’d prefer, you can download the book from:

Amazon UK

Amazon Worldwide

Smashwords

Crooked Cat Books

Great Aunt Jemima’s Life Would Make a Wonderful Novel

I was reading this post from Chris Hill, which I stumbled on via Twitter. All about the public perception of a writer. It’s something I’ve touched on before, at the end of the A-Z Challenge in April.

Chris talks about how others will suggest certain genres to you, or ask why you don’t write in these genres. It’s a familiar tale, and one I’ve come across personally, and I find it just as irritating, even though, unlike Chris, I don’t write literary fiction.

“James Bond is very popular, you know. How come you didn’t write something like that?”

Well the real truth is Ian Fleming got there the year after I was born and although mother always assured me I was a clever baby, word processors hadn’t been invented in 1951.

One of the worst is… “My great aunt Jemima had a fascinating life, you know. It would make a wonderful novel.” I’ve even heard that one from Her Indoors.

The truth is most peoples’ lives are terminally boring. Including mine. Joe Murray and his pals have a more exciting life than me, and all they do is run a truck stop in a fictitious Yorkshire town.

When I read fiction, I don’t want to know that Joe got out of bed, scratched his arse, took a shower and had a coughing fit over the first smoke of the day… well, I do, but only as a backdrop to whatever trials and tribulations the rest of the book will bring to him.

Reality is a lot different. Here I am. It’s nine thirty, Monday morning, I’ve had that first cuppa, I’ve had that first smoke (and the accompanying coughing fit), I’ve let the dog out, checked my emails, and the day’s beginning properly. Now what drama awaits me? Will I have a murder to solve before tea time? Will I become embroiled in a passionate affair with the blonde across the street? Will aliens land on Saddleworth Moor and will it be my duty to lead humanity in the fight against the invasion?

All these things are possible, but not likely. In the event of a murder I’d call the cops, the blonde across the street moved away two years ago, and I’m sure invading aliens would find somewhere more interesting to land than Saddleworth Moor.

The biggest drama that may await me is a debate on how fresh the bread is when I go to the local shop for a loaf and the biggest crisis I’m likely to face is running out of brown sauce when I’m having pork pies for lunch.

And it’s the same for most people, so don’t be offended if I don’t rush to the word processor to novelise your great aunt Jemima’s life story.

You can read Chris’s original post here.

Things Are Changing on This Blog

This Tuesday, June 10th, sees the launch of a new series of supernatural whodunits: the Spookies Mysteries. They kick off with The Haunting of Melmerby Manor, one of the first novels I ever had published, now taken on by Crooked Cat Books. You can find more about it by clicking the link, or going to Spookies Mysteries linked at the top to the page.

At the same time I’ve been taking some advice from other writers/novelists, and the upshot of it is, things have to change on this blog.

So from this week, I’ll be blogging more regularly, and the particular days will be themed (don’t ask me what the themes are because I don’t know yet). I’ll even be looking for guest posts designed to help other writers.

In the meantime if you wanna tag along to the party for the launch of The Haunting of Melmerby Manor, it’s this coming Tuesday on Facebook and everyone is welcome.

How Long Does It Take To Write A Novel?

An interesting question, and one which creates a fair amount of debate.

The answer? As long as it takes.

Voices is one of my major works. The original draft was 120,000 words. I wrote it in just 33 days. The Handshaker is another one of those “big” works. Originally conceived in 1995 as a TV series, it was 2011 before it finally saw the light of day as a novel, and I guess it took me five or six years before I was happy with it. By contrast, the original, 60,000-word draft of the sequel, The Deep Secret, took exactly one week.

Why the disparity?

Much depends on your situation. If you have a full time job, there will be only so many hours a day you can devote to your novel. When I wrote Voices, I was off work with a broken ankle. I now write full time, and the writing The Deep Secret was part of an internet challenge to “write a novel in a week.”

But boredom is another factor. The Handshaker took so long precisely because I’d been working on it so long and I had begun to lose interest in the project.

The STAC Mysteries, those titles for which I’m best known, are fairly short and light, easy reads. I tend to write the first draft in about a month, but that’s not as clear cut as it might sound. In fact, I think about the plot for many weeks, sometimes months, and by the time I begin writing, I know exactly what will happen where and how.

I’m not alone in this ability to work quickly. Georges Simenon, creator of Maigret, was reputed to write the novels in about two weeks, and there are many other authors who have written full-length books in as little as a week.

Closer to home, good friend and fellow Crooked Cat author, Catriona King, is releasing her sixth DCI Craig novel, The Slowest Cut, today.

Another friend and Crooked Cat author, Nik Morton, has a book on sale entitled Write A Western in 30 Days. Much of the advice in this book is valid for any genre

Let’s not forget, when I talk about “writing” a novel, I don’t mean having it ready for publication. Just because you’ve typed “The End” doesn’t mean it’s finished. Voices may have been written in a month, but it took the better part of two years to bring it up to publishable standards. The Deep Secret was written in a single week in 2012, but it was October, 2013 before it saw the light of day.

And just to turn this proposition on its head, if you’re happy to spend two years putting together a first draft, who am I to say you’re doing it wrong?

In answer to the question how long does it take to write a novel, I repeat: as long as it takes.

***I regret I can’t open this blog for comments yet. When the lazy spammers decide to do business properly, I’ll re-open them. But then, Santa’s due on Christmas Eve, isn’t he?

Interviewing Your Characters

 

I came across this blog post via Twitter, in which author Nat Russo suggested the best way of finding your character’s voice is to interview them.

Eleven books down the line, I figure I know Joe Murray well enough already, but it’s an interesting exercise, so I thought I’d give it a go, and I’m using the set questions Nat suggested. Here it is then, the definitive me interviewing the definitive Joe.

Who are you?

I’m Joe Murray. I own The Lazy Luncheonette the finest truckstop in West Yorkshire. I’m also the best amateur sleuth in the north of England. And don’t let anyone tell you any different.

What do you care about most in the world?

My business. What else? Sanford isn’t the liveliest town in the world. It’s not the liveliest town in Yorkshire, to be honest, so there isn’t really that much to care about. Having said that, there is the Sanford 3rd Age Club, which I happen to run with my two friends Sheila Riley and Brenda Jump. We help keep all those born again, middle aged mods and rockers off the street.

What really cheeses you off?

Everything. Bolshie truckers expecting breakfast to be ready before they’ve even ordered it, suppliers who can’t deliver on time, nosy parkers from the health department accusing me of dumping chip fat in the street bins, and third agers who believe they can run the club better than me.

If you could do one thing, and succeed at it, what would it be?

I’d abolish VAT on the service element of catering. Do you know complicated it is trying to keep my books straight?

What people do you most admire, and why?

Professional detectives. And by detectives I don’t mean private eyes who spend their time chasing up bad debt and divorce evidence. I mean the real sleuths who track down hard line criminals and murderers. They need guts, intelligence and persistence.

What was your childhood like?

Depressing. Work it out for yourself. This town was dominated by the pit and the foundry. That’s enough to depress anyone. To make matters worse, my old man had me working in the café before and after school, and the day after I left school, I started here full time.

What’s the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you?

Waking up next to Brenda just after Valentine’s Day last year. We were both drunk at the time, and I swear nothing happened, but no one believes us.

What do you look like?

I’m six feet six, and I have muscles in me spit. What do you think I look like? I’m short, wire haired and grouchy. But if you had my life, wouldn’t you be grouchy, too?

***So there you are. A short interview with our Joe.

You can read the original post from Nat Russo here.

Audio – Is It Worth the Effort?

 

I’ve been experimenting with audio this last week or so, and one of the results, recorded today, is embedded at the bottom of this post.

Is it worth it? That depends on your idea of “worth”. Rather than simply putting up audio blog posts I’ve adapted short extracts from my self-published volumes, and to be honest, I’ve seen a slight spike in sales.

But it doesn’t come cheap, in either terms of time or cash. The extract below, a sample reading from Flatcap on Sex, is 500 words, and runs for 2m 49s, but it took almost an hour and half to record and edit. Longer extracts would take proportionately the same time, so you can reckon two hours or so for a five minute reading and many more hours for a single chapter from a book. That’s time I could spend writing my next megatome. It’s time I could be working to let people know I’m there, especially when I have a new novel due out next week.

The equipment doesn’t come cheap either. I have a Logitech headset with built in mike, but I found that produced poor quality recordings and because it was set so close to my lips, plosives and sibilants became respectively explosive and hissing.

I now use a Samson CU01 microphone (pictured) which I stand in front of the monitor so I can read directly from the screen. It cost me about £100 but it’s excellent at its job. Plosives (the letters ‘P’ and ‘B’ mainly) can still be a problem, sibilants (‘S’ ‘Z’ and soft ‘C’) less so, but by speaking slightly to one side of the microphone, or backing off a little, I can avoid them.

The other thing you need for audio work is a good voice, and that’s where I lack. My voice tires quickly; probably because I don’t sleep too well and because I smoke too much. It leaves me croaky and sometimes so hoarse that entire syllables go missing, which by turn entails a lot of re-recording and cutting at the editing stage.

You also need a little peace and quiet in the room, and that too can be problematic. If the dog from three doors up is daft enough to walk past our house and Joe, my Jack Russell terrier, spots him, all hell breaks loose and that’s another recording for the bin.

Does it do any good?

I’ve already said, I’ve seen a slight spike in sales since I began last week. It’s impossible to say with any certainty that the audio produced those sales, but it’s a reasonable assumption based on the coincidence.

On the other hand, the stuff I’m recording is Flatcap at his most absurd, so it might be that the people picking up on it are simply looking for his deadpan, grumpy, politically incorrect humour.

Would it improve my hits/sales if I began to put out blog posts as podcasts, or would my froggy voice get on peoples nerves so much that even more of them would stay away?

I don’t know, but I do know how to find out.

Watch this space.

In the meantime have a listen at Flatcap chattering about his favourite subject.

 

listen to ‘The Purposes of Sex’ on Audioboo

Spookies Are Coming

Twenty-five thousand stolen DVD videos. one bloody corpse, a grim, haunted moorland manor house, things that go bump in the night, and an aristocratic ghosthunter channelling through her dead butler.

Add to them a pair of misfits, a grotesquely obese movie pirate and a gang of inept crooks and it’s the prefect mix for the first Spookies Mystery.

A week tomorrow sees the launch of The Haunting of Melmerby Manor, which introduces us to the strange world of Lady Concepta Rand-Epping, Countess of Marston, her ghostly butler Fishwick, and her two friends, Pete Brennan and Kevin Keeley.

Although Sceptre, as she is known to her friends, may be down on her luck, she has lost none of her aristocratic authority or her naiveté. And if former policeman turned private detective, Pete refuses to believe in Fishwick or even entertain the idea of ghosts, he’s on hand often enough to save Sceptre from whatever perils may await her. And if he can’t do it, Fishwick usually can.

And if ducker and diver, Kevin indulges his appetites and daydreams about large sums of money, while simultaneously quaking in his boots at the thought of ghosts who appear to be attracted to him, his skills with their complex IT systems are guaranteed to help them along in the course of their investigations.

All the ingredients for a chilling whodunit, but one with a serious vein of humour.

And it’s here on June 10th.

As usual, Crooked Cat Books have arranged a launch event on Facebook, and you are most welcome to join in the fun.

So make a date one week tomorrow for the release of The Haunting of Melmerby Manor, the first Spookies Mystery.

Benidorm Bared

 

We all know that Flatcap is an expert on disastrous UK holidays, but he does travel further afield. Here are a few observations on his recent trip to Benidorm.

This old couple were making their way onto the beach. He’s pushing a rollator, which is a kind of shopping and support trolley for disabled people. She following, towing a normal trolley with two metal framed decked chairs strapped onto it. He gets onto the sands, she’s still on the promenade. She clips a lamppost, her deck chairs fall off the trolley and gets tangled up in the securing straps. She’s struggling to pick them up, he comes back to give her a hand, and he forgets to put the brake on his rollator. Neither has a clue what they’re doing and in the meantime, the rollator goes on its way… travelling the wrong way along a one-way street. Fortunately some bloke caught the rollator otherwise it’d have been halfway to Alicante.

I’d have helped, too but I was too busy rolling on the floor laughing.

We came back to the hotel one night and there was bloke on the floor below, fast asleep, his window and blinds open, showing his wedding tackle to the rest of the world. Her Indoors was very impressed, but I told her “it’s not what you’ve got it’s how you use it,” and she said, “How would you know?”

I watched this woman on the sands wrap a beach skirt round her waist, take off her bikini bottoms, and she then sat there for ten minutes, smoking a cigarette before she put her knickers on. As far as I could judge, she had her knees open giving anyone who happened to look a fine view, not so much of next week’s washing but the lack of it. It was disgusting, but she had her back to me, and I couldn’t get to the front quick enough for another blackmail picture. And her knickers were lime green with red flowers on. What kind of woman wears lime green, flowery panties? The trollop. They didn’t match her bra cos she wasn’t wearing one.

Benidorm always lives up to its reputation; full of stag and hen parties. The women go round manhunting in gangs, so maybe the bloke flashing his crown jewels was just advertising. Even I got propositioned. I had to move three times before the woman came onto me, and of course, I politely declined.

I had to.

United were live on the telly

***

If you’d rather listen to this post on, click here and hear the lad himself tell you all about it.

listen to ‘Benidorm in the raw.’ on Audioboo

The People’s Book Prize

 

Tomorrow, Wednesday 28th May, sees the award for the People’s Book Prize, in which you, the readers are the judges.

My publisher, Crooked Cat Books, has no less than SIX titles in the finals.

Vying for the Fiction Prize are:

Bad Moon Rising – Frances di Plino

Topaz Eyes – Nancy Jardine

A Departure – Tom Ward

And challenging for the Children’s Fiction Prize:

Lily Lovebug – T.P. Ripley

Myopia – Jeff Gardiner

Leap of Faith – Richard Hardie

As usual all titles are available in all e-formats and paperback.

Voting has been going on for some time, but to get six of our people into the final is a hell of an achievement. Can they go that one step further and win the award?

Well that’s up to you.

I’d like to add my note of congratulation to all six authors. I know them, I know the quality of their work, and every one of them would be a worthy winner.

So good luck to them, flying the flag for Crooked Cat.

If you’d like to have your say, there’s not a lot of time left. The award ceremony is tomorrow night. You can cast your vote at:

http://www.peoplesbookprize.com/

Meet My Main Character

This a blog hop on which I was invited by my good friend Ailsa Abraham.

I had a good deal of heart searching to work out which of my main characters I should discuss: Joe Murray, Sceptre Rand, Chris Deacon, Felix Croft, Flatcap, Millie Matthews…I could go on.

Ultimately, I’ve decided to go with Joe. He’s the character I’ve written into most tales and the one I probably know best, so here we go with meet Joe Murray.

What is your character’s name and is he fictional or a historic person?

The odd thing about this question is that it assumes I wouldn’t write about a real person who’s alive now. I don’t see why not. I have one biography bubbling away on the back burner, but it’s been there for the last four years or more with no progress.

Be that as it may, Joe Murray is fiction. He’s an amalgam of many people I’ve known over the years and there’s a good deal of me in him. Particularly the irritability.

Where and when is the story set?

There’s not just one story. There are eleven books, and one of those is an anthology of half a dozen short stories. I’m working on the twelfth. Although Joe is based in the fictitious town of Sanford, West Yorkshire. The books are set all over England, with one on the continent (Costa del Murder) and a short story on a North Sea Ferry. All the stories are set in the here and now.

One reviewer suspected that Sanford may actually be Castleford, just to the east of Leeds. Good shot, sir. The location is Castleford, but the minimal descriptions of Sanford are not based on Castleford.

What should we know about Joe?

He’s in his fifties, short, rakish, wire-haired, divorced, irascible and he couldn’t punch his way through a paper bag. But he has excellent powers of observation and deduction. He misses nothing and you can’t pull the wool over his eyes.

What is the main conflict or what messes up his life?

The books are whodunits. With one exception (My Deadly Valentine) they don’t impinge on Joe’s life, but he sees each case as a personal challenge, and always gets there ahead of the police.

What is the personal goal of the character?

The goal is the same in every book: to catch a killer. There are subplots, but they tend to be thin, and they usually involved outings for the Sanford 3rd Age Club, of which Joe is the Chairman, or slight romantic interludes for him.

Is there a working title for the book?

With eleven books already published, the working title of number 12 is A Family Killing

When can we expect the book to be published?

Eleven are already out there, and you can find them listed on Amazon UK and Worldwide. The twelfth should be out by the late summer, but we have no fixed date yet.

***

The STAC Mysteries are written by David W Robinson and published by Crooked Cat Books in all e-book formats and paperback.