David W. Robinson's Blog: Always Writing, page 34

Taking Over the Charts

I’ve had a rough old time of it since I came back from holiday. The dog is unwell and the car is broken down. Both will cost me in terms of stress as well as cash.

It’s something of a relief, then, to check the Amazon UK Kindle charts and find that I seem to be taking them over.

Costa del Murder leads the way at number 8 in the British Detectives top100, but I’m overjoyed to see ALL NINE of the STAC Mysteries in the chart.

In sci-fi, Voices is still holding its own, albeit quite low down, and in humour , my two madcap LOL volumes Flatcap’s Guide to UK Holidays and Flatcap’s Guide to Sex are consistently mid-chart.

This means that, not for the first time, eleven of the twelve books I have on sale are in one chart or another

The odd man out is The Handshaker but there’s a sequel due out at the end of October, so you never know.

My thanks go to all my readers. I hope to keep entertaining you for many years to come.

We’re Home

So we’re back from Benidorm, and it was the usual disaster. Aside from a two and a half hour delay at Manchester and an argument with the cabin crew to get the seats I had pre-booked and paid for, the hotel was a revelation. I expected it to be bad, and it exceeded expectations. It was appalling.

Here is the view from the balcony.

I said before we left that the place reminded me of D wing in Walton nick, and now you can see why.

Her Indoors insisted they move us and they did. But the view this time was even worse. Here it is.

Which bright spark had the idea of giving a Man U follower a view of Barca? I’d rather have had Chelski or Citeh (did I really say that? It must be the jet lag).

We never saw a cloud all the time we were there, which meant it was too hot to walk, too hot sleep, too hot to f… yes, well, never mind. I had to spend most of my time in one bar or another to keep cool.

Then there was the bloke in 205. He slept naked. How do I know? Because he left his window and blinds open, flashing his wedding tackle to anyone who happened to be passing. And Her Indoors made sure she passed many times.

“It’s not the size,” I said as I took a couple of pictures of him, “It’s what you do with it that counts.”

“You said the same about the window box,” Her Indoors replied, “and those flowers wilted, too. Just like…”

I didn’t hear the rest of it.

Internet access was almost non-existent, and even when I did find a café, the browser was IE3 (or earlier). I barely said hello on Facebook and my half hour was up.

After a week of torture, the return journey was quite uneventful. We left the hotel at five and were in our house at eleven. I’ve taken longer driving from Birmingham.

I was pleased to see that my latest tome, Costa del Murder was still doing well on Amazon, still riding high in the Brit Detectives chart.

I was quite happy to be home when two disasters struck in a matter of hours. The car broke down, but much worse than that Her Indoors wants to go back to Sunnydorm next year.

Aaargh!

Flatcap Flying

It’s a stressful time at Festung Flatcap. Eight o’clock Sunday morning and I’m tearing about like a lunatic making sure everything is as it should be… and it isn’t.

This time tomorrow, while you lot are crawling out of bed ready to face another gruelling week at the coalface, Her Indoors and Flatcap will be at 30-something thousand feet jetting southeast-ish for a week of sun, sand and s… sangria.

Yes, Flatcap is off to Benidorm.

Why Benidorm? Well, every other resort in Spain, the Canary Islands, the Balaerics and Balkans has suffered and I see no reason why Benidorm should get away with it any longer. Also, we’ve never been to Benidorm. I’ve spent years purposely avoiding Benidorm. But Her Indoors insisted, and I’m a good husband. I do as I’m told and take it out on the rest of the world.

Benidorm, I’m told, has much to offer. There’s a bar every five yards, and you can buy specialist cocktails called Leg Openers. I’m thinking of trying one on Her Indoors, but I don’t expect any spectacular results. Last year, in Majorca, she wanted Sex On The Beach, but the barman didn’t know how it was done, so she end up with an Orgasm, and she complained that there was too much Cointreau in it.

I’ve checked out the hotel where we’re staying. I’m not suggesting it’s downmarket, but the pictures did remind me of Walton Nick’s D wing.

“You should feel at home, then,” said Her Indoors.

There’s plenty of entertainment nearby. And there will be additional shows, such as watching Flatcap trying to find the right key when he’s pissed out of his brains.

It’s an awkward time to be going away, what with Costa del Murder doing so well in the Crooked Cat End of Summer, Start of Autumn sale (bet you thought I wouldn’t have the balls to sneak a quick ad in there.) But we’ve taken all the necessary precautions and let the police know that we’re away and two teenagers will be living on their own for a week. That way I don’t get blamed when I get back.

This is the last entry until we get back next week, and that’s assuming the kids and grandkids haven’t burned the house to the ground, in which case, you could have to wait a while longer.

So until then, be good. If you can’t be good, be careful. If you can’t be careful, try doing jigsaw puzzles instead.

Crooked Cat Sale

Prices on all Crooked Cat books are cut to (about) 77p on Amazon for the coming week.

Not sure whether it’s a late summer sale or an early autumn sale, but for the next seven days, you can take advantage of vastly reduced price on their entire range of fantastic books.

This includes the STAC Mysteries, the latest of which, Costa del Murder, is currently in the top ten of Amazon’s British Detectives chart. If you want to know how Joe handles investigations in Spain, then help yourself for only 77p.

It also includes my two dark thrillers, The Handshaker and Voices.

The Handshaker is the tale of hypnotist Felix Croft confronting a serial killer. The killer has Croft’s girlfriend; Croft wants her back in one piece.

‘A terrifying ending that will leave you gasping for breath on the edge of your seat,’ is how reader Paul Bell described The Handshaker. And right now, it’s only 77p

Voices has featured on this blog quite often just recently. Sitting slightly below the midway point in the Amazon sci-fi/visionary and metaphysical top 100, once again it’s a dark tale with paranormal overtones, following the torments of college tutor, Chris Deacon after he survives a bomb attack.

‘Real horror at its best… because you really believe it could be happening.’  So says reader, Richard Hardie, and once again, you can form your own judgement for just 77p.

And, of course, it doesn’t stop with my titles. Crooked Cat have many fabulous titles from brilliant authors, and they’re all at rock bottom prices for the next seven days. Thrillers, fantasies, rom-coms, contemporary, whodunits, historicals, romance… I’ve run out of breath.

The Crooked Cat late summer/early autumn sale runs on Amazon from now until September 20th, so get ’em while they’re hot and cheap.

Update, Update, Update

I recently took delivery of a new BT Home Hub. I’ve been with BT for over two years, and although they have their critics, I’m quite happy with them.

When I first installed the new Home Hub 4, I switched on and everything worked perfectly. Then I came to download a fresh title to my Kindle this morning… and ran into a brick wall.

The Kindle picked up the new wi-if source all right, but it couldn’t connect because it wasn’t set up. So I went into setup mode, jumped through all the hoops and put in my password. That’s where things started to go awry. Like most people, I have a range of passwords for different purposes and accounts. I tried every one of them and the bloody Kindle still couldn’t connect.

I went into my BT account, jumped through even more hoops to change my password to ensure that I was putting the in the correct one. I turned the router upside down to get the factory password from the bottom, tried that and still it wouldn’t connect.

I went to the BT help pages – no use – I went to the Amazon Kindle pages – no use. Some sites even suggested that the Kindle paperwhite is not compatible with BT HH4

In desperation, I surfed the web and found a blog post which is getting on four years old that told me the Kindle didn’t want my password. It wanted the wireless key from the router. Turn router upside down again make a note of wireless key, then try to connect again. And… done deal. I had lift off.

Why can’t these people say what they mean in the first place?

That’s update one.

Update two concerns the progress of STAC and Costa del Murder. Officially released last week, it’s doing well, holding its own in the Amazon UK British Detectives top 100, at number 7 (the last time I checked).

Update three is personal, and it’s the one which gives me most pleasure.

My daughter, Angela Brown is a forty-something mother of two teenage girls, one of whom, Victoria, is getting ready to start life at Cambridge University. Her sister, Hannah, is coming into her A level year. But their mother, my little angel, has just passed her degree in Applied Computing, and is now Angela Brown BSc.

If she’s this good now, just think what she’ll do by the time she’s over 21.

Congratulations to Angela. You make the old man proud.

Voices – Could It Become A Reality?

The central premise of my novel, Voices, is mind control. The Voices use direct communication in an effort to destabilise the central character Chris Deacon. And they do a damned good job. It’s only Chris’s determination and strong will that come to his aid.

That’s as much as I’m prepared to give away of the plot.

So what’s the reality behind it? Well obviously, there is no reality. It’s science fiction, with the emphasis on fiction.

As a long time (slightly sceptical) student of all things paranormal, I did some research and learned that the Americans and Russians experimented in these areas. The official line is that they experiments were, at best, inconclusive, and the American sessions were discontinued in the early 90s.

But that threw up a slight disparity. We all know that Great Britain and America have an agreement to share intelligence and other, related defence information. Presumably, then, the British knew of the American failure in remote viewing. Why, then, did the British decide to run their own experiments in 2001? Could it be that the US efforts produced slightly better results than we were led to believe? Disinformation is one of the best tools at the disposal of the intelligence community, and an admission that the experiments failed, would be the perfect way of letting them carry on in total secrecy.

The conspiracy theorists dream: and that of the political thriller, sci-fi thriller writer.

Now, however, we have a fresh spanner in the works. Well, I say spanner. Perhaps I really mean a machine for making spanners.

Browsing my news feeds this morning, I stumbled across this little tale in the business section of the BBC website. A chap playing a computer game, but his actions were dictated by someone else, someone in another building, and the only means of communication was the human mind.

Thought control may be about to become a reality.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23994649

***

Voices: You cannot escape what is in your head.

STAC Fans – Joe Needs Your Help

STAC #9, Costa del Murder is out there and it’s doing well, holding its own in the  top five of the Amazon UK British Detectives chart.

It’ll be Christmas before you know it and work on the festive release is well advanced, but I need your help to add those finishing touches.

I need a varied assortment of menus for Christmas lunch/dinner and buffet snacks.

This may seem an odd request, given that Joe has spent all his life in catering, but after his heart wobble, and the insanity resulting from packing in smoking, Joe’s mind is wandering and he can’t seem to concentrate.

I need menu suggestions for full, three course lunch/dinner, and I need table of goodies for the parties.

It’s not a competition as such, but we’ll see if we can come up with something for the best suggestion as chosen by an impartial onlooker.

All suggestions please, to this blog or the mirror post on the Official STAC site or on the STAC Facebook page, and thanks in advance.

Voices Rising

It’s been a crazy few days here. We fly off on our late summer holiday soon, so we’ve been zipping around making sure everything is in order, then I fell quite ill last week after neglecting a ‘sniffle’ which turned out to be a full-blown chest infection. As if that wasn’t enough, I had the official launch of Costa del Murder, the 9th STAC Mystery, last Friday, and the usual follow ups to ensure the book is visible.

It’s still total mayhem here. I have STACs #10 and #11 to work on, Maddy Chester is feeling neglected, I’ve a sequel to The Handshaker due out in time for Halloween, and as I hinted previously, I’m working on a sequel to Voices.

The book itself is rallying a little. As far as I’m concerned, it is one of my best works, if not the best, and yet it has never been popular, mostly (I believe) because it’s invisible. It’s also a long read: about 110,000 words.

According to readers, the effort is worth it. Reviews are scarce, true, but they’re consistent. Everyone who has read it has given it five stars. An earlier edition had only a couple of reviews, and they, too, were 5-star.

It’s been likened to the works of James Herbert. I’m honoured to be mentioned in the same breath as the late Mr Herbert, one of the world’s finest horror writers.

Real horror, real fear does not come from zombies, werewolves, vampires and reborn Egyptian Pharaohs. They have a reality about them, a tangibility which can be confronted, fought, beaten.

Genuine terror comes from within: the phantoms and demons which have no form or substance. As Chris Deacon says:

No matter how much I thought about it, no matter how hard I tried to make sense of it, I could find only one common thread: insanity. And it was staring me in the face.

Chris’s very ordinariness is what makes the novel tick, according to most reviewers. There is nothing special about him. He’s an unambitious college teacher, with no designs on management. He enjoys his work, he has a comfortable life, he’s happy, until the terrifying events in the college dining hall change his life, and cast him into this nightmare. His nerve shattered, his courage waning, he cannot comprehend his phantoms, yet if he is to be rid of them, he must learn, and to learn means confronting them.

Reader feedback says Voices is a compelling read, but as reviewer Richard, advises, don’t get so engrossed so that you forget where to get off your train.

***

Voices is published by Crooked Cat Books and is available for download from:

Amazon

Smashwords

Crooked Cat Books

And in paperback from

Amazon

Launched

Costa del Murder, the 9th STAC Mystery, is launched today and already it’s reached number 500-ish in the Amazon UK overall rankings, and #3 in the British Detectives chart.

Some going, huh?

Well, maybe not.

It’s an open secret that because of a glitch, the book has been on sale for over a week. Even so, its performance has been impressive. It made its first appearance in the Brit Detectives chart on August 27th at #38. My previous best performer, The Summer Wedding Murder, only managed to poke its nose in at #81 on the day of its release.

From that entry point, Costa del Murder entered the Amazon top 1,000 on Monday this week, and at the same time anchored itself at #7 in the genre top 100. It then entered the top 500 and made #3 in the category chart yesterday while I was at the doctor’s listening to another lecture on smoking.

You may think that with all this pre-launch activity, today will be an anti-climax. Not if I have anything to do with it. Mind you, in my experience, most launch day are anti-climaxes.

There is still a huge party to be enjoyed on Facebook and you’re more than welcome to come along and join us. It’s a Spanish theme… I wonder why. We’ll be looking for pictures of holiday memorabilia, preferably from the times you visited Spain, but if you’ve never been further than Llandudno, it’s cool. Bring your pictures along. There’ll be music and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of jokers.

And me? Well I’m far too busy to be enjoying myself. Having sent Joe, Sheila and Brenda to Spain, I’m going myself a week on Monday, and I’ve a shed load of things to get through between now and then.

But I’ll be round and about all day.

***

Costa del Murder, STAC Mystery #9, is published by Crooked Cat Books and is available for download from:

Amazon

Smashwords

Crooked Cat Books

And in paperback from:

Amazon

Come along to the official launch party on Facebook.

Two More in the Charts

A few days ago, I was talking about the difficulty of categorising my novel, Voices. Well, we finally managed to find a category. Sci-fi/Visionary and Metaphysical. And what do you know, it has finally made its mark on the Amazon genre charts, coming in at number 45 this morning.

It’s no coincidence that Crooked Cat and I have been working on this categorisation problem. Voices was set up for a sequel, and I’m working on it. That sequel will take the tale closer to the metaphysical science fiction.

Without giving away any of the ending of the original novel, I’m going to give you a taster of what is to come.

At the end of Voices, Chris met Colonel Thompson of the Intelligence Services, a man determined to suppress the knowledge Chris had come by. Here we are early in the sequel, and Thompson has called upon him again, four months after Chris’s wife, Jan, was killed in a traffic accident. When Thompson brings up the matter, Chris accuses him of involvement in Jan’s death. Thompson’s reaction is typically authoritarian.

***

“Despite what you may read to the contrary, the intelligence services need no reason to arrest you and we’re not overburdened by the need for warrants or other trivia, like proof. No, Mr Deacon, I had nothing to do with Janet’s death and if I were to eliminate anyone, it would have been you, not her. You are an enemy of the state.”

I ignored his jingo-jingo patriotism. It was part of the public school mindset. “Why are you here?”

“Curiously enough, I need your help.”

I laughed. A sardonic bark dripping with cynicism, but it was the first time I could recall laughing at all since Jan died. “I’ll ask again.”

“No, really, I do need your help.”

“Pull the other one. You just said I’m an enemy of the state. Given my history as a union activist, a left winger, the kind of man who loathes you and all you stand for, do you seriously imagine expect me to believe that?”

“No, I don’t. I would, however, like to extend an invitation. How would you feel about dinner tonight? Giacomo’s. In the town centre.”

I was stunned into silence for a long moment. “What the hell are you talking about?”

He finished his tea and put the cup and saucer on the coffee table. Getting to his feet, he said, “I’m led to believe that Giacomo’s was one of your favourite restaurants. Seven thirty for eight… oh, and do smarten yourself up, old boy.”

I bristled. “Give me one good reason why I should turn up.”

He smiled that infuriating, ingratiating smile. “If you don’t, you will never learn who really killed your wife or why. Seven thirty this evening, Mr Deacon.”

***

What does Thompson want? What really happened to end Jan’s life? Well, you have a bit of a wait to find out. I don’t anticipate the novel being completed much this side of the New Year, and then it will need polishing, editing, editing and polishing before its ready for publication. But I promise you, it will be worth the wait.

***

Voices isn’t the only non-STAC Mystery title making its mark.

I find this world terribly depressing, and my work doesn’t help matters. The only safety valve I possess is a one-megaton sense of humour, and that manifests itself in the thoughts and advice of… Flatcap.

We all know a Flatcap. He’s the man in the pub who knows absolute everything about everything, and for the price of a pint and two pork pies, he will tell you everything about everything.

The two volumes of Flatcap’s advice, Flatcap’s Guide to UK Holidays and Flatcap’s Guide to Sex have just come off a five-day free promo, and Flatcap’s Guide to UK Holidays has refreshed its mark on the Amazon UK/Humour chart, bolting back in at number 13 this morning.

Here’s Flatcap warning us all about cycling holidays.

Your modern pushbike is fitted with anything up to 8 gears on a double reduction axle. It has on board refreshments in the shape of a water bottle and long straws, independent suspension on the saddle and a variety of all-purpose handlebars. I’ve even seen them fitted with tom-tom satnav systems, detailing the route from Garstang to Carnforth (cyclists always go to these boring places) and projecting the timescale.

And it doesn’t end with these hi-tech accoutrements. Most bikes are now fitted with a speedometer. A speedometer!!!

On the move, your average bike hovers around the 10-12 mph mark. (That’s slightly faster than a First Manchester staff bus when I’m behind the frigging thing taking Her Indoors to work early morning.) Why would anyone want to fit a speedometer to a bike? What next? A high beam flashlight to blind the speed camera at Cross Street? Who is the cyclist trying to outrun? Granny Whiz on her motorised scooter?

I found one guy on the web crowing because he’d got up to 37.6mph. Laugh? I nearly bought my own beer.

Buying the bike is not cheap, and the expense doesn’t end there. You have to poppy up for the clobber too. Back in the dark ages, when I was a lad, you put a pair of cycle clips round your trousers and hopped on the saddle. If you couldn’t afford cycle slips, you tucked your trousers into your socks.

That’s not good enough these days. Oh no. Nowadays it has to be full length, cycling tights in black Lycra. The problem with these things is, they are body hugging. It’s to lower wind resistance, and you’ll soon understand what that means when you take them off and find that every fart of the day is stored inside, released in one giant, ozone-shattering blast of methane that will blow your head off and knock your eco-friendly rating for six.

And these tights hide nothing. Her Indoors’ rugby forward thighs would be on display to all and sundry and while I wouldn’t say my legs are thin, they do tend to remind most people of the novelty robin perched on a Christmas cake. They also reveal that most men, me included, are not … ahem … built like a ballet dancer.

After the tights, there is the helmet. These things remind me of a fancy egg box sliced in half, after someone has nicked the eggs. And you should see the price. Averaging about £40, the most expensive I came across was £91. £91!! I only paid £65 for my first car.

***

No one should contemplate holidays without first taking Flatcap’s advice.

Flatcap’s Guide to UK Holidays and Flatcap’s Guide to Sex are exclusive to the Amazon Kindle.

Voices, published by Crooked Cat Books, is available for download from:

Amazon (Kindle)

Smashwords (all formats)

Crooked Cat Books (EPUB, MOBI, PDF)

And in paperback from

Amazon