David W. Robinson's Blog: Always Writing, page 60

D is for a Different Detective

 

Regulars will have heard me extol the virtues of Maureen Vincent-Northam many a time. She's a fine writer, editor and story consultant, and if Mo is giving advice, you should listen.

But she has another string to her bow. She writes books.

Shock, horror! How can this be?

This lady is a specialist detective: a researcher. Their work is every bit as intensive as that of Miss Marple, Joe Murray or your local CID team. Further than that, Mo is a genealogist. I thought that was someone who chips away at rocks and tells you what they're made of, but apparently it isn't. It's someone who tells you all about your family history.

I've said before that I don't need any specialist to tell me about my family history. I go to the police station and county court records and it's all there.

Anyway, back to the plot. Mo has finally decided to let us all in on the secrets of researching family histories. She has a new volume out, entitled, Trace Your Roots.

Would you like to know some more? Good. Here's a little trailer that'll go itno a bit more detail.

 

So there you are. If you want to know whether your great granddad met his wile while playing second clarinet with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, follow Mo's advice and you'll learn how to track it down.

Enough of my waffle, you can learn much more on Mo's website, here and for those of you on Facebook, there a huge Book Launch next Wednesday, April 11th, everyone welcome.

Trace Your Roots by Maureen Vincent-Northam is available in paperback from Amazon UK and Amazon.com

D is for Detective

 

Even as a child I loved detective stories. Starting with Jennings Follows a Clue by Anthony Buckeridge, I graduated to Sherlock Holmes and then onto Mike Hammer. Favouring the less violent activities of European Detectives, I ran through John Creasey and a little of Georges Simenon and as I grew older, the more erudite approach of Inspector Morse. Somewhere along the line I hit on Poirot and Miss Marple.

Nowadays it's Chief Inspector Barnaby, Agatha Raisin, Libby Serjeant and Inspector Colbeck, DCI Frost and Dalziel and Pascoe, but still these novels grip my attention until the very moment when the killer/thief/blackmailer is unmasked.

I suppose it was only logical, then, that when I turned to writing novels, they would be detective stories.

It's puzzles, y'see. I've always enjoyed puzzles. I tackle cryptic crosswords, sudokus, jigsaws (online these days), logic problems and I can never get enough of them.

From my point of view, the detective novel is a giant logic puzzle. I'm not interested in forensics, in police procedures, and even if I do bring up paranormal angles in some of my work, they're only background to the story: they do not contribute directly to solving the puzzle.

And I never go for police stories. It would involve a shed load of research which I'm not prepared to carry out. I don't want my sleuth to crack the case through the minutiae of DNA testing, fingerprinting, and a million and one other scientific angles about which I know little and care even less. I want him/her to be faced with an intellectual/observational challenge whereby the tiny clues give away the miscreant. It's enough for me to have my sleuth unmask the villain. The cops can deal with proving it after I've typed THE END.

They're not easy tales to write. The surround stuff is. I can knock that out for fun. The actual crime is fairly easy, too, because more often than not, it is murder. It's the tiny things designed to give the game away which are the hardest pieces to construct. They must be installed so that the readers know they're there, but read right past them until they reach the denouement, smack their foreheads and say, "Of course. It's so obvious when you think about it."

I'm fortunate in that my editor, the inestimable Maureen Vincent-Northam, is a whodunit aficionado like me. When I get it wrong, she's quick to point it out; just like Sheila and Brenda are quick to smack Joe's legs when he gets it wrong.

***

The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords

C is for Carol

 

I didn't read anything in the Blogging from A-Z Challenge that prevented me from putting up more than one post, so here goes.

Carol is my wife. She is a wonderful woman. She must be to put up with me for the last 30-odd years, but he does have some quirks.

She hates books. Since she left school over 50 years ago, she's never read anything other than the gossip pages of the Sunday rags and the TV guide.

Therefore, when she decided to sort out my bookshelves a couple of years ago, I was surprised to say the least. I own somewhere between 500 and 1,000 books and I have a simple system. When I've read it, I put it on the shelves wherever I can find a space. Over the years, the shelves have become two and three deep with books. Carol employed her own system.

"I've put all the big ones at the back and all the little ones at the front."

!!!!

Recently, she decided she wanted to start reading… erotica. So she trawled through the shelves looking for the stuff. Why would a 67-year old woman decide to read soft porn? Search me, but whatever the reason, I bet I'll end up with a bad back and my knees will suffer more wear and tear.

Because she had such a problem finding the erotica (I don't own that much) she decided again to sort out the shelves.

"I've put them together according to category," she reported.

"Good," said I, and promptly found Keith Waterhouse's novel, Office Life lumped with business management, and Stephen King's Duma Key filed under DIY next to hanging doors and changing locks. What's worse, his zombie novel Cell, was ranged alongside Crime & Punishment.

When I asked what she'd done with the Fethering Mysteries, I was told to look under Ornithology, Libby Serjeant has been closeted with Militaria, and Agatha Raisin is with cookery. I don't know where Inspector Morse has got to, but I think it might be with Computer Coding for Beginners.

What was it someone said about the road to Hell?

C is for Cover Design

 

You should never judge a book by its cover. That's what they say. And I would agree with them, but… The cover is usually the first thing that takes your eye.

With my usual skill at arms, and ignoring every bit of advice to the contrary, I designed my books covers when I was self-publishing. I have Photoshop, I dabble in amateur photography and I take a fair picture, so it wasn't difficult to put the two together and come up with covers. My good friend, editor and sometimes tormentor, Maureen Vincent-Northam, has helped on a number of them, particularly the early Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery covers. They were not expensive, yet attractive and I'm convinced they helped establish the series' popularity.

When Crooked {Cat} Publishing picked up The Filey Connection, it fell to them to deal with covers, and after some to-ing and fro-ing, we settled on the current example (below).

Some readers have asked what it represents. It's the headlight of the vehicle that knocked Knickers-off Nicola down.

You may be surprised at what can be done with book covers. Take a look at this, for example.

How was it done?

First I downloaded a star field from the web for the background. The planet is a picture of Neptune, which I coloured green, then shaded out most of it to make it appear in crescent. I added a yellow lens flare for the sun, and the landscape was clipped from the photograph below, which was taken near Las Roques de Garcia on the island of Tenerife (below), an area which has been used as an alien setting in several sci-fi movies.

It takes time and patience to learn how to use Photoshop or its free equivalent, GIMP, but it can be time well spent, and there is plenty of help around the web. Putting this cover together was the work of perhaps 4-5 hours.

Does the cover work? Is it attractive enough? Since the novel isn't yet complete, I have no way of knowing, but judge for yourself and let me know what you think.

***

The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords

B is for Brenda

 

Brenda Jump is 55 years old, the same age as Joe and Sheila, and she is widowed. A senior bank clerk for most of her working life, when her husband Colin succumbed to cancer she felt no longer needed the security of working in a bank, and she had grown tired of what she saw as an increasingly sales oriented career, so she gave it up and came to work for Joe Murray at the Lazy Luncheonette, where she is now assistant cook and waitress.

Brenda loves life and she makes no bones about it. Others put it down to the untimely death of her husband, but Brenda has always been the same. Colin's demise merely allowed her a little more freedom, especially with men, and she indulges her whims shamelessly.

And yet, she is not interested in long-term relationships. She prefers the single life of a merry widow.

She is not to be trifled with, however. There a hard edge about her; she can be very outspoken and she fears no one.

When it come to mystery, she leaves the fine deduction to Joe and the police procedures to Sheila, yet her observations on fellow men and women, often lead to solutions that may not have occurred to others.

She loves the Sanford 3rd Age Club, its members, outings, regular fun evenings and discos, and her background in finance made her the perfect choice for the role of Treasurer. A founder member, it is a labour of love for Brenda and she treats every aspect of club life with fervour and joyful enthusiasm.

***

The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords

A is for All About the STAC Mysteries

 

This is the first of 26 posts in the Blogging from A-Z Challenge 2012, which is open to anyone.

STAC stands for the Sanford Third Age Club, and as its name suggest, it's a social club from the fictitious West Yorkshire town of Sanford, whose members are all aged over 50.

However…

Just because the central characters of the STAC mysteries are all heading for their dotage, doesn't mean they're targeted at an elderly readership. Anyone who enjoys old fashioned, cosy crime, will enjoy solving the puzzles in the tales.

Chairman of the club is Joe Murray, the curmudgeonly proprietor of the Lazy Luncheonette. Joe is irritable, tight-fisted and divorced. He runs the cafe with the help of his nephew, Lee, and two fellow members of STAC, Sheila Riley and Brenda Jump. Joe loves crime novels and fancies himself as a bit of a detective. His mind is razor sharp and even though he often misreads the clues before him, he always arrives at the correct solution.

Sheila Riley is the widow of a deceased police inspector, Peter. The same age as Joe, her knowledge of police methods, and her intelligent analyses pull Joe back from the brink of a leap into oblivion.

Also widowed, Brenda is often described by Joe as man mad. For Brenda, naughty is always nice. She is the emotional heart of the triangle, and her observations sometimes point Joe in the right direction, often without her being aware of it.

Sex never raises its head in the STAC investigations, much though Joe would prefer it to put in an appearance now and then. The two women, known collectively as Joe's Harem, are both attractive, but as Joe often reminds himself, they're best friends and they do everything together. He could never make a pass at one because he wouldn't be able to get rid of the other. Brenda is quite open about her 'adventures' with men, and we're sure that both Joe and Sheila indulge their respective libidos now and then, but that's as much as we'll ever know.

The Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries are cosy crimes. There is no serious violence, no bad language and the clues are all there for the reader to spot.

I originally self-published the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries on Amazon's Kindle, but in January of this year (2012) Crooked {Cat} Publishing picked up the first tale, The Filey Connection, and although there are no guarantees, they will be given first refusal on subsequent titles.

***

The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords

Tomorrow We Begin

 

From tomorrow, The Blogging from A-Z Challenge begins. Twenty-six posts will follow, and from each you'll learn a tiny bit more about the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, the characters, settings, and background to these cosy crimes.

The posts will appear at 8 a.m. BST on every day except Sundays, and yes, I know tomorrow is Sunday, but it's the one exception.

So join us tomorrow for A is for All About the STAC Mysteries. By the end of the month, your knowledge will be encyclopaedic.

 

Are You Missing Out on Sales?

Regular readers will know that with one exception, my titles are not exclusive to the Kindle. The exception is The Handshaker, which is enrolled in the KDP Select program until the end of April. A condition of Select is that the title must be exclusive to Amazon.

For all my other works, whether self-published or through Crooked {Cat} Publishing, they are also available from iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Scrollmotion, via Smashwords.

"Why do you bother?" some have asked. "Everyone knows the Kindle is the big seller."

Is it?

Yesterday, I checked my first quarter sales on Smashwords. I've sold just 20 less books on there than I have on the Kindle.

That result, which doesn't surprise me, is slightly biased. The Handshaker is only available through Amazon. If I eliminate it from the reports, I've actually sold more through Smashwords than I have Amazon.

The situation becomes more intriguing when I narrow down the sales. If I look at my Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, the titles I push the most, I find that I've sold TWICE as many on Smashwords as I have on the Kindle.

I'm not knocking the Kindle. The Amazon platform has opened up a marketplace that no sane author can afford to be without. It is brilliant. Upload is easy and quick, finding books is simple thanks to their ASIN cataloguing system, and contrary to many opinions, I've always found their support to be top drawer.

But last year, the Kindle accounted for only 50% of my sales. The rest were made through Smashwords. And the reason is clear; Smashwords carry an author's work in ALL formats, including pdf and online reading. My titles are available through Amazon but only for the Kindle. Check out my storefront on Smashwords, and you can download for the Nook, Kobo, pdf, iPad/Phone, every possible variation. In addition, once a work has gone through the Smashwords vetting process, it can be found on the iTunes, Barnes & Noble, etc. sites.

I don't sell many from the actual Smashwords site. Most of them come through these others sites, and the sales are even more surprising because I don't particularly publicise them, whereas I push my Kindle links like hell.

My cosy crimes appear to do well in countries like Canada and Australia, and Great Britain doesn't do too baldy, either, which indicates that there as many people using reading devices alternative to the Kindle.

I don't give advice… well I do but I usually charge for it (I'm a Yorkshireman, what would you expect) but in this instance, I'll give you a spot of advice for free, and it's based on personal experience.

Ignore Smashwords at your peril.

***

All my titles, published or self-published, can be found on my Amazon page and for reading devices other than the Kindle, they can be found on my Smashwords storefront.

Blogging from A-Z Challenge 2012

Next Sunday is April 1st. Ha-ha, yes very funny. Now that we have the April Fool gag out of the way, let's get down to business.

(Note: you may be wondering what April Fool gag. I am too. Guess we'll have to wait until April 1st to find out.)

It's also the start of the Blogging From A-Z Challenge.

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The principle is quite simple. You blog every day (all but one Sunday off for good behaviour) each post beginning with a different letter of the alphabet until you've done them all, A-Z.

Mercifully, those nice people over at Blogging from A-Z allow you to choose your own theme and mine will be… wait for it.

The Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries (groan).

Never mind complaining. I'm saddled with turning out 26 blog posts in April and they have to be on a subject I know something about. The chances of me producing even 5 posts on Hand Rolled Cigarettes That Work or Garden Sheds I Have Known are lower than a snake's doings, so what better than the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries? I mean, I invented them, so theoretically no one knows more about them than me. I use the word theoretically because I'm not actually sure I know much about them, so I'll be making it up as I go along.

The Blogging from A-Z Challenge is open to anyone and everyone. If you fancy having a dabble, cut along to their website and register along with the 1250 or so other balloons… I mean good people who've added their blogs to the list.

If you don't fancy your chances, get over there anyway. You may find something to read. But wait until you've finished reading mine first, huh?

***

The Blogging from A-Z Challenge runs for the month of April 2012 and is open to anyone with a blog.

I'm Deaf: What's Your Excuse?

I'm very hard of hearing. What did you say?

It goes with getting older, so they tell me. In my case it goes with having spent years listening to rattling engines, the background racket of busy factories, and so on. Noise induced hearing loss.

It has its uses. When Her Indoors is nagging the pants off me, I can always say (and I frequently do) "Couldn't hear a bloody word."

It also has one or two curious side-effects, principal amongst which are phantom sounds. Tinnitus rings constantly in my left ear, and in my right it sounds like a hurricane rushing through the trees outside. It also produces phantom voices.

Before you think I'm losing my marbles, let me hasten to reassure you. I lost whatever marbles I had long before I lost my hearing, but I've never heard voices. I can't hear them now: not properly. It's as if someone next door has the TV on with the volume turned up. According to the bods who know, the audiology specialists, it's my brain tricking me into thinking I can still hear. This, too, is a novelty. My brain usually tricks me into thinking I have money when in fact, I'm skint.

Now hold all this in mind while I tell you about my broken ankle.

In 2008, I was working at a factory in Manchester when I fell over a pothole in the ground and broke my ankle. I didn't work for the company, I was only visiting. Naturally, I called for help; the idiot in charge asked what had happened, I told him and as he helped me to the canteen, he said "You should have watched where you were walking," to which I replied, "We'll see what the lawyers have to say about that." The lawyers had their say, I got a smack on the wrist for not watching where I was walking and the company got a larger smack on the wrist for not having repaired said hole in the ground. They also paid me a handsome sum in compensation for my injuries and lost wages while I was off work.

So there I was, Christmas, 2008, nursing a busted ankle and deaf as a post, listening to phantom voices muttering away in my head, when my writer's mind put them both together and came up with an idea.

Supposes the voices were real. Suppose they had a sinister motive. Suppose they were responsible for my broken ankle.

The story of hidden spooks tripping up a hack writer isn't a story at all, so it needed a little embellishment.

120,000 words worth of embellishment later, the first draft was done. It was eventually trimmed ot 110,000 words, Crooked {Cat} Publishing have picked it, and it's entitled… Voices.

And it's coming soon, to a Kindle near you.

***

You cannot escape the voices in your head: where they lead, you must follow