Adam Maxwell's Blog, page 2

New book coming soon – Rockdown in Lockdown

Lockdown – what a pain in the arse. Am I right?

Well in the continuing saga of me trying to finish the third book in the Kilchester series you’ll be totally unsurprised to discover that I put it off once again…!

It should have been:

The Dali DeceptionKill It With FireGet The Girl, Kill The Baddies

Instead, it’s true, I have produced two (albeit shorter) books:

Come On Steal The NoiseRockdown in Lockdown

but that’s not a full length novel. Though I’m acutely aware of the fact that, in writing two novellas, I’ve technically written more than enough words that, had they been put in a different pot, would have easily completed it.

I’m not going to beat myself up over it. I’ll leave you to do that. Instead I’ll just say – more news on the (to be released later this year) third novel at a later date. For now the more eagle-eyed of you will notice that there are two mentions in the post already about:

Rockdown in Lockdown

And it is almost ready. Like, the cover is done, the second draft is in the bag and it’ll be going to the editor and proofreaders by the end of the week.

Just in time for Lockdown to come to an end… because I don’t writer fast enough, apparently.

Anyway, for now I’ll just say this – it’s a novella but a longish one. And it’s a socially distanced heist.

Oh, and there’s a bazooka.

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How To Write A Christmas Story (part one)

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Will You Help Me Change My Life?

Happy New Year (can we still say that?!)

I hope you enjoyed my little e-present of ‘Come On Steal The Noise’ over the festive period. If you’ve not grabbed it I’ll drop the details at the bottom of the email. Today I wanted to ask you something…

WILL YOU HELP ME CHANGE MY LIFE?

I want you to PATRONISE ME

Not in the usual way, no.

For a while now I’ve wanted this to be less of a one-way street and more of a conversation. A community. And last year I discovered Patreon.

What is it and how will it help? Both good questions. For the short version click here. I made a short video to explain and… it’s easier than reading. Go on, watch it, I’ll wait.

If you didn’t watch it (or even if you did!) Patreon is a platform where you can help support creative types (like what I am) to do what they do. So each month you would give $1 or $5 or whatever and you get rewards in return. And since you’re here on my actual website I’m hoping that means you want Maxwell-related rewards.

I’m going to be pulling back the curtain and giving you access to the inner workings not just of Kilchester but of how I write my books. Depending on what level you choose you’ll get:

– Opportunities to name characters and locations in future books
– New chapters from forthcoming novels every few weeks
– Latest books before anyone else
– Deleted scenes and never before seen stories
– Exclusive blog posts and videos 
– Direct access to yours truly

and if you hop on board before the end of February I’ll send you a personalised and signed postcard from here in the UK to wherever you are in the world.

The end goal, if it works, would be for me to get paid every month to be a writer. LIFE CHANGER.

The goal for 2020 is much less grand. It’s just to see if I can get enough people interested to generate $100 a month.

I know thousands and thousands of people enjoy my books every year and I’ve given away countless thousands more over the years so I can’t overstate what a difference this would make to me (obviously) but also to my output. 

Over the last decade I’ve written THIRTEEN books. Some were very short. Some were very long. If we built this community it would mean that you’d be getting, in all likelihood, two novels and several short stories EVERY YEAR.

And you could help choose what they would be.

So what do you think? Do you read my stuff and like it? Think you could help me change my stars?

I’ve set up several tiers to try to suit all levels you might be interested in but this isn’t just an automated email, I write it myself and I really do want to know what you want from it so if you’ve got questions or suggestions just email me – I’d love to hear from you. 

I love to hear from you and I can’t wait to see what we make of this decade together.

Now stop reading and GO TO PATREON AND SHOW YOUR SUPPORT.
https://www.patreon.com/adammaxwell

Talk soon

Adam

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Free eBooks… Free Audiobooks… what’s going on?

What more can I say? I wish I could have done this quicker but it turns out Audiobooks take time not just to record but to edit as well!

‘Come On Feel The Noise’ which is a Kilchester Short (although technically at 23,000 words it’s not really that short!) is currently free. You can get it as an eBook. You can get it as an audiobook read by me. You can get it as both if you like.

How? Easy. Go to this page and click the link. Pop in your email address and I’ll send you the details.

Well, technically I won’t send the details. It’ll automagically and technologically do it all by itself. In a matter of seconds. After all you don’t want to wait around for some lazy bum of an author to wait for the muse to strike, find a computer, blah blah blah and send it to you.

What you want is robots. Internets. All that stuff.

And crime fiction, of course. Lovely free crime fiction ebooks. And even more lovely free crime fiction audiobooks. Because who would want that?

The post Free eBooks… Free Audiobooks… what’s going on? appeared first on Adam Maxwell's Fiction Lounge.

Christmas Starts in September

Okay, let’s get this straight – this isn’t going to be one of those blog posts complaining that Christmas comes along earlier and earlier every year. It does. You have every right to be annoyed. Now let’s move on.

You see, for me it really did. And it did it to myself. On purpose. Just like the idiot I am.

Those of you who’ve been a follower of my writing for a while will know that I’ve always had a (some call it unhealthy) obsession with writing Christmas stories. This can be traced all the way back to the days when the only form I was writing in was flash fiction. In fact, one of my earliest books was ‘The Night Before The Christmas Before I Was Married’ which collected a selection of them.

This was born of two main factors. Firstly the laziness of certain sections of the creative world who seems hell bent on ramming ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens down our throat in new and mostly-unchanged forms. I mean, I’m not sure that teaching our kids the only way to change rich people’s behaviour is to terrorise them with unquiet spirits. As a method it’s just too labour-intensive. Too many chickens need to be sacrificed and it pisses the vegans off.

There’s also the fact that The Muppets put a lid on the whole affair by making their version of the tale so let’s agree that we’re done with that story because (and this might surprise you) THERE ARE OTHER CHRISTMAS STORIES.

Which brings me to the second factor. The ‘other’ Christmas stories. And no, I don’t mean the whole religious thing. Seriously. That’s more worn out than Dickens… I’m talking the Die Hard factor.

What’s always fascinated me about the Christmas season as a writer is the way people behave in an entirely different way to the rest of the year. And I’m not alone. The best Christmas stories are those that play with that central idea.

I mean punishing rich people is fun and all but it has limited mileage in fiction.

So I played. Men returned home and accidentally got engaged to their ex-girlfriends. People fought over the last toy in the shop. A small girl travelled to a fantastical market on a train and fought with a mysterious baddie in order to secure a gift for her best friend.

And what all of these tales had in common was that, somewhere in the month of December (usually around today, the 18th). I would have a mad idea to write something in time for Christmas and then hurl myself bodily into the act of creation when, really I should have been decorating the tree or… whatever non-writers do in December. How the hell would I know?

The problem was that for the last few years I’ve been writing novels and they take a lot longer than flash fiction. And a lot, lot longer than short stories. So I’d left the idea of a Christmas story by the wayside.

But like an incurable rash, it itched.

And I had an idea for a short story a couple of years ago featuring Zoe from The Dali Deception. But I was writing Pirates vs Ninjas at the time. So I just wrote the very basics of the idea down and left it. And then I was busy writing Kill It With Fire and then I was busy writing Kilchester book three. And, technically, I still am.

But this year I decided to press pause on the current work in progress and so it came to pass that in the first week of September I put on my ‘Now I have a machine gun. Ho. Ho. Ho.’ t-shirt and matching socks to get myself in the Christmas spirit to write a short story set in the jolliest of seasons.

A short story, I thought. It’ll take about a fortnight.

September me was a fucking idiot.

I was aiming for eight thousand words.

When I got to ten thousand I realised it was going to be a bit longer.

In the end it closed at just over twenty three thousand words.

If my editor’s face was an emoji it would be this:

December’s New Kilchester Advent-ure

A Kilchester Advent-ure…

Which of us hasn’t wanted to commit a crime when we’re with our families at Xmas??

Coming soon to an e-reader near you – stay tuned for more information.

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One Book Ends & Another Begins

Kill It With Fire really reignited my passion for crime.

No, not that sort of crime you foolish person…

I’m sure you’d say my approach to writing has been somewhat scattergun over the last few years. And, to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t disagree with you. But having said that I have published a bunch of books so, you know, I have that going for me.

The problem, if there can be said to be one, is that there hasn’t been any consistency.

Crime book… kids book… short stories?! Well a calm has descended here at Maxwell towers and my passion for crime has been well and truly reignited.

I always knew that The Dali Deception was going to be the first in a long-running series and, right now that series (Kilchester books one and two) is soon to expand into a trilogy.

I’ll probably blog about it another time but I struggled to get my head in the game until the second draft of Kill It With Fire but after I did I remembered why I loved Violet, Katie and the gang.

And so off I went and wrote an outline for book three in the series.

As of today I am over thirty-two thousand words in to the first draft and adding more every day. To put that in to perspective that’s now longer than Kill It With Fire and I’m only a fraction of the way through.

This one is going to be my longest book yet and, do you know what?

I couldn’t be happier.

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Real Life

Real life has an awful habit of getting in the way of you doing whatever the hell you please. And, as it happens, that’s exactly what happened to me!

But things got back on track so I’m starting with a little blog post just to say ‘I’m here, alive and well (and writing)’. The last blog post was about the novella that I was working on ‘Kill It With Fire’. Well that novella is now completed so there’ll be updates coming on that along with new projects and links to stuff I’ve forgotten to post on here in the meantime.

Sorry. I’d promise to do better but I’m afraid I’d just let you down.

Oh, don’t look at me like that. I promise to do better.

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Kill It With Fire

It seems I can’t stay away from Kilchester.  After discovering the place with Clint in The Defective Detective and then getting embroiled in The Dali Deception it seems that my heart belong to that twisted mass of concrete, glass and madness.

The last time I posted it was about my next kids book which is pretty much ready to publish now but writing Violet & co once more makes me want to spend more time in Kilchester and, in writing this novella sequel to Dali more and more ideas have been tumbling out into my virtual notebook. I’ve even got a tentative title for the next novel…

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves… where are we today… where are we right now?

Right now, as you’ll see from the image I am over seventeen thousand words into the novella.  Chances are it’s going to come in around the 25-30,000 word mark.  It’ll be as long as it needs to be (or as short) but I’ve got a solid outline so I’m just chipping away. Over two and a half thousand words last week is not to be sniffed at.

Well, you might be able to write faster but for now, that’s pretty good for me.

Most fun of all has been that this week I’ve spent most my words describing Katie hitting people. Repeatedly. It’s been fantastic and I can’t wait to show you it.

For now, I’ll just tease you a little and let you know that the wonderful artist responsible for the cover of The Dali Deception has delivered another phenomenal cover that I’ll be revealing in due course and I’ve been a lot more active on Facebook so if you’d like you can cruise on over and join me there.

Or not. It’s entirely up to you.

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Pirates and Ninjas and Bears… oh my…

Okay then I admit it there are no bears in the post, or in any of the upcoming books…

I’ve been busy with things that I think will keep all sections of my readers happy so, this might be a longish one.  Buckle up, loungers.

First up earlier in the year I finished writing the next in The Lost Bookshop series.  This one is called ‘Pirates versus Ninjas’ and it’s around 80,000 words.  Which is long for a kids book but it’s got pirates and ninjas and an octomonkey.  What’s not to like?  I’m around 75% of the way through editing that, expect a cover reveal and release dates to be cropping up very soon as that’s going to be the next one published.

For my long-suffering adult readers who have been indulging me writing kids books… I’ve been working on a sequel novella to ‘The Dali Deception‘.  It’s (currently) called ‘Kill It With Fire’ and after an extensive outlining process that went on far longer than it should have I started to write it two weeks ago.  Since then it’s flowing like a hosepipe.  Only with words rather than water otherwise it would just be too messy.

Currently the word count for that stands at 5,172 which I’m quite happy with since it’s only been two weeks.  Obviously it’ll be as long as it needs to be but at a guess I’d say it’s going to come in at under 30,000 in total.  Don’t want to reveal too much about the plot yet but I can say that Violet and Katie will definitely be featuring heavily and at least a couple of new faces too.  Good guys? Bad guys? You’ll have to stay tuned to find out.

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