Steve Turnbull's Blog, page 2

Timeline of the books ~ so far

I have one hell of a publishing schedule outlined for the coming year: one book every month of which eight will be novellas and four will be novels. And all of those will be in the Voidships steampunk universe.

So to help people see how the books relate to one another I put together this fairly rough timeline of the stories. Of course what I really need to do is have it generated automatically form the books themselves but, well, I'm too busy writing.

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Steamy punk or, why I'll (probably) never write erotica

Originally posted in my newsletter, join it, over there >>>

Sex sells, or so they say. But I'll probably never find out. I mean, yes, it's true, those of you who have read Halo Round the Moon will know that much of it is to do with sex. And it does have a single sex scene in it. The new Maliha Anderson novel Wind in the East also has a couple of erotic scenes (all done in the best possible taste). Even my comic book The Lazarus Device also has a sex scene in it (not yet available).

But...

Four Weeks Hard Labour

So we're almost two weeks into NaNoWriMo and I have written just over 21,000 words of the fourth Maliha Anderson book (the target is 50,000 by the end of November). As previously mentioned I do like a deadline. If we add the previously written Chapter 1 (which you can read on Medium) that takes us up to nearly 30,000 which is about halfway through.

I must say I'm very pleased with the way it's going though with all the things that have been going on it's been quite tough. The first week I was...

I Am Writer - Hear Me Narrate!

I've been serialising a story called Journey into Space as part of the #saturdayscenes initiative over on G+ (the only social network I use extensively). And some other writers have been doing readings from their work and I thought, why not?

So I did. This is episode 1 and it's just under 6 minutes long.

Journey into Space ep 1

What tech did I use? Skype headset, Audacity (free), and SoundCloud. It took me an hour including the editing. Audacity is incredibly easy to use and has a noise removal...

Opening to Wind in the East

As I said I'd been writing my work-in-progress, I thought you might be interested in reading the first paragraph:

In those days when she had been young and credulous, Riette had believed her mother’s fairy story about her father—a heroic Boer farmer by the name of Pieter who had been killed by the British. She claimed he had been her lover, or in some versions of the story, her husband. As the years passed Riette learned from the taunts of the older children her father, whoever he was, would n...

Blowing a creative gasket

Yesterday I wrote a thousand words of the next Maliha Anderson story on the train and this evening I wrote another two thousand.

And I did this because I had to. I am still planning much of the detail of the story, writing murder mysteries and thrillers requires a good deal of planning when it comes to the placing of clues. This is not to say that there isn't a lot of creativity in the writing process itself - because there is, my plans aren't rules, they're guidelines.

But, as I've been planni...

The Evolution of a Story

I'm in the process of building the next (fourth!) Maliha Anderson story Wind from the East and I've known from the outset that this is going to be the most complex one so far - structurally and emotionally.

On a purely mundane level I have a need for a far tighter control of time, so I have got the demo copy of Aeon Timeline. It's an excellent product and I will be buying it when my free trial runs out.

I started working on the plot last weekend and spent time making notes. I already knew the g...

Murder out of the Blue - available free

So, here's the deal:

I've made Murder out of the Blue free on Story Cartel.

The idea of Story Cartel is that, if you sign up (for free), you can download the book, read it and then provide an honest review.

Obviously, I hope you'll enjoy it and write a good review, but if you think it's a pile of poo, then you can say that.

The book is only available for a short time and is downloadable either in Kindle format, or straight PDF which every reader, tablet and PC can manage.

In case you're wondering...

How does it end?

Now that Halo Round the Moon is finished I have begun planning the fourth story for Maliha Anderson and William Albert Valentine Crier (known to his friends as "Bill", and to Maliha as "Valentine", his least-favourite forename).

When asked whether I'm a planner or a plotter, as I may have mentioned, I'm somewhere in between. But there are key things that I must know. And the most important of those things is how the story ends. If I don't know how it ends I can't write because I don't know whe...

What comes first?

The main writing is now complete on the third Maliha Anderson story Halo Round the Moon so it's going into the edit process and while it's a little behind schedule I'm not too troubled because it's turned out so well. I'm extremely happy with it.

So what happens now? In the background I'm working on the plotting for the second in the Patterner's Path trilogy but that's quite a toughie.

The thing is that Halo Round the Moon has left the main characters in an extremely uncomfortable position emot...