Update on Things

Not sure what I am going to write but a friend mailed me today asking how things are going and it occured to me I haven’t posted for a while.

Ok – Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate
It’s being professionally previewed: ie a company reads it and assesses the cover, narrative cohesion, story, pricing, characterisation etc against its market. It’s relatively cheap at about 60 dollars and I think it is better value for market than these so-called ‘promotional’ packages where they just give you a banner on some obscure site and then add you to a db which is used by US book sellers to locate books. I mean why would they even find my book, let alone actually decide to stock it without reading a decent review?

I also submitted Chapter 1 on critters.org where amateur (and professional writers I think) review in exchange for having their work reviewed. I am not sure if I will do all the other chapters because it is quite a lot of work to submit. Anway they didn’t slate Chapter 1 which is about as much as I could have expected because they can be pretty harsh.

Iron (might possibly be called Too Bright, The Sun)
Going well. Actually I have just started the last chapter (I think) and, unlike Ordo Lupus (which was a labour of love) I really don’t want to stop. It has been a real pleasure writing it.

Its much to narrative based at the moment but that is usually how I start. When finished, I will need to go back and revise it heavily to take out as much of the narrative as possible.

It was quite amusing when I reached the climax or ‘twist’ because this story, although simple, has a subtle twist and I had rehearsed it in my head many times. However when I finally came to write it, I found mysself arguing with myself, saying things like, “This won’t work,” and “You said this would work.” Needless to say it took a good deal of fiddling about to get it right.

One of the two main characters starts as a baddie and finally ends up a hero and that was quite interesting to write. It was quite hard keeping him appearing as a baddie when I knew he was actually a goodie.