Omnis Speculamur

Vos Omnis Speculamur is the motto of the Kingsmen, and Omnis Speculamur is the mailing list to be on if you want to be notified when new books in the series come out.

It's a no-spam list - the only emails you will receive are new release notifications at most, a few times each year. And of course you can unsubscribe at any time.

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Writing Update

Book 1 (Wanted) is still waiting for the results of the final round of beta reading (due after the Easter hols). Then it just needs formatting and prettifying ready to push the button later in the month.

Book 2 (Hunted) is now underway and plotted out. I've signed up to Camp NanoWrimo for April, http://www.campnanowrimo.org with a target of 50k words (less what's already written) I've decided I need to be pushed more, and this seems like a good way to do it. That would have me on track for finishing the first draft sometime in May – assuming I keep up the pace – which would be good. Again I'm aiming for a total around 90,000 words (Wanted is 92,000)

April is actually quite a busy month, with a trip to Liverpool for location scouting, and a production of The Admirable Crichton, so I think it's going to be tougher than the regular Nano in November. We shall see...

The new Blurb

This is my new blurb for Hunted:

23rd Century Britain is tough. There's few people, no oil and no electricity (by order). Kingsmen rule the country with a rod of iron, and exact the severest of penalties for the smallest of crimes.

When a mysterious boy falls from the sky, sixteen year old Flick Carter must save him. That is her first crime. Falling in love is her second. But someone even worse than the Kingsmen wants him - and now her - dead. In a town of just 150 people, you can't hide. So you run. Or you die.

Hunted Update

Progress is going well on the third draft - I'm probably about halfway through that, although there is still feedback to come from some of the beta readers. I've spent some time working on the design for the cover, which I'm now pretty happy with. I've also done a cover for Socko's First Day, which was previously published in A Splendid Salmagundi, and will be made available as a standalone short. Both covers are shown below.

 



















With a fair wind, and no major rewrites, I'm hoping both books will be available around the end of April for the eBook versions, with a possible paperback to follow.

2ND Draft

Good news: The second draft of Hunted is now finished, and a Word file is being prepared to go out to test readers. I'm working on designs for the cover, and after a short break to do other things, and once I've got feedback from the testers, I'll get to work on the third (and hopefully final) draft. Woohoo!

Word Cloud

I recently discovered word clouds - graphical representations of the words in a piece of text, scaled by the number of times they occur, and arranged in aesthetically interesting ways. They occur frequently in the sidebars of blogs and forums, but we can also generate word clouds for anything, thanks to www.wordle.net. All you need to do is copy and paste your text into the text box on the Create page, and hit the Go button. That's what I did with the first draft of Hunted, and this is what I got:

Now, there's a whole bunch of things you can change, both aesthetically (font, colours, word orientations etc) and informationally (number of words shown, suppressing common words etc). You can also get complete word counts (the word 'the' occurs 5499 times, for example).

Looking at the cloud for Hunted, my four main characters (Flick, Shea, Adam, Rosie) are obviously large, but there are some other, smaller words that appear to be rather prominent, and maybe deserve to be looked at in the second draft to see if they are being over-used (back, just, looked, around, like, well...)

Hunted: First draft finished

92,000 words and the first draft for Hunted is finished! (yay!) Going to print it out for posterity (maybe the start of the legendary pile of manuscripts under the bed...!), then make a dozen backups in different formats & different places -- don't forget off-site backups people: What would you do if the house burnt down?)

And then it's playing catchup with WriMo... :)

Day 5 update

Hunted: 85,500 words
Starstruck: 6,000 words

Sunday was pretty much of a write off, on all levels. I think really I needed to recharge the batteries. The movie I wanted to see at the cinema wasn't even on at my local flea pit. I really hate it when they trail a movie for weeks on end, and then when it finally comes out they decide not to show it. Grrrr.

So anyway, I ended up watching the first two Twiglet films on blu ray, in advance of the last one coming out soon. (I haven't actually seen any of them before or read the books, so it's all new territory)

Yesterday, again I spent more time on Hunted. I'm working on the build up to the big third act showdown, and it's coming along quite nicely (no spoilers). I did get in a few hundred words on Startstruck too, but it still leaves me behind on the word tally. Some catching up to do...

More anon. :)

Day 3 Update

Hunted: 83,250 words
Starstruck: 5,300 words

Ben has finally ridden the Space Elevator up to BritSat Station, although he had to suffer the ministrations of some officious security personnel in the process (no moving fuzzy blobs to distract the viewer in literature, not that this is "literature") Anyhow, the eventually let him aboard the "puck" and he's off. When the elevator docks, Ben is able to give his first reaction to being in space. Unfortunately he will have to clean it up himself...

As I mentioned yesterday, I had the final line of Hunted, and so now I've written the final scene to go around it. I just have to remember the ending while I write the final conflict, so I don't introduce any embarrassing continuity errors (like the wrong people live/die or something!)

It's a mucky wet Sunday, so I might just go see what's on at the flicks this afternoon...

Day 2 Update

Hunted: 82,150 words...
Starstruck: 3,490 words...

In which Ben, our hero, reaches the Space Elevator base station in the Maldives, and checks in (eventually). The elevator is on one island, the airport is on another. There are water taxis to take people from one to the other. Except their charges are not exactly straightforward. Or low. And if you don't (or can't) pay them, you swim...

Overnight, the last line of Hunted came to me, so my first job today will be to write the final scene. (which is not the same as finishing - I still have some build-up and final conflict to write.)

More tomorrow. :)

NaNoWriMo 2012 kicks off

Hunted: 81,000 words down
Starstruck: 1780 words down

So November is NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month, a challenge to write a 50,000 word "novel" in 30 days. I'm entered in the challenge - Tim_A if you want to buddy me - and I'm writing a novel called Starstruck. Its science fiction and features a character called Ben, who is a 20 year old janitor aboard the Starliner Queen Elizabeth IX. Unlike Hunted, which has been planned and outlined to the nth degree, I'm pretty much making this up as I go along. Which should be interesting.

Hunted is about 9,000 words shy of being done. I wanted to get it finished before WriMo started, but things conspired. Valiant effort though, and it's rather like doing WriMo two months running. I'll still try to get it finished early this month though, so I can get it out to a couple of people for an alpha read.

Next update tomorrow... :)

New title... Hunted

51,000 words down.

Sorry it's been a while (actually it's been a bloody long while - just looked at the date on the last post - oops!) Anyhow, my October resolution will be to post more often...

The novel now has a new title. It's HUNTED (I rather like those single word title books - I'm sure you've seen them, Uglies, Gone etc.) and the subtitle is Kingsmen book 1. Yes there will be a book 2! (yay!) and I already have some thoughts on it.

Next month sees NaNoWriMo, and I'm entering that. Im planning out what I'll write at the moment. It won't be Kingsmen related, and will feature space ships. More on that later. Towards that goal, Ive decided to try and get the first draft of Kingsmen finished before the end of this month. That means daily targets and stuff, which is all good practice

Anyhow, breakfast calls, so more anon. :)

Henchmen have families too!

18,200 words down.

I think I hate dialogue. I put my characters together in the same room They were supposed to strike up some witty banter "How's Mavis and the kids?" "Done any good henching lately?" "Come on Charlie, show us where she bit you", that kind of thing. But nothing. Interior, day. Five men sitting around a table playing cards. In walks our POV character, "Wotcher guys" he says cheerily. Then... nothing.

All day I sat at the keyboard, prodding an poking these characters, but they steadfastly refused to speak. The next day they were still not talking.

So in the end I said sod it, and ran a nice hot bath, to which I retired with a large glass of riesling and iPlayer on the iPad. A couple of glasses, two episodes, one of Dad's Army and one of Outnumbered later, and I was suddenly inspired. I knew what the scene was lacking: Stuff. So having dried off and re-clothed I rushed downstairs and gave my characters some stuff to play with. One guy had a bag. Okay, what was in it? Sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Three lots. He's sharing them out with his mates. So what's in them? Something his sister caught while out hunting. Ewww... And very quickly I've rattled off two scenes, and a quite respectable 1800 word day.

Another lesson learned :)

No battle plan survives...

11,300 words and counting.

They say that no battle plan ever survives the first five minutes of actual combat. Perhaps they should also say that no outline survives the first 5000 words of actual writing!

I've already got myself two new secondary characters.  The first I realised that I needed pretty quickly. Her name is Rosie, and she is younger sister to Flick and Adam. I'm not going to say anything here about her role in the story, but rather, the consequences of adding her to the mix. You see, what happened is that she changed the family dynamic; something I didn't anticipate. Adam is now the middle child, surrounded by two sisters. Flick is a bit of a tomboy, and outcompetes him, and Rosie gets all the attention. So that added a whole realm of angst, anger and frustration that wasn't there before, and Adam has become a bit of a bully and an attention seeker. Interesting.

Then I was trying to figure out this horrible piece of back story, trying to make it more interesting--show don't tell, kind of thing, and I ended up taking Adam and putting him alone in a locked room, with a whole load of illicit tech. So of course he starts playing with it, at which point in walks....

Jessica Rabbit

Ok, well it wasn't actually Jessica Rabbit, but you know the type: Sultry, sexy and completely unattainable. So of course Adam promptly kecks his pants, 'Jessica' does a White Witch number on him, which solves my exposition problem, and I get a whole new sub-plot to boot!

Isn't this fun! :)

In a paragraph...

A small amount of progress today. I'm now up to 8200 words, and I can give you a slightly better descriptive paragraph.

23rd Century Britain is tough. There's few people, no oil and no electricity (by order). Kingsmen rule the country with a rod of iron, and exact the severest of penalties for the smallest of crimes. When sixteen year old Flick Carter comes across an injured pilot from an illegal aircraft that has crashed, fixing him up is her first crime, and falling in love is her second. In a small town of just 150 people, it's hard to hide for long, and when the Kingsmen find out her secret, the choice is simple: Love, or life.