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.

Sign up here.

Wanted on Audio

I'm almost halfway through recording an audio version of Wanted, which has been a very interesting experience. I've just finished reading Chapter 18, and the midpoint (based on page count) is about three quarters through Chapter 19. The big question is going to be whether I have any voice left by the time I've got to the end...

I don't do 'voices'. At least I'm not doing voices. I had a go at the first two chapters, and since more than half the characters are female... well, you can imagine the result. Put it this way, it wasn't pretty.

Anyhow, once it's all edited together, it'll come out somewhere in the region of sixteen hours, which is ballpark for this length of audiobook. However you won't be able to buy it as an audiobook. No, I'll be releasing it as a podcast, in roughly thirty-something weekly instalments. For free.

Yes, you heard right: It'll be free. Okay, you have to listen to my voice, and as I said, I'm not doing the voices, and it'll be the best part of 9 months before you get to the end. But still, free. (And there might be the odd ad in there too.)

Keep an eye out here or on http://www.tim-arnot.com or on the Facebook page for further details.

Paperback Writer...

Okay, not quite, but the proof has now arrived for checking. Yay! Here's, er, proof...

No doubt everyone will be more interested in what's on the bookshelf behind me, such is life, ho hum etc. And yes that is Piglet.

While I have your attention, there is now an official Wanted Facebook page. Please 'like' it. :)

Paperback news

In addition to the news of being Indie Book Bargains author of the day today, I had news that the proofs are now ready for the paperback edition (360 pages, 5" x 8"). That means, assuming everything is okay, it should start appearing on Amazon etc 2-3 weeks from giving the go ahead. Yay!!!

Let's see if we can't get my first month's sales into triple figures! Buy it for only $3.99 (£2.71) from one of these sellers:

  

Ignite's 5 Stars

Wanted just got its first five star review, from Ignite's Book Blog (Yay!!! :-)). You can read the review here:

Tim Arnot is a new author and has created a believable world. You most certainly don't need to be a young adult to enjoy it, though the main protagonists are.

This is a post-apocalyptic book with a difference. Most of them concentrate on a devastated world where chaos rules. Tim Arnot has taken a world which collapsed maybe a couple of hundred years ago and people have adapted. He creates a Britain in which electricity and technology are forbidden (except to the Kingsmen – an elite law enforcement agency). Sixteen year old Flick Carter makes flint arrowheads, hunts and helps her dad to run the local inn. Out hunting, she ‘finds’ a young man, Shea, injured after using forbidden technology. Her caring for him puts her in danger; he’s already in it up to his neck! There are those working against the king, to raise a private army. Flick falls foul of these and her life is forfeit.

Tim Arnot has created a believable world here and has fabricated the politics to go with it. I enjoyed the characters, feisty Flick and her younger sister Rosie; the Faringdon Watch and the Kingsmen, in particular, Jessica Dixon. There are evil characters to get your teeth into too; especially the corrupt and bullying mayor and his weak and venal thugs. We learn just enough about the mysterious Shea to want to follow his exploits and there are hints that Jessica is more than she initially seems to be. Flick is a darling! I really look forward to reading more.

Ignite Books (Follow Ignite on Twitter)

You can buy Wanted (Flick Carter Book 1) from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Kobo or B&N Nook.

Now on Nook too!

Wanted (Flick Carter #1) is now available to download to your Barnes & Noble NOOK.

Get yours today!

It's Out!!!!

In a 23rd Century Britain where oil and electricity are just a distant memory, Kingsmen rule the few remaining people with a rod of iron, exacting the severest penalties for the smallest crimes. Sixteen year old Flick Carter has saved the life of an injured Scav. But it’s not just the Kingsmen who want to get their hands on the boy and his secrets; there are forces far more dangerous who will stop at nothing, not even murder.

Wanted for a murder she did not commit, Flick is forced to flee. In a town of just 150 people, there’s nowhere to hide. So you run. Or you die.

Note for parents: Contains scenes of death and violence, and very occasional swearing.

Buy it now from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

Wanted: Sample available

The first few chapters (roughly equivalent to the Amazon free sample) are now available on my main web site for you to read online. You can check them out at http://www.tim-arnot.com/felicity-carter/wanted/wanted-sample/

The finished book should be available from Amazon later this month.

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... :)

A Splendid Salmagundi

70,000 words down...

Recently I contributed a short story to this anthology that's just been published on Amazon. My story is called The First Day, and features two of the minor characters from Hunted. It's a nice little introduction to the world of the Kingsmen, and I think you'll like it. Check it out:

A Splendid Salmagundi is a delicious salad of short stories seasoned with a light dusting of poems, covering a variety of genres.  You will find one or two true stories, some humour, some horror, fantasy, adventure and science fiction.  Many are Amazon published authors whose work you may already have read.  Others will soon be favourites.

Contributors are alphabetically, D M Andrews, Tim Arnot, R J Askew, Baarbaara, Andrew Barrett, Kath Brinck, Michael Brookes, Alexandra Butcher, DD Chant, Mel Comley, Lexie Conyngham, Raymond Daley, Ian Ellis, Robert Franks, Cornelius Harker, Mark R Faulkner, Vic Heaney, Jonathan Hill, Darren Humphries, Andrew Lawston, Stephen Livingston, Will Macmillan Jones, M T McGuire, Kath Middleton, Marc Nash, Harry Nicholson, Jenny Shaw, Rosen Trevithick, Simon Turpin, David Wailing, Jim Webster, Philip Whiteland.

Click HERE to buy on Amazon UK

Click HERE to buy on Amazon US (.com)

A Splendid Salmagundi Official Website

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.