Friends, fiction and puppy dogs.

I didn’t write last week’s blog because we had company over the weekend. Two friends of ours from Spain are on an extended holiday in UK and spent four days with us. Sometimes it’s right to stand back from your routines and see life from a different angle, and the four days with our friends was like a mini break for us. On the other hand, I didn’t get any writing done and missed writing this blog.

Looking back over the past fortnight, I can say my Facebook advert has proved relatively successful, bringing me an extra 450 subscribers to my e-mail list. I now have over 1200 subscribers, which gives me an opportunity to develop something from that relationship. But where do I begin? I expect to be framing another FB advert later this month using ‘Lookalike’ audiences. Facebook consider a minimum of 1000 subscribers is necessary to make this kind of campaign work, so it will pay me to go down that route and see what transpires.

My writing has picked up again and I have now passed the 40,000 word mark, which I consider to be over halfway. I’m way behind my schedule, which should have seen me finishing the first draft last month. I usually take a year to complete a book, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll have this one finished before 2017 arrives.

I am at a kind of crossroads now, because I have to begin picking up the elements of the story and gathering in the sub-plots to bring it to a final and dramatic conclusion. I have compiled a list of bullet points as a kind of aide memoire so that I don’t leave out any pieces of the jigsaw. Although I write with MS Word, I copy everything into Scrivener, which I find extremely useful. It gives me the ability to search through my manuscript at a glance using the corkboard facility and the fact that every scene is recorded separately. I keep the bullet points in Scrivener so that I can refer to them from time to time.

One danger of writing sub-plots into a story is that you can see how some of them would make a story on their own. I’m having that problem with Vereen, my main female character in the book. She is a single mother, on benefits, mixed race and likes marijuana. She buys her smokes (spliffs, zoots) on the estate where she lives. Her supplier gets murdered, which means her source has dried up. I can see how this could develop into a story on its own, but she is connected to the main male character, Marcus Blake, a private investigator who is trying to uncover the truth behind a cabinet minister’s apparent suicide. There is no direct link between Vereen and the cabinet minister except the country of their birth in the West Indies, but there is an element, a tenuous link at the moment, that draws the two of them to the arch criminal behind Vereen’s situation and that of the minister’s suicide. That’s why I need my bullet points: to keep track of all the little clues I keep putting in.

What else is in the pipeline? A book stall at the Arundel Festival this month and a chance to sell a couple of paperbacks. The CHINDI group (www.chindi-authors.co.uk) have something planned for September and November, and ideas keep tumbling out at our regular monthly meetings.

Tomorrow is the local dog show. We will be entering our puppy, Tuppence, into the “Best Puppy” class. We expect to win of course like all puppy owners do. But will Tuppence behave or make her mum look a fool as she tries to walk her round the show ring? Who knows, but it’s all in fun and in aid of cancer research — something close to my heart. Wish me luck!

Question Time at the Rox Music Festival

Yesterday, five members of our CHINDI group and myself set up a bookstall at the Rox Music festival in Bognor Regis. It might sound odd, being as it was a music festival, but it worked. The six of us were there all day, and met some interesting people who stopped by the stall to chat. And we sold some books! It’s amazing what kind of questions we are asked. “Are you all authors?” was a common one. One visitor wanted to play a kind of one upmanship. “So where’s so and so then?” We’d never heard of him. Seemed he’s a local author but not a member of the CHINDI group. When we pointed out that our banner describes us a ‘CHINDI’, he got the message. And there are those who have written a book, but seem embarrassed to admit it. One woman told me she had 5000 books at home, and had no intention of adding more to the pile, so wasn’t buying. Oh, unless the price was £0.99 a book. Another lady got all excited because we were authors, as though we are hidden away, out of sight and only appear publicly on the odd occasion. I liked her because she bought one of my books. One chap listened to me for a while as I explained my novel, Past Imperfect, then decided to buy it (what a salesman!). When I told him the price, he said, “That’s cheap.”

And so the day rolled on. It began with rain, fine drizzle for an hour or so, and then the sun came out and lifted out spirits. More people turned up at the festival and we got busier answering questions, handing out brochures, collecting sign-ups for our quarterly newsletter. From the profit and loss point of view, it wasn’t worth the effort, but from the point of view of making contact, it was extremely successful. And I think we all enjoyed ourselves, and I suspect we’ll seriously consider doing it again next year.

On the domestic front, I haven’t written anything because I have been one degree under. It’s some kind of viral infection that doesn’t want to go away. I am improving slowly, day by day, but on the few occasions I have attempted to write, it’s been a non-starter; the brain won’t function. My Facebook advertising is progressing and picking up ten subscribers a day. Few more days to go before I finish the campaign, then it’s on to another FB advert. This time I think I will use my 1000 plus subscribers to get FB to select a ‘lookalike’ audience. FB recommends having at least 1000 subs to make the advert work effectively.

Today, Pat and I went to a Golden Wedding celebration. It was over at a posh looking golf club near Chandlers Ford, just outside Southampton. The happy couple immediately introduced me as the ‘celebrated author’. Nice friends, eh? Perhaps next time I should take an armful of books with me.

No more news now. Hopefully I’ll be able to add more words to my manuscript tomorrow and then be able to look ahead to seeing that light at the end of the tunnel. Wish me luck!

Upsides and downsides

The sun is shining here in Bognor and I have a lousy viral infection. Can’t write, don’t want to write, and know that as an author I should ignore the pain and get on with it. But it shouldn’t be too long before I’m back in the game once the antibiotics kick in. You get days like that, don’t you? But what has been happening on the upside is that I have passed the 1000 subscribers mark! Time for a celebration. The next target must be 2000, but that’s a long way off. It’s a bit scary, you know, having 1000 people out there. I feel that they are my responsibility, although I know they are not. But what is the point of trying to get a burgeoning list if there’s nothing there for them? I know of some writers who have thousands of subscribers, and it makes me wonder how they keep them faithful. I also wonder if the top writers have subscriber lists. I can’t imagine they do; their name is a big enough draw anyway. I said last week that I was thinking of tweaking my Facebook advert. I tried and failed miserably. No doubt I’ll have to wait until my brain is functioning properly and try again.

Nest week, July 30th, six of us in our CHINDI group will be putting up a bookstall at the Rox Music Festival in Bognor. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it, having a bookstall while all that rock music is going on? But it’s all about being in the public eye and reminding people who you are and what you do. I would like to say that I expect to sell loads of books, but my experience tells me I will be lucky to sell a couple. But we try.

Today, the Daily Mail published the result of its First Novel competition. A young woman won the prize with her first book. She beat the other five short list candidates. All of them were women!

I started watching the American TV series, ‘Breaking Bad’ on Netflix this week. My eldest son has just finished the box set, said it was brilliant. I often find myself envying the writers of scripts like that (The Sopranos of course), and wonder what kind of thriller writers they are, if indeed they are writers. To produce something as clever as that, you need a good team around you. It puts our singular efforts into perspective, and I suppose most of us would like to see a film made of at least one of our books. I did manage to get my title, The Eagle’s Covenant into the hands of Judy Coppage some years ago. She was responsible for bringing Die Hard to the screen. She liked the book but thought the location would not be attractive to American audiences. The book is set in Germany and uses German police procedures throughout. I did live in hopes. And so we press on. Maybe one day I’ll hit the big time and see my work up there on the silver screen. Wish me luck!