It’s been a hard week. Puppies don’t realise what a strain they put on their owners. I’ve been exercising muscles that have been dormant for ages. How do you make a garden puppy proof? A lot of hard work. How can you get work done when you are keeping an eye on the little one because your wife is having a well-deserved break from it all? Me and Tuppence fell asleep while I was on duty. Fortunately she woke me up before my wife came home. But I have managed to get some writing done. As readers of my blog know, I scrapped my last WIP of 12000 words and started again. So far I have managed to pen 3000 words, and have started my novel from a completely different perspective. I have an idea which way I want to go with this, and even how I might change the style a little. I suppose it’s all part of being a stand-alone author, having an “eclectic” mix of styles. Is that possible, I wonder? Usually you can rely on a series author to write the thriller or whatever genre in which they write, to be unchanging, but in my case I believe that different characters in different time settings mean there will be subtle changes. All I can hope is that I come up with the goods.

My current work in progress is a resurrection of Marcus Blake from A Covert War. I haven’t changed him; I will be using him in a slightly different way, but hopefully he will be the same man I invented and have the same fighting skills and bags of luck (editorial licence comes into play here). I will also be using Sir Giles Cavendish, but in a lesser role than the one he occupied in A Covert War. Another female character I am introducing is a single mother called Vereen. She is a widow, young and of mixed race. She is also very attractive (what else?). I have looked up some gangsta slang too. Mustn’t get carried away with that though.

I had a small promotion yesterday for North Slope. The book shot up to just over 6000 in the rankings out of 3 million books on Amazon. I wish it would stay there, but can’t expect that. I sold 67 copies yesterday, which is nice. I also e-mailed my subscribers to tell them of my change of plan with regard to my latest WIP and to ask them to mention me to their friends on social media. It would be a neat way of spreading my name around the social networks. I also raised my two, low priced books back to their original price of $2.99. Tomorrow I expect to put North Slope back there too. After that I’ll keep an eye on sales and think about some promotion on either Facebook or Google. Maybe I’ll get more work done on my book. Or in the garden. Wish me luck!