Final Episode of THE TRANSPORT Podcast Out Today

A half-year rollercoaster comes to an end. Today I posted the last episode of my audiobook podcast THE TRANSPORT. 130 Chapters, 100K+ words, close to 500 pages. It was an experiment during the “boring” phases of the CORONA pandemic of lockdowns and public-life standstill. I learned a lot about reading aloud during those 26 weeks, about noise management (as I recorded predominantely in my living room at night), and about all the mistakes I still had in the manuscript despite a highly paid editor (Update time to the print and eBook editions of THE TRANSPORT!)

Will I repeat this? Maybe not. It took a lot of time off my writing activities. But it was fun during a stressful time, just as much fun as conceiving and writing my COVID Trouble over-the-top thriller last year. Hopefully, fingers crossed, this will be the last Corona project, two years is enough.

News of the Week - Writing, Publishing, Promoting - How I Spent My Easter Vacations!

It’s been a while since I gave an update on my various workings. Shame on me. But here’s a quick one. What’s going on in the Ames-Universe?

• The Transport audiobook podcast is proceeding quite nicely. Episode 13 just came out and recording / producing is fun, though the technical part is purely down to automation and handiwork these days. It wil occupy me for some weeks to come but is a nice distraction from pure writing chores.

• Parallel to the podcast, The Transport also comes up chapter-by-chapter on Wattpad. A weak ploy to get more readers, however not many readers have caught on yet. Well, there’s hope.

• Another Wattpad & Co project of mine has upstarted. It’s sort of a manga-fantasy-demon hunter story of a young girl destined to balance the worlds of good and evil, a quest she had to accept against her will. As this, for now, will be a pure online project, I plan to pack the story into a TV-style format. The four stories are set up episode style, full stories in their own rights with one overarching story line holding it together and investigating the girl’s challenges with her demon hunter situation. The four episodes will form season one. Let’s see what comes out of it. Idea is to publish it in all the online outlets, accompanied with some kick-ass manga graphics of a girl with a demon hunter sword. Episode 1 is near writing completion and will go to the editor, soon.

• On the side, I am writing on a thriller idea I had for some time, inspired by these old-man stories that are personified by old Clint Eastwood and other senior action heroes. A mix of “Torino” and R.E.D., if you get my drift. Bob Prescott, retired, widowed, 72, housesits for his daughter in the small Florida coastal town Pelican Coast and gets drawn into the more seedy underbelly of the charming and peaceful town. It’s fun to write, as I make Bob out to be a very unapologetic guy. And an extremely, extremly ruthless guy. Pelican Coast’s underworld will have sleepless nights!

Not Writing. Recording.

A quick update on what’s currently going on. Well, I’ll t ell you: a lot.

Podcast: You probably noticed by now, “The Transport” audiobook is in constant output state. A new podcast episode with three to five chapters every Monday. I just uploaded episode 8 to be scheduled on Feb 22nd. I needed to stay ahead of the curve in order to realize my new project, making music again.

Music: Yes, you heard right. With the production of the podcast came back the idea to do some music, too. Tinkering with keyboard, guitar and writing songs. More to come from February 1. I’ll have a separate post as an explainer on Saturday.

Writing: As I need some constant writing outlet, I started plotting for my next Troubleshooter thriller. It will be second book in my “inspired by current events” series, featuring Paul Trouble and Leah Steel. Their first adventure together was COVID Trouble of course. The new book has the working title “Billions of Troubles” and is inspired by the great, ugly, messy real life events around Germany’s Wirecard fraud scheme. A blue chip fin-tech company built on deceit and fraud, imploding after an inquiry by a journalist.

Out Now: The Transport - A SciFi Military Action Alien Thriller

New Year, new book. Sounds as if I had been busy over the last months. First the publication of my new Troubleshooter thriller COVID Trouble, and today the announcement of my first full-length scifi action novel The Transport.

But looks are deceiving. COVID Trouble had its first word written in July 2020 with an aim of 50K words, whereas The Transport already started way back in 2019. From the point of complexity, The Transport was way more ambitious. I aimed for 120K words, put down 130k, split up onto four point of view main characters. With a book of that magnitude, everything takes longer. The conception, the writing, the editing, the external editor reworks, whew!

The additional challenge for this book: I wanted to try something new regarding marketing. So I had the mad idea to create an audio book version of The Transport, too, and publish it as a Podcast. Several lifes ago, I used to be a recording musician and had some idea about recording technologies, but the step from a MIDI sequencer on an ATARI ST1040 to Pro Logic X on the Mac was a big one. But with the help of a lot of YouTube tutorials I managed to set up the narration in an acceptable quality (I hope, you’ll be the judges).

Getting closer to point "Writing-Burn-Down-Zero"

My new day job that I started earlier this year comes with a longer commute on the train. Time effectively spent with writing on my current book, a science fiction thriller romp with a lot of “citations” from classics such as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, “The Terminator”, or “Independence Day”. The writing process for me comes in several stages. Ideation and plotting are the core creative parts, fleshing out the story from a one liner (“A bunch of stranded aliens try to steal back their spaceship from US military”) to a fifty chapter structure. After that it’s writing. The most challenging part. Will the story idea hold up to hundred-thousand words? Will the characters be interesting enough to hold the reader’s attention for such a long time? Will all the plot-lines play out as sketched out?

Let me explain “Writing Burn Down Zero”: Burn down is my take on agile project methodology, adapted for writing. The fifty-plus chapter cards are my task repository, writing one after another — not necessarily in chapter order — is like developing a piece of software. One function point after another, each chapter stands on its own, with own drama and cast of characters, reactive or active, and with a small cliff hanger at the end. And the long list of chapters slowly burns down like a candle, two steps forward, one step back , putting flesh to the bare bone, creating life.

“Burn Down Zero” for my latest story approaches fast, I am running out of things to write, that moment when my burn down list will be empty. All chapters will be there. The story is there. All the characters are in. All stories within the story are resolved.

The story will be far from done, don’t get me wrong here. All over the place, I entered my open issue code “xxx”: missing story twists, missing descriptions, holes I found and was too lazy to resolve, missing characters. The next phase of work, resolving the xxx’ses, will take me as long as writing the story itself and usually adds ten percent of additional word count. I hate what’s ahead, but I love approaching Burn Down Zero! (Anytime next week)

The story is there.

It works!

I’ve made it this far!

A good feeling.

What's up? That's on!

Long time no post on this site but I took it easy recently. As I replaced a 30 minute train commute (each way, very productive) by an eBike ride (60 minutes each way, sporty, but not productive). So I am missing 60 minutes a day in text production. Plus, the weather is fantastic currently and my evenings are shorter, too. And vacations...

Sounds like a lot of excuses NOT to write. But I am busy. Teen Vampire Hunters, the second installment of my Teen Monster Hunters series, is coming along well and I am in rework mode. The timing, characters and overall story line is fine, just some structural optimization. Followed by two more reviews. Hopefully I'll have that all behind me by end of August, to send it off to the editor. And finally start writing again. 

Next book is still a bit up in the air. I've had some motivation to pick up my second romantic comedy again, a piece I left off at about 80 % because I was unhappy with some of my characters. It's hard these days to write good romantic comedy where your characters are female, and professionally successful, but still you are required to have your heroines fall in love with hanging tongues. The second option is to continue with my science fiction horror action thriller, working title "The Transport". Also maybe in  state of 50 %, but needs a lot of rewrite to differentiate itself from the Teen Monster Hunters. (plays in high school, aliens in the basement, sounds familiar).