From the Writer's Desk

Hi there, not much happening in Writer's land. I had to travel a lot all over the place for my company, which took me away from my Mac and my iPad for the last three weeks. Every night a new hotel room, a new conference center, and new faces. Kind of social overload for an introvert like me. But it all went well and actually was a lot of fun. This is how Bruce Springsteen or the Rolling Stones must feel when they are doing one show a day for months and months. And we remember Mick Jagger's advice to us road warriors:

What else is new? Kindle Scout for "Troubleseeker" did not pan out, unfortunately. Even though it got almost the same exposure as "Five for Forever", they decided not to take it into their portfolio. Which means that I'll need to do the final edit and publishing one of these days. Big question is whether I'll make it an Amazon exclusive and put it into KDP Select, or do a broader release. Decisions, decisions. The Troubleshooter series so far hadn't created much buzz in the past, so I'd like to try something new this time. Most likely I'll publish it broadly and run a campaign via Wattpad. Put up the first "Troubleshooter" novel up to Wattpad, and advertise books two  and three ("Troublemaker", "Troubleseeker", and 2.5 "Pieces of Trouble") heavily. Maybe that works better. The Calendar Moonstone story gave a lot of attention.

Which brings me to the planning for the next novel. My latest work in progress "Matchbreaker" is about in the middle. Many core pieces are in place, although I am not so happy about style yet. It is supposed to be a romantic comedy, but I tend to linger too much on the backdrop (Start-up scene New York) instead of the hilarious comedic and romantic situations of my three main characters. After that it will likely be either the next Calendar Moonstone Brilliant novel (working title: Brilliant Heist)  or a high speed ultra-violent thriller with the working title "Rattlesnakes". I might throw a coin...

A writer's life - re-edit, cover, Wattpad, starting a new book

Some updates from the writer's life while Richard Ashcroft does his hymnic singing thing in the background. 

Re-Edit:  "Troubleseeker" arrived back from the editor. Back to the chain gang to embed the edits and do all the homework of rewriting as suggested. Man, I hate this part. It is so labor intensive! I did not dare to check out the Word change log to see how much I have in front of me. But it must be done! A lot of good music will be needed to get me through the nights on this one.

Cover: And then of course the cover. I had some other priorities during the last weeks, so I fell behind on the cover for "Troubleseeker". The draft is there, but not the artwork, and not the copy for the back cover. Another piece of homework for me and Mr. Photoshop.

Wattpad: I will be hitting the three-hundred mark of followers and the thirty-thousand mark of readers due to the success of "A Brilliant Plan". We are at Chapter 45, five more to go!

Starting a new book: I am still undecided which topic to tackle next. It will be a romantic comedy, that is for sure. One a little darker, and one a little lighter and geekier. My mind tells me to do the lighter one first (a sort of Sex-and-the-City meets Start-up meets Gentlemen-prefer-Blondes mashup), but my heart lies with the slightly darker story (boy and girl are in love, fall apart, live their lives and accidentally meet again). If I see my follower group on Wattpad I might also dust-off a Calendar Moonshine short story from the shelf to bring that on the market before Christmas.

Troubleseeker milestone — No more open issues!

Tonight marks the next milestone for T3 - the third Troubleshooter installment, called "Troubleseeker". When I write or edit, I mark each open issue with an "xxx". This marks everything from missing descriptions ("xxx What does Irene wear?"), clarifications ("xxx MI5 or MI6?"), or plot-points to be picked up ("xxx add earlier scene about threat"). Especially in first drafts I might dispense "xxx" remarks by the dozen whenever I am too lazy or too immersed in my writing.

During editing passes one and two, most "xxx" items get taken care of. But at the end of edit pass two there will always be twenty to thirty more persistent items left over. Because they require a bit of deeper research which I avoided to do during concentrated writing or editing. E.g. "xxx what model is the helicopter?" requires a check into what helicopter types are used by the Royal Air Force to transport people from A to B.. Or because the issues require another dive into creativity because the story structure is weak or complete new scenes are needed. 

In the most cases, I simply delete the xxx comment after I am done, as it makes no sense to keep them. But in other situations I keep them. I might pose a question in my remarks "xxx Shouldn't Tom discover the identity of the baby instead of Burton?". To answer, I leave the comment, just re-labelled as "yyy" or "nnn" which stands for Yes or No.  

But now it is done. The last "xxx" has been eradicated from the Troubleseeker manuscript! Now it is back to edit pass three. By end of August I should be able to pass it over to the editing service for the language, grammar and typo check. 

PS: in case you are wondering: I am working on a German Mac. German lesson of the day: "Suchergebnis" = "Search Result"

Five for forever — my ride from obscurity to superstardom and back

Amazon has this concept of author rank. According to Amazon definition it summarizes all your cross book sales and pitches you against the rest of the world. With Kindle Press-driven promotion for "Five", I had for the first time taken a systematic regular look at my own rank. Talking about modest, have a look at my ranking from the last half year. It reflects nicely my activities around the two books I published this year "Five for forever" and "Pieces of Trouble".

What do we see? February and March spikes are easy to explain. I had bought some gift copies   (10 each)of my books via Createspace, that probably was the large May peak that brought me into the 100.000 for the frist time. The other earlier peaks were the typical 1-2 copies per month per book. There appears to be an interesting calculation method in place that catapults you up at a purchase but then uses some moving average to the end, which explains the right-heaviness of the distribution of each peak. 

Then mid-June things became serious with Five for forever on Kindle Press and the parallel promotion on Amazon. Basically what they did is that they added my book to the various recommendation results that you typically see.

The peak was July 5th, seems there were a lot of bored people in the US Independence Day, and bought something good to read. I made it up to Author rank 27.503. This probably does not yet bring me up to ranks with Stephen King or Frederick Forsyth. But next book, next goal! Crack the four figures.

PS: Just a plug for Wattpad's "A Brilliant Plan" - the next chapters are online.

A Writing Evening

In the middle of the second editing pass of Troubleseeker, my third Troubleshooter installment. The house is quiet, kids and wife in bed sleeping, night has fallen. Moody light to keep visual distraction low.

Recognize the London Eye and Big Ben?

On the iTunes rotation I had some prefab Beatles playlist from Apple Music under the curated topic "Beatles at Night". Was a good one, many deep cuts like "Mr. Moonlight", "I'll be back", or the fantastic "Long long long". After that I opened up the Radiohead page and simply pressed the random button. The hypnotic quality helps in the humdrum task to rewrite, root out my xxx's from within the text, and spot logical errors.

In the first pass writing process, I am neither patient with detailed descriptions, especially not of rooms or surroundings. For me, the flow of the story is everything at this point, mundane things like description, continuity, or character management goes to the background. So in order to keep the writing going, I simply type 'xxx' in the text to indicate that there is something missing. Sometimes labelled with what I think is missing 'xxxDescribeMan' would be a typical xxx entry. 

Then either before or after the first edit pass, I'll use the global search function and bring up the list of xxx. One after one needs attention. Not a task I prefer, as it is a very mechanical and time consuming, making details up, balancing description and action flow, assuring continuity, doing research on topics. (Like just now: how many rounds do fit into a Beretta 71 Jaguar?)

So for this sort of work, I need intelligent background music, Radiohead fits this category exactly. And with so many years and albums under their belt, the number of songs is exhaustive. 

I tinkered with some cover ideas for Troubleseeker. A sniper scope is a must have, dito is a London sights silhouette like London Eye, St. Pauls, and Westminster. So it might look something like this:

A quick first draft...

It's Official: Someone Paid Money to Read Your Book

After about half a year, my Troubleshooter story collection "Pieces of Trouble" found it's first paying customer. That of course is special, though I bet it does not really increase my Amazon author rank much. 

What is also special is that the meta-publisher Pronoun send me an alert with some tips and tricks what to do now. E.g. just this, posting a blog post or twitter about the occasion. Done that. 

While I rode the train home today I thought about some follow up stories from the Troubleshooter universe, and actually came up with one story. Maybe I'll work on it during commute when I am sick of editing T3 (Troubleshooter Book 3). Working title is 'Boy Trouble' and it will pick up on a storyline that is mentioned in one sentence in the unreleased T3 book. Paul mentions to his (female) sidekick that he was in progress dating a neighborhood girl. 'Boy Trouble' will describe the building of the relationship with the plotline that there is a violent boyfriend of some sort in her background. Who of course will learn that Paul Trouble is not just a one handed accountant. One twist will see that Paul attempts to hide his 'persuasion' skills from his girlfriend. I probably will keep the story open ended, whether the girl finds out or not.

Together with a sort of "Paul Trouble, kindergarten cop" story, that's already two more novellas as the basic stock for a second novella collection. But that's probably two years out until I've penned those!

Hey, whoever bought the book: enjoy it.  And hey, whoever did not buy the book, yet, login to Amazon and start buying!!! Print or digital, I don't care as long as you buy!

I can start splurging now.