The Autumnal Equinox approacheth…s?

On September 21st, the Autumnal Equinox will be here.

For those who don’t already know (or haven’t read A Construct of Angels), it’s one of the two days in the year where day and night are of equal length.

Significantly for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the point where the nights start to become longer than the days, a process that will continue until the shortest day on December 21st, where the process reverses and we begin the long climb out of Winter.

The Autumnal Equinox features heavily in A Construct of Angels, as protagonist Sara Finn and her fallen-to-Earth Angel companion Michael discover.

If they are unable to prevent an anticipated demonic event on the eve of the equinox, the days will grow shorter and shorter until only night remains, and the Dark Realm beneath our feet will gain control of all the souls on Earth.

As the hours pass, chaos and darkness descend and Sara is bombarded by nightmares of a world scoured by dust and ashes.

With only six days remaining after Michael’s unexpected ‘fall,’ will the pair be able to uncover the reasons for the increasing disappearances, and the chaos that grips the City of York?

Find out in A Construct of Angels.

Click to watch…

‘A Fury of Angels’ is now available for pre-order

April sees me unusually organised with my work.

With ‘A Fury of Angels’ out for beta reading, I’ve already listed the book provisionally on Amazon, and its now available for pre-ordering, should anyone be keen to read it. 🙂

There’s plenty of time for me to make final changes to the MS before it goes live, but I thought I’d set myself a publication deadline in order to get this, the final story in the (first) trilogy completed and put to bed.

Put to bed? Nah!

It ought to be rising with the lark, ready for the day ahead, its tummy filled with tasty breakfast!

Just to demonstrate that Amazon’s pre-ordering system works, I found this whilst browsing:

Also available for pre-order in Japan. Don’t you love the 21st Century?

Have a great day!

I must now Write On. Half a million words aren’t going to write themselves!

Cover reveal – A Fury of Angels.

It’s been a few months since my last post. I’ve been extra busy this year with artwork, formatting, editing and writing. Already my word count is matching that of 2015, which means I might once again hit half a million words, even though I’d only planned a target of one third million.

One of the projects has been ‘A Fury of Angels,’ the final story in ‘The Angels of York’ trilogy.

Yes, Sara and Michael’s adventures have now concluded, although they haven’t ended by any means.

So here, for the first time, is the third cover, as created by the talented Ravven.

It’s consistent with the previous two covers, featuring the quatrefoil tower, stormy sky and mysterious supernatural character. I’ve already received early feedback that this colourful cover is more eye-catching than the first two, something which was intentional.

Each new cover is brighter than its predecessor, promising a better and brighter future for my characters, even though the stakes are higher and the danger grows.

I’m close to completing the Kindle-formatted ‘Fury of Angels,’ and the Createspace layout is all but finished, meaning the trilogy will be complete and up for sale very soon.

Watch Amazon and Smashwords closely!

Until then, I continue to;

 

 

A Vengeance of Angels – Teaser 1

Last week I was able to reveal the cover for my long-awaited sequel ‘A Vengeance of Angels.’

This week, I can read you a short excerpt from the fourth chapter. I’ll reveal more later in the week.

BTW, Anyone who’s read the first book, ‘A Construct of Angels,’ might recognise this part, as it appears at the end of the book.

This passage is told from the point of view of Michael, the Angel-turned-mortal as he recuperates from his recent battle with the demonic ‘Aryan.’ He is in the company of Sara Finn’s father, Gil, plus Gil’s nurse-employee, Ingrid:

A long shriek from above sent Gil rocketing to his feet. Ingrid had already fled through the door. Concerned, I followed Gil as he dashed upstairs and into the room of Agatha Carpenter. As he and Ingrid tried to calm the old lady, I remained at the door. They might have succeeded in their efforts, but she caught sight of me and her deafening shrieks resumed. She waved a bony finger in my direction and I felt the chill of one whose fate is irrevocably sealed. I’d felt it before. As a doomed gladiator, as a convicted witch, as a Jew amongst the Nazis…

“The swordsman is falling,” she wailed. “Now! He seeks the one who shines most brightly. He will have his revenge!” Her arm swept around to encompass the room, but Ingrid’s body blocked part of the flailing gesture.

“All around him shall perish!” she declared in a voice edged with hysteria. I knew a moment of panic. She could only be referring to one person, one Anakim.

And he was coming for me.

“When, Agatha?” I called. I had to get clear, to keep everyone around me safe from Damocles’ fury.

“My god, Michael,” Gil snapped. “Don’t encourage her!”

“Now!” she shrieked as Gil rolled his eyes. “Now, now! Beware…” Abruptly, her voice tailed off as if she’d passed out—or the vision had overwhelmed her senses.

I spun and scrambled for the stairs, taking them two at a time in my headlong rush toward the door. Upstairs, Gil was shouting, but I paid him no heed. I was through the large conservatory in seconds, bursting through wood-framed doors to hurtle across the flat lawn bordering the rear of the large house. A line of trees separated the garden from the open fields beyond. If I could get far enough from the house, Damocles would never connect me to Gil, Ingrid, or any of the residents. While I ran as hard as my mortal legs would allow, my progress felt painfully slow. Chancing a glance back at the house, I saw nothing was amiss.

Until something in the bright morning sky caught my eye. A dark shape was dropping toward the hospice as fast as a missile.

Aw, hell…he’s still going for the house! I slithered to a halt on the damp grass. The dark shape became clearer. At the speed he was moving, with the strength and rage he doubtless harboured, Damocles would flatten the house in a heartbeat. I threw up my arms and tried to howl out the Anakim’s true name. But my human throat collapsed around the supernatural sound. Instead, I sucked in a deep breath and settled for:

“Damocleeeees!”

The dark shape hesitated, its pitiless assault wavering. And then it exploded toward me.

I stepped back toward the trees as he took shape, knowing that as a mortal, I would stand no chance against the Anakim. But if I could keep him away from Gil and the others…

Damocles slammed into the grass with a sub-sonic thump that punched at my feet and threw me to the ground. Using my heels and elbows, I scrambled backward as the grimacing swordsman stepped out of the foot-deep crater he’d formed in the lawn. I scuttled back over leaf-strewn soil and through bushes, intent on putting more distance between me and the house, but Damocles raised his arm and my flight was over.

The irresistible grasp of his power drew me toward him, my boots leaving deep furrows in the soil, then the lawn.

“Don’t run away, little mortal,” Damocles sneered darkly. “You’ll miss all the fun.” He flexed his fingers and I rose into the air, shedding autumnal debris onto the ploughed turf. I was turned upside down, then spun around on my head like a street dancer.

“So it’s true…” he breathed, spinning me upright to face him. My feet dangled six inches above the ground.

“You really did give it all up…” he sneered, “…to be mortal.”

*  *  *

Watch out for the next part!

In the meantime, I shall continue to:

 

 

When inspiration strikes…

Recently, an opportunity arose for a Saturday visit to York, the setting for ‘The Angels of York’ trilogy.

Well, it follows, doesn’t it? 😀 I had to go.

At the time, the final chapter and Big Battle scene was quietly pushing open the door, ready to peer into the room. I was happy with the way my characters had used the church I’d researched last year (as detailed in ‘Angels Week‘), but I didn’t want to stage an unholy battle between the denizens of Heaven and Hell inside a church. Too much damage. So as I headed into York on the city bus, I perused the city centre map in the hope that inspiration might strike – and it DID!

A diagram of the ancient (rebuilt many times) city wall leapt out at me, particularly the acute angle of the North-West corner. I decided to investigate – and found myself here:

Very photogenic – and a distinct possibility for the site of an unholy battle.

Unfortunately, I’d taken a wrong turn in my attempts to find it. I was on the wrong street. York is a medieval maze of narrow twists and turns. I’d been steered away from my goal.

So I began again, paying closer attention to the street names, and finally found myself in this place:

This is the outer section of the corner keep. Quite imposing to an attacking force, you might think.

Inside, it looked like this:

Rather difficult to defend unless you were on your knees – or you happened to be called Tyrion Lannister.

image source: http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Tyrion_Lannister

Seems the Victorians who refurbished this part of the wall had little use for its defensive capabilities, preferring instead to reconstruct it into a viewing platform.

Still, I could envisage the possibilities of the battle in this setting and was satisfied that I needed to look no further. I took a few photographs and returned home to research the history of this section of wall.

I was able to make use of the new outdoor location almost immediately. Once my characters had finished with the church, the story picked up at the corner section of the wall in dramatic (I hope) style.

Apologies to English Heritage for all the damage I’m about to cause in the narrative. It IS necessary for artistic reasons – honest.

In other news, I am now typing furiously on my replacement Netbook, a Windows 7 version of my poorly Acer Aspire One.

Unfortunately, Acer issued this model with a set of flat keys, rather than the earlier chamfered type, which has led to an increased number of typo.

I’m struggling to get used to it and wish they hadn’t changed something that worked perfectly well for the sake of asthetics. 😦

So, first draft now has its dramatic climax. On with the read-through.

Hope your writing is marching along too!

Introducing, for the first time… Ginger:

Be nice and say hi. He has rather large (virtual) shoes to fill.

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The editing continues – revisiting CoA (again)

Sometimes, I’ve been extremely fortunate in my writing journey. When I’ve needed them the most, I’ve met people who have shown me that ePublishing is not only possible, but in some ways it is preferable to traditional publishing. 

During my year of querying agencies and receiving a whole basketful of raspberries, around the time I’d started to build my author platform, I quickly began to encounter other writers, some of whom were still querying, others who had decided to go it alone by self-publishing.

And as they proved to me that there is definitely hope after rejection, one author in particular steered me towards the tutorials that explained how I could complete the process myself.  Thanks Ryan!

I’ve also become friends with several other authors who went on to recommended exactly the right cover artist.

Thank you everybody! You are my guardian angels. Or at the very least, he recommended you all. 🙂

Now I am entering a new phase in my writing. By sheer chance, and some very fortunate timing, I have become friends with Tara, an aspiring editor who began by examining my first chapter, but went on to review the entire MS.  We are now working together on a complete and thorough edit of CoA.

When I wrote the post How to accept editing feedback I thought that accepting a professional critique would be much more daunting, but Tara has been fair as well as thorough with my MS.

She even likes my jokes… 🙂

As I write this, we have already made some major changes to the story and I now have several words to purge from the MS, on pain of nagging.

It seems that I use the words ‘just’, ‘like’ and ‘sigh’ a great deal (thanks, WordSmith!), to the point where it has begun to leap off the page at Tara. *Sighs* We are also discussing the intricacies of ‘forwards’ versus ‘forward’ and it looks as if I have sinned with ‘towards’ as well. Taking into account that I write in British English (BrE), we both understand that different rules apply on our respective sides of the Big Pond, but she may have me cornered in this instance. 🙂

However, Tara seems to enjoying the peculiarities of BrE and I’m slowly introducing her to some of our colloqualisms. I’ll soon have her speaking like a native of the UK and then we can be china plates for life!

Once we’ve finished my fish hook, of course. 

Toodle-pip!

The genre system – is it good enough any more?

I’ve been browsing through the ‘Blogs I follow’, trying to keep up with all the discussions, concerns and new releases and I’ve been seeing a lot of posts where authors are grumbling (quite rightly IMHO) about the trouble they’re having with squeezing their novel into a genre category.

And it’s not surprising. For instance, on Wikipedia, there are currently 80 genres and sub-genres listed under fiction alone. Yikes! My own novel,  ‘A Construct of Angels’ would currently fit into the horror, romance, Urban fantasy, religious fantasy, thriller or mystery categories.

There are How-to-Write books on the market that happlily suggest that writers should choose a genre and write within its boundaries if they want to sell. But why should we have to work within such restrictions? We’re not aiming towards library shelves. Some of us aren’t even looking towards bookshops any more. The electronic age has changed all that.

In these days of indie eBook publishing, with sub-genres and even sub-sub-genres sprouting up, the whole idea of ‘genre’ feels overloaded and outdated. Of course, to declare that, an alternative is needed and here’s my (fledgling) idea;

Wouldn’t it benefit both readers and retailers if some sort of ‘tick box’ or a graphic system was introduced where the elements of the book can be highlighted (or illustrated) by a sliding colour scale such as we have with rated domestic applicances (in Europe at least)?

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I experimented with a few variations on this theme and didn’t find them to be flexible enough as I was still having to insert genre labels. It was colourful, but no better in terms of classification. Perhaps you could see a way to make it work.

So I tried a pie chart instead. This is a simple chart, created using ten subjects that are most relevant to my debut novel  ‘A Construct of Angels’;

Note that I said the ten most relevant subjects – there are others that I could justify adding in there, but ten is plenty. Perhaps ten is too many and five would suffice. Who knows? This is all hypothetical and open for discussion.

BTW, for you with your magnifying glasses against the screen, there’s only 0.5% sex in the story. 😀

In an ideal world, the catergories would be listed from most relevant to least relevant, top to bottom, thus;

This arrangement should make it easier for the potential buyer to interpret. They would be free to scan the top two or three subjects and decide if the story is for them or not. They might still be swayed if their favourite genre was listed as number four or five – something which wouldn’t happen if the book had been listed under ‘Thriller’ when they prefer to read about religion- or horror-based stories.

I don’t think it would be too difficult for an algorithmist like Amazon to feed the percentages into their version of Deep Thought deep in the heart of Amazonia and begin to categorise the books in this way.

As I said, this is all hypothetical.

Do you think the time has come for the library shelf-based genre categories to be given a shake-up? Perhaps you have a fledgling idea that leaves my suggestion eating dust.

If so, please share! I would be happy to eat humble pie chart. 🙂

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Six Sentence Sunday – the battle

This week’s extract is from ‘A Construct of Angels’ and describes the impromptu angel Michael’s battle against the self-named Damocles, an Anakim, or demon’s offspring.

At this point, Michael is only just beginning to realise his powers and has very little to time to explore them before Damocles attacks him with deadly force.

White light exploded across Michael’s vision as a hurricane of force roared about him; the world spun away in a dizzying blur and the ground hurled itself aside to give way to a vast body of water.  Something dark slammed into Michael’s chest, smashing the breath out of him.

Spinning wildly, he ripped across the sky, supersonic shockwaves exploding from his arms and legs, but Michael willed his hurtling body to stop and the shockwaves instantly vanished from his limbs – but even as he slowed, a dark blur rocketed straight towards him. 

This time Michael’s reactions were faster – he spun around, avoiding the hurtling shape just as he had side-stepped the black sword and watched as Damocles exploded past him like a missile, already turning to strike again. Watching the black dot grow larger by the second,  Michael’s determination resolved –  he would no longer be pushed around by the approaching Anakim.

Damocles cannoned into him faster than a fighter jet.

A Construct of Angels is FREE on Amazon Dec 1st and 2nd 2012

‘A Construct of Angels’ has now been live at Amazon for five weeks now…the time has come to use two of the five ‘freebie days’ on Amazon KDP to list ‘Construct’ as a free download.

This will (if all goes to plan) apply to Saturday and Sunday (1st and 2nd December), hopefully from 0001 Pacific Time Saturday to 2359 Pacific on Sunday…give or take.

If you’ve already downloaded a copy, please tell your Kindle (or Kindle-for-PC enabled – a free download from Amazon) friends that ‘Construct’ will be available for this period.

Or if you’ve been the (lucky?) recipient of one of my advance copies, please download a free copy so that you will be able to (if you so desire) leave a line of feedback when you are able.

The rumour is that Amazon is busy removing feedback from peeps that haven’t procured a copy from their site.

I emphasise that this is just gossip at the moment and I haven’t seen any first-hand evidence of it.

As this is the first time I have tried the Amazon KDP free download day feature, I will feed my  experiences back to you in my next post.

Please take advantage of this offer if the genre appeals to you and if you are able to, please be kind and leave some feedback.

Feedback is a very valuable commodity to debuting authors and helps to boost credibility, build buyers’ confidence and hopefully encourage future sales!

Thank you.

Write on!

Well, I’ve only been and gone and done it!

Well, I’ve only been and gone and done it (as they used to say in the old Brit flicks).

Yep.  It’s done.  Too late to back out now.

What? I hear you cry in exasperation.

I’ve only gone and published on Amazon.