Goodbye to all that

Farewell to 2018 then, a year when I achieved very little and did almost no writing - but, I did manage to sneak something in under the wire.

I mean, I write all the time of course, and you could even call it professional writing. In my day-to-day job I am constantly writing cues and scripts for broadcast on the BBC, as well as associated online tie-ins. The most substantial bit of tie-in writing I did this year was once again doing the programmes for our Treasure Quest Live stage shows at the Norwich Playhouse in November.

Thanks mostly I think to the very talented Andrew-Mark Thompson doing those spoof annual covers for us we raised over £1500 in donations for the programmes alone, towards £5807 in total from the shows for Children in Need, which was rather nice. As usual I curated and designed the interiors, wrote most of the content and chivied along the contributions from the others!

Fiction-wise, however, I had an almost completely blank year... Until it came to Christmas Day.

I went out for a walk early that afternoon, around near my parents' house in Clapham in West Sussex, where I grew up. Instead of walking around Clapham, though, this time I wandered around the neighbouring village of Patching, and when I was passing Patching Pond I noticed how the sky was reflecting onto the water, so took a few photos:

When I posted these on social media, I mentioned that "The Sky in the Water" would be a good title for a story. One of my followers on Twitter, Lesley Harper, suggested it could be an Alice Flack story, so I decided to give it a go. I decided to write a short one that very afternoon, and not only that I randomly decided to record myself doing a reading of it, too:

https://soundcloud.com/paul-hayes-882952482/the-sky-in-the-water

It's probably not great, but neither is it awful. Certainly not bad for something started at 5pm, and all written, recorded and put online just after 9pm that same evening.

It made me want to go back and do some more Alice next year, anyway. I do have several stories in mind for her, but I find it so difficult to get down to writing anything these days. I need more discipline! I also have an idea for a novel I'd like to write in 2019, one that's been brewing for a while, but we shall see...

Happy New Year to you all, anyway!

Back to Flack

About a year or so since I started working on it, and much later than it ought to have been, a second Alice Flack story, Voices in the Dark, is now finally online on Amazon’s Kindle Store!

It’s only 35,000 words, and I started writing it last summer not very long after I put the first one up for people to buy, and it reached my self-imposed target of twenty sales before making another one available. But despite having completed a good chunk of it last year, I found myself getting distracted by various things towards the end of last year. I wrote a non-fiction Doctor Who book which probably won’t ever see the light of day; I had last year’s Treasure Quest Live! to put together; I made a radio documentary about writing, and then into this year I suddenly found myself getting paid actual money to write pieces for various Doctor Who Magazine special editions, and doing more documentary work.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I actually finally sat down and got to the end of Voices in the Dark, the second adventure for my late-1940s-set investigator Alice Flack. I showed it to a few friends to help pick up general feedback and typos, and finally got it up online yesterday.

Once again, it has a lovely artwork cover by David Lavelle – the cover’s been ready for months, so poor David has had to wait for the world to see the fruits of his labours!

It also again managed to make it into the charts, climbing into the lower reaches of the Kindle Store’s Top 100 for “historical thrillers”. Admittedly this was only on the basis of a tiny handful of sales, but hey, I’m not complaining! Its release has also seen a tiny little spike in sales (i.e. three!) for the first one, The Ruined Heart, which is a good sign if I continue to put more out.

Will there be more Alice? I’d like there to be, I have ideas for several more, and have even started writing the next one. But as for whether it reaches the light of day… well, let’s see if Voices in the Dark can pass the 30-odd sales mark the first one has so far made! I promise if it does appear, however, it won’t take another year this time!

If you do want to buy the new one – and my ego would be wonderfully massaged if you did! – it’s available from Amazon by clicking here. Thank you!

Into the charts!

In the charts - briefly! 8th July 2015

On Sunday, Val - the lady I wrote about the other day, who kindly sent me an e-mail about how much she'd enjoyed The Ruined Heart - posted about the ebook on the Facebook page for Treasure Quest, a programme I produce on BBC Radio Norfolk. This led to 11 sales on Sunday, and pushed me right up towards my target of 20 in total. A few days on, and I have now passed it - 21 sales at last count, which means that Alice Flack will ride again.

I noticed when checking the Amazon page last night that this little spike in sales also meant I was propelled to the dizzy heights of number 93 in the "historical thrillers" chart in the Kindle Store! Given that this was on the basis of just those 21 copies being sold it doesn't really say much for the ebook sales at the bottom end of this chart, but hey... It's something!

I've also had a very nice review left on the Amazon page. I must admit that it was from a friend of mine, Lauren (who blogs extensively here), but hey - she didn't have to say anything at all! So I'm very grateful to her, and flattered that she liked it. She wrote:

Alice Flack is a bit of a mystery, arriving in a sleepy village and discovering a secret hidden for years. In fact she still is a mystery after reading the book and I'm hoping there will be more stories soon so we find out a little more about her! Definitely worth a read, the perfect length for me as a busy mum too!

Well, Lauren will be happy as there are indeed to be further Alice Flack stories - or at least one. Simply because the story idea had been in my mind for months and I wanted to finally sit down and tackle it, I began writing the second Alice story, Voices in the Dark, at the beginning of this month. My reasoning was that if it was around the 25 to 30,000 word mark, as planned, then if I did 500 words a day throughout July and August I'd then have it finished, ready for the time I'd have hopefully met my sales target.

That target has been met, and I've actually been averaging a bit more than 500 words, and am enjoying putting it together.

 "A writer is someone who counts words," John Braine said. My daily and cumulative totals so far for July on the new Alice Flack story!

In the meantime, if you haven't yet, please do feel free to add your 99p to the pot and buy The Ruined Heart from Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruined-Heart-Alice-Flack-Book-ebook/dp/B00ZO2QWGA

And thank you to everyone else who has bought it so far!

Alice Flack will return...

Halfway there, and a nice review

On Saturday I completed chapter 15 of Scarrowbeck, my cod-19th century thriller based on a joke from a radio programme, being written to raise money for the BBC Children in Need Appeal.

So I am now exactly halfway to my target of 30 chapters, and well on-course to be finished by the target date - Saturday the 7th of November, when we're holding this year's Treasure Quest Live stage shows at the Norwich Playhouse.

I've slowed down a bit to just a chapter a week, but aim to try and pick it up again... Of course it's all nonsense, but it seems to be entertaining the ten or twelve people following it, and it's already raised more than my initial target of £150, or £5 per chapter. Thanks to everyone who has already donated!

You can read the existing chapters here, as they're posted:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/treasurequest/files/

And you can donate online here:
https://www.justgiving.com/scarrowbeck/

When it's all done, I'll put it up as a complete novel both as a Word document like the individual chapters, and in ebook form for Kindles, etc.

Speaking of ebooks, sales of The Ruined Heart have not exactly taken the world by storm. It sold five copies on the day I put it online, and in the fortnight since then has sold exactly one more copy, yesterday.

So slightly disappointing, but yesterday's sale did result in this lovely e-mail I received today, and what's more it's from someone who is neither a friend nor a colleague, and whom I have never knowingly met. So I was very pleased with it!

I hope it is OK to send an email to you at the BBC but I couldn't find another address. In the space of just over an hour I have been totally absorbed in your book and honestly it is such a good read and I couldn't put it down...

Seriously, it is tremendous and I was left wanting for more so leaving the ending open for more Alice Flack is genius. I am an avid reader and it was so refreshing to read a book with a story that does not rely on 4 letter words and explicit details of sex. I am now reading Scarrowbeck and really enjoying that as well. All this and cryptic Treasure Quest clues - you will, I am sure have a best selling novel at some stage. Can you imagine Ruined Heart being adapted for TV and Alice Flack being the new Miss Marple !!

As you can imagine, this left me with a big grin on my face, and I kept re-reading it throughout much of the day! As for further Alice Flack stories... Well, I do have the next one plotted out in some detail, and rough ideas sketched for some others, but whether or not they ever see the light of day depends on whether I ever meet my target of 20 sales for The Ruined Heart!

If you'd like to buy it - it's only 99p! - you can do so on Amazon, here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruined-Heart-Alice-Flack-Book-ebook/dp/B00ZO2QWGA

The Ruined Heart

The Ruined Heart cover, created by David Lavelle.

Last year, I wrote that I’d finished a short novella – or, less charitably, a long short story! – called The Ruined Heart. A sort of murder-mystery set in an English village just after the Second World War, I was rather pleased with it, and mentioned how I was considering putting it up online on Amazon as an ebook download.

Well, now I have done it, and those of you of an ebook persuasion can purchase it for 99p by clicking here.

Long-term readers of this blog – should there be any! – may be surprised at this, given my stated dislike of the idea of self-publishing. It’s not that I condemn others for doing whatever they want with their books, it’s just that, for me, it feels like cheating to expect people to want to pay for my books when no publisher has judged them good enough to print.

But 25,000 words is a funny length for a story. Too long for a short story, and much too short for a novel, there isn’t really anything else I could do with The Ruined Heart. So I decided… why not?

A friend of a friend of mine, the talented David Lavelle, kindly took on a commission to create a piece of cover artwork, and the story went online to purchase from Amazon this morning. I’ve decided that if it somehow manages to make 20 sales, I’ll put another one up. I already have a 2000-word treatment written for a second Alice Flack story, and some ideas floating around for others… They’re quite fun to write, and there is something more relaxing about writing without the pressure of thinking you’re ever going to submit it to anybody.

So just the readers to worry about, then!

So far, it’s sold 5 copies, which isn’t bad for one day, and a quarter of the way to my target. No reviews yet, and I doubt it’s sold to anyone I’ve never met, or ever will manage that… But you never know!

Elsewhere, I continued to work on the Scarrowbeck novel in aid of the BBC Children in Need Appeal, and am nearly halfway through that – you can read the chapters so far completed by clicking here. I managed to complete the research and writing for my possible next Doctor Who Magazine piece, and that’s being considered by them for possible publication next year, although it may need cutting down a bit. Fingers crossed it will appear on some form or other! I also submitted Another Life to another agent last week, so we shall see what happens with that.

Anyway, please do take a look at The Ruined Heart – and if you like it, please tell your friends!