Amanda completed

Dear readers,

Yesterday December 17th I completed the draft of my latest thriller Amanda. I started this story on October 11th and it amounts to 105k words. I calculated that this equates to around 1550 words a day. This is strictly an adult story, but the plot hangs together brilliantly and I have been able to go straight through without a pause.

I will be blogging more about this story as it nears publication, which I am aiming to be in the summer, say July would be about right. But without doubt it is the best thing I've done and to be honest is much better than many of the thrillers from the great and the good that I have read.
I am confident that it will make its mark.

So with Christmas coming, my first job will be to do the first edit on Amanda and produce version 2. This will be put away until May, when I will get it ready for publication.
The next work that I will publish is another adult thriller set in the fictitious American city of Duisburg. And the story will take that title of the city. I will be blogging about this in the run up to publication, but again it's another rollicking good read. I expect to publish it February/March.

Over Christmas the other task I have is to make some better covers for my first two novels, the epic fantasy The Scorpian Visitant, and the paranormal thriller The Brent Street Haunting. I have had some favourable feedback from the latter. But the covers for both of these are crap and people do judge a book by its cover. So I will be endeavouring to do better in this area. So they will be republished in January with new covers.

Regarding The Scorpian Visitant, I took a terrible wrong turn with this. It always had been 'The Prism', but just before publication I saddled it with The Scorpian Visitant. It was my first foray into self publication and I guess this was a typical error of inexperience and one I would not commit again. Indeed, If possible I will change the name back to its original.
No matter both books will be republished in the new year.

The other thing I am going to do is play about with price points for these. Brent Street has been read quite a lot and the feedback I have is favourable. In my view it is a better book than the The Prism, which being a fantasy is in a totally different genre to that I write now.

I guess I have settled into the crime thriller/mystery genre. I keep a paranormal element in all the books I have written to date, but I feel that in Duisburg and Amanda, the paranormal side of things is supportive rather than determining the action. The players in both these stories are highly motivated in terms of their human experience to go and do the things they do.

I work hard at the books and that is why I don't keep this blog updated. I really will try to do something once a week on it, as well as improving my presence of FB and Twitter.

I have already been working on a plot for a sequel to Amanda and I will develop it with a view to staring the writing at the end of February (I am trying not to juggle too many balls in the air at any one time, but some slight of hand is inevitable and the final readying of Duisburg will probably run into this). Still I am not afraid of hard work. Indeed I feel a bit manic without it. So will keep on  going with these stories.


Best wishes

Saul.