Hey you!

Sorry for the lack of action last week, but I was too busy finishing OPERATION HIGH-CONCEPT.

I’m shifting these back to Beehiiv and back to Mondays at 5pm.

#Music

Had reason to stumble across this the other day. I bought the album but didn’t get on with it much; this is a corker though, kind of like Shakin’ Placebo...

I’m a sucker for half-time drums like in the chorus of this.

#Last Fortnight

Well, I worked myself deep into the ground finishing off the first draft of OPERATION HIGH CONCEPT. When I say first draft, I mean my first draft. Because I’d finished the first draft the week before. And I took a few days to fix up the little issues I’d captured as I was working away. Little bits and bobs here and there, plus six new chapters, and splitting a few up. Then I did a read edit. The first pass came in at over 105k, but I trimmed it back to 100.9k for the first draft, which is much more manageable. Given it’s got two clear POVs (and now two other very minor ones), it’s hard to get that back to something like 80k. And the weird thing is, there are sections I could expand – if it needed to be 140k, it wouldn’t be padded out, it’d all be active stuff.

Anyway, I finished that last Monday and sent it off to my editor on Tuesday morning. It’s good to do that, in case something comes out when you’re asleep. It does. It has. It didn’t this time.

And after that, I sort of collapsed. I do this all the time, especially after a prolonged phase of work. That was six weeks with about four days off. I remember reading an interview with Georges Simenon, the Belgian author of the magnificent Maigret novels, and he was a bit of a fast writer. Back then, a “novel” was about 35k (which would be considered a novella now), and he’d write one in ten days, which is pretty much the rate I do, just I write longer books and on 2020s technology rather than just a typewriter – I can and do edit the text constantly as I’m writing, whereas he had one pass. And twice, I’ve written full novels in AHEM six days (albeit heavily outlined). ANYWAY, he got his doctor to do a blood test before he started and just after he finished. He’d almost completely depleted his white blood cells, so was at massive risk of infection (and ALLEGEDLY, there’s a source of where he might HEM HEM have got an HEM HEM infection from). (Actually, he’s dead so I can’t libel him – he was a massive shagger. Like, Warren Beattie level.) (Can’t libel him, even though he’s not dead, as he claimed that himself.)

So that’s what I do to myself when I work like this. Stupid! It’s not like I’m working down a pit or something, but still. It’s constant concentration and sacrificing everything else to the sake of this book.

I hope it pays off!

#This Week

So I’m back doing some work this week while my agent works away on OPERATION HIGH CONCEPT.

I’ve spent today going through the fantastically detailed pitch I have for OPERATION HIGH CONCEPT 2 (which I’ll now AKA PROJECT TRIO). When I say it was on the back of a fag packet, that does a disservice to fag packets. But there was enough to hook into and focus on. It was initially a slight tweak to an old co-writing project, but it’s gone off in its own direction, to the point where I’ve removed the vestigial stuff, so it’s entirely its own thing now. I’ll let it go cold now, then pick it up on Thursday and rework it, but it’s weird how three hours of work can take a load of splodge and turn it into something pretty cool. Assuming it’s approved, that book is ready to outline when and if I need to. These pitches are a pretty good idea – even if the book doesn’t get written in its current form, I can repurpose the killer and motivation into another book.

And I’ve got a fair bit of catching up to do on another project, which I’m excited about getting stuck into.

#Stuff

The thing that’s kept me sane while writing this book has been playing very difficult video games. I beat Dark Souls Remastered, which I loved (though the second half was a bit of a letdown; I think they ran out of time to make it as interesting as the first chunk). I went back to Demon’s Souls, the PS5 remake of an old PS3 game, and got bored of it. The graphics were incredible but the gameplay difference between DS1 and this meant a lot of grinding to increase my levels, rather than a natural progression. So I gave up and moved on to Dark Souls 2, which is the least-well-regarded of the three. And I really like it. It’s a tough game and I’m plugging my way through it, but it’s very satisfying. I got a nice buzz yesterday with No Man’s Wharf, where I was struggling to get up past these dead pirates, then turned on a light that stopped all the gorilla baddies, then I brought this ship in and opened up a shortcut through to the boss. With both Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, the bosses were TOUGH, but I’ve managed to beat all of these with a maximum of five goes. I’ve died A LOT MORE TIMES going through the levels.

Needless to say, the games feature in the book. AHEM.

To celebrate finishing my book, I treated myself to a new Cambridge phono

Anyway, that’s enough from me. I’m still struggling to get over WhatsApp capitalising the status field. It’s upsetting!

Have a good week.

Cheers,

Ed