Hey,

Where have I been hiding, amiright?

#Music

Have a sneak feeling I’ve done this song before, but it stands up to many, may repeated listens. A power duo of bass/vox and drums, but such a colossal sounds created by splitting the bass signal and passing it through both a bass amp and a guitar amp, an octave up, with lots of mutes and guitar pedals to create that huge sound. Very surprised nobody else has recreated that sound.

#Last Wee While

It’s been a case of head down and getting on with Marshall 6. It’s now done and off to the copy editor for the penultimate pass of the text. My annual trip to Harrogate for Theakston’s Crime Festival split the work in half, whereas usually I’d like to finish a project going into it. Anyway, it’s managed to squeak to about 103k, which is a lot longer than I expected and in the ballpark of the other Marshall books.

Phew.

I was feeling a bit of pressure with that – it’s the third book I’ve written this year, after Marshall 5 and OPERATION HIGH CONCEPT. And I’ve squeezed it in just in time for the editing to happen before Angus King’s narration, with a release on 30th September 2024.

#This Next Few Weeks

As well as taking a lot of time to do nothing, or just garden landscaping work, I’ve got a few projects I’m tackling at a lower speed.

OPERATION MOONSHOT is a screenplay I’ve done about 30pp of 120pp, which I plan to do more work on when my head’s a bit clearer.

I’m going to sort out the synopsis for Marshall 7, with a tentative release date of 31-Jan-25 or 28-Feb-25 – striking while the iron is hot is a good way to sort out issues and refine what I’ve done for it so far. There will be a few subplots moving into this book from book 6, so they need to be resolved – I’d intended this series to be low continuity, but that went out of the window pretty bloody quickly!

One thing I’ve been interested in is writing a screenplay. I am, obviously, but I’m finding it a very fluid way to write and low-cost, i.e. the text is a lot less rich than a novel, so it’s easier to create and to edit. I’m thinking it’ll be a good intermediate step between the synopsis for the book and the novel, rather than a detailed outline. I’m a big believer in outlining, but I think maybe I’d say the synopsis and an outline could be the same document, with much less detail going into the outline, then this screenplay would effectively be the first draft of the book, with a chance to flesh everything out but in a more rigorous way than my outlines have been. Some of my outlines have been 25-35k long, which is insane. A screenplay would be more effective for the same thing.

Anyway, that’s a lot of rambling – I need to test this process out. Rather than get into a bugger’s muddle with Marshall 7, I’ve thought of something else to work on instead. A few years ago, I had an idea about a cop who sees the ghost of a murder victim. I’m not using that ghost stuff, but will be using the characters and setup to provide the basis for a second Shunty novel! Not really got a title for is (well, STOP START) but I’ve got a solid idea or seven about it. So that’ll be another bit of focus – getting a synopsis for that nailed down, then writing the screenplay, then turning the edited screenplay into a novel. And that’ll give me an idea of how the number of screenplay pages converts into one of my novels (in screenwriting, the rule of thumb is a page is a minute on the screen), with something I’d like to do and which will give me a nice bridge between Marshall 6 and 7.

And there’s something else that’s going to take a bit of time to finish but I think will make people grin like absolute fools. I hope!

#Stuff

Nothing much to add – I’ve been so deep into writing and editing that book that I’ve not done much else. FLY ME TO THE MOON (Scarlett Johansen and Channing Tatum) was a charming old-fashioned film with tons and tons of great humour. DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE was very enjoyable, even if the story is complete nonsense – I watched the previous two back to back and think the third is the most enjoyable, but they don’t really stand up to repeated viewings. I watched MEMENTO because I’ve never seen it and it was leaving Netflix – it’s a very ordinary story dressed up with a time trick that I couldn’t care less about. I’m 2/3 through ERIC (Netflix), which I think I’m enjoying – the big blue imaginary monster doesn’t appear anywhere near as much as I feared and it’s got an incredible cast.

Anyway, that’s all from me – I’ll be back in a few weeks once I’m deep into a new project. Or maybe I’ll be back sooner, who knows?

Oh, and the Blood & Guts update is still broken. Harrumph! Amazon are looking into it for me – I might need to do a plan B.

Cheers,
Ed