short stories

We interrupt this silence…

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I’m still on paternity leave for a little while, but I just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone who entered my Goodreads giveaway of A Divided River: Tales From Vasini I.

The signed copies will be going out to the winners in the coming days.

For those who missed out, the eBook of A Divided River is available for pre-order on Amazon and iBooks. It will be published as an eBook and in paperback on 21 July.

As always, for those outside of the UK, please try your local Amazon or iBooks store.

A Divided River giveaway

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As I write this on Tuesday, I have still yet to enter the realms of parenthood. By the time the post is actually published on Thursday morning (UK time), who knows what the situation will be.

Anyway, UK-based people, I’m running a Goodreads giveaway for the chance for you to win one of five signed paperback copies of A Divided River: Tales From Vasini I ahead of its release on 21 July. You can enter the giveaway here. You have until 6 July to enter.

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And here’s the copies of The Silver Mask from the last Goodreads giveaway just before they were posted on Tuesday.

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Gone Quiet

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Any moment now I’m going to become a father.

I say any moment now, it will be any time within the next few weeks, but after nearly nine months of waiting it feels like any moment.

Although you may not notice, at some point I’ll go silent for a while as I finally get to look after and play with my child (I’ve already been reading to it).

Before that though…

My Goodreads giveaway for The Silver Mask has now finished. Thank you to everyone who entered. I’ll be sending out the copies to the lucky five within the next few days.

Ahead of its publication on 21 July, I’ll be running a Goodreads giveaway (open to UK-based people) of five signed paperback copies of A Divided River. It’ll start this Thursday and end on 6 July.

For those outside of the UK or who don’t do the Goodreads thing or those who prefer their books on electronic devices, you can pre-order A Divided River on Kindle and iBooks.

Catch you all after I enter the land of parenthood.

Tales From Vasini

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Back in February I talked about how some people had assumed that The Vasini Chronicles was going to be a trilogy, but it was likely going to take six novels to tell the story of Doctors Marcus Fox and Elizabeth Reid.

As I said then, early on when I was developing the ideas for Vasini, I realised that there would be scope for more stories than just The Silver Mask. Although most of those stories focused on the exploits of the good doctors, I kept on wanting to explore other aspects of Vasini, the bits where they either didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t go. Vasini, after all, is a city of a million people, there’s more going on there than what an ex-alchemist now inspector and an apothecary/adherent-to-a-philosophical-path would experience.

That’s where Tales From Vasini comes in. It’s a chance to explore the wider world and travel through those city streets and places outside of the city where Marcus and Elizabeth don’t go. To meet some of the people who may not play a big role in the story of The Vasini Chronicles but are still facing their own challenges and having their own adventures.

So, in truth, although the story of the good doctors is six novels long, the story of Vasini itself is much, much bigger.

A Divided River: Tales From Vasini I is now available for pre-order on Kindle and iBooks. It’ll be available in paperback as well, and will be published on 21 July.

(As always, for those outside of the UK, please try your local US, Australian, New Zealand or EU-based Amazon or iBooks store.)

You can read more about it here.

Between the cover

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For those who may have wondered what A Divided River is actually about,  you’ll find the blurb below.

It will be available as an eBook on Kindle and iBooks, and in paperback through Amazon and other online booksellers, in July. The eBook versions will be available for pre-order in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, UK-based people have until the early hours of 11 June (BST) to enter the Goodreads giveway to win one of five signed copies of The Silver Mask: The Vasini Chronicles I.

Tales From Vasini I:
A Divided River

Vasini, founded and rebuilt from the ashes left by the fall of the deities. A city-state divided by politics, class, philosophies and by the Sini river.

As the tides turn and the riverbed is exposed, mudlarks search the silt for valuables that have been washed into the Sini. In The Mudlark’s Tale, one mudlark’s find may be worth far more than he first thought, but it comes with consequences.

In the depths of winter the Sini river freezes, and the comte calls the Winter Fayre upon its ice. In The Winter Fayre, five citizens of Vasini find their lives intersecting and changing as they enjoy the festivities. A sergeant of the Palace Regiment watches for trouble amongst visitors to the Fayre. A pickpocket plies her trade. A palace bureaucrat looks to make political connections. A banker hunts for a mysterious young girl. A follower of a philosophical path attempts to make contact with a fellow adherent who may well be dead.

Tales From Vasini is a companion series of short stories and novellas to The Vasini Chronicles novel series. It tells stories of the wider world of Vasini and its environs. A Divided River contains two stories: The Mudlark’s Tale (a short story); and The Winter Fayre (a novella).

And here it is written on the back of the paperback cover…

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He shall, from time to time

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Back at the beginning of the year I posted my To Do list for 2017. As it’s been a few months since my last update – and there’s been some activity recently – I thought it was time to do another update on some of the points.

Edit and publish a novella and short story

For those who didn’t see the announcement – and cover – A Divided River, the first of the Tales From Vasini books, will be appearing as an eBook and in paperback in July.

It’ll contain two stories: The Mudlark’s Tale (a short story); and The Winter Fayre (a novella).

Keep an eye on the blog, Facebook page and/or Twitter over the coming weeks for more information.

Tales From Vasini is a companion series of short stories and novellas to The Vasini Chronicles novel series. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, don’t forget to checkout The Silver Mask – the first of The Vasini Chronicles – either on Kindle, iBooks or in paperback.

Finish writing and then edit The Vasini Chronicles II

The first draft ended up taking longer than expected, mainly because the word count ended up being much (like 50%) higher than expected and a little bit because of technical difficulties over the past month. As always with these things there’s bits I like and bits I know I’ll definitely be changing. There are many words I’ve written that won’t make it through to the published version. It’ll sit on my computer for a little while before I get round to doing any serious editing.

Write some more things (not all of them Vasini related)

While I get the required space between the first draft of The Vasini Chronicles II and starting the second draft, I’m having fun writing a short story that’s been floating around in my head for something like seven years. It definitely doesn’t involve zombies.

There’s another non-Vasini story, and probably two Vasini-related ones as well, I want to write before I plunge on into writing The Vasini Chronciles III.

Read at least 26 books and cut down my backlog of unread books (now over 300 thanks to Christmas presents)

According to my Goodreads page, as of finishing Chris Wooding’s The Black Lung Captain (good, fun adventure), I’ve read 32 books so far this year. Unofficially, I’ve read 39 books as I’ve slipped in a couple of books for research purposes. My new target for the year is 46. Given the next item on my To Do list, despite a strong start to the year, I may not reach my new target.

Become a father (at which point my to do list will likely be much longer and quite different from the above)

Fingers crossed, all is going well.

A Divided River

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So, A Divided River, the first Tales From Vasini book, will be coming out in July as an eBook and in paperback.

It’ll contain two stories: The Mudlark’s Tale (a short story); and The Winter Fayre (a novella).

Tales From Vasini is a companion series of short stories and novellas to The Vasini Chronicles novel series. It tells stories of the wider world of Vasini and its environs.

A Divided River eBook cover

Things fall apart

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The fear of the white page is talked about often by writers. The fear conjured by sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper/screen, attempting to conjure something out of nothing is likely to be a familiar tale to anyone who has read about writers.

For me, there is a greater fear: the fear of re-confronting the white page; the loss of what you have written and having reconstruct what you have already created. The wasted effort. The need to dredge from memory everything that you’ve done, hoping that you can at least recapture some of what you’ve lost.

You’d think then that I would be more careful about making backups. Apparently not.

So when I tried logging into my laptop last Wednesday and discovered that my keyboard wasn’t working, panic began to set in as I realised that I hadn’t made a back up for a month.

Fortunately, thanks to a Bluetooth mouse I had laying around, I was able to get the keyboard working again and was able to make a backup.

For a day at least.

The next day the same problem occurred, and my fix from the previous day didn’t work, leading to a milder panic that I might have lost the 800 or so words I’d written the previous day. Fortunately, a quick purchase of a Bluetooth keyboard allowed me to make another back up.

For the short period before I got the Bluetooth keyboard, in an attempt to keep on writing The Vasini Chronicles II, I found myself without notes trying to remember where I was and what was going to happen next, and writing longhand with pad and pencil for the first time in several years.

Anyway, the laptop has now been fixed and everything seems to be working fine with no data loss. Panic over.

As a result of all of this – as well as promising myself I’ll make back ups more often – I’m now using the Scrivener app on my laptop and iPad, which should at least mean that I can continue writing, to some degree, without interruption should this happen again.

Although all of this has been delaying me finishing the first draft of The Vasini Chronicles II, it shouldn’t impact the publication of A Divided River, the first Tales from Vasini volume, which should still appear over the summer.

In the end, I’m just grateful that I have the flexibility in my life at the moment to deal with this sort of – in the scheme of things – minor nonsense without it becoming anything more than a frustration.

Slow news day

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It’s been a month since my last post, mostly because a weekly statement of “I wrote some words and read some books” doesn’t quite provide the word count to warrant a blog post. There have been other things happening, mostly those annoyances that come with everyday life (like the central heating boiler breaking down, the car leaking coolant and a radiator in the house springing a leak), but nothing of real consequence.

Any’hoo…

The Vasini Chronicles II is coming to the end of its first draft. Hopefully it will be wrapped up by the end of March (and won’t spill into April). It will then be told to sit in a corner and behave for a little while before I start the year-or-so’s work of editing it. It’s already way longer than I expected, although it will get shorter as I clear out all the bits that don’t need to be in it. I won’t reveal anything about the set up or what happens just yet. There’s plenty of time to do that.

A Divided River, the first of the Tales from Vasini (the companion series to The Vasini Chronicles) is coming together. It’ll contain two stories (a short story and a novella) and is on track to be out over the summer.

I was putting a draft of A Divided River into a storage box yesterday when I came across an early draft of The Silver Mask that my wife had marked up with some comments. When she reads a draft, along with her thoughts and corrections, she usually adds some doodles as a reaction to what’s happening in the story. At the end of the Chapter 12 of The Silver Mask, I received this:

Cankera

It’s the first and, as far as I’m aware, only drawing of a cankera.

The length of string

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I have noticed a little trend when talking to people about The Vasini Chronicles – there seems to be an assumption that it will be a trilogy.

It’s understandable, in someways. People tend to like things that come in threes, it seems to fit an assumed natural order to the world. And given all the trilogies out there, it does seem like we’ve become programmed to think of ongoing stories in terms of three installments (although this ignores how many novel and film series don’t follow that format).

So how long will The Vasini Chronicles be?

As long as it needs to be to tell the story, which looks likely to be six novels.

I say it “looks likely to be six novels” to give myself a little leeway should I get midway through and discover six novels is too few (or, possibly, too many).

Early on when I was developing the ideas for Vasini, I realised that there would be scope for more stories than just The Silver Mask. As I worked on The Silver Mask it became apparent that there was an end destination for the story of Doctors Fox and Reid, a natural outcome for what had developed out of those initial ideas and the events that started in the first novel. The question, though, was how many steps (novels) would it take to reach that natural outcome? I thought four, then five. After some actual planning, I realised it was more likely six. I doubt it will stretch to seven, unless there’s some factor I haven’t considered that will expand this particular story.

Alongside these six novels will sit what, for now, I’m going to term The Tales from Vasini, a companion series of short stories and novellas that will explore parts of Vasini outside of the story of Fox and Reid. The first should be out later this year.

So that’s the plan. Like a piece of string, it will be twice the distance from the middle to one end, but it won’t be a trilogy. It won’t necessarily appear quickly, but hopefully it will appear regularly.