Tag: TheBookandtheBlade

How’s the writing going?

I get asked this a lot. It’s nice. It’s also a wee bit depressing when the answer is, has been, and will probably continue to be… it isn’t. I have a “work in progress” but instead of my usual all-consuming attacking the keyboard like a starving dog going at a bag of hot chips I’m more tapping out a single word here and there like an old man one-finger tapping his phone while in line at the chemist.

We’re all absolutely cream-crackered. Between covid, the flu, moving house, work, exams, sick kids, midnight hospital visits, frequent runs to the doctor, and general… life… there’s been little in the way of time left for writing. But it’s the school holidays now so maybe I can eek out some time to peer over the top of the old spectacles and tap out a word here and there?

But I do like the latest book… it’s set in Brisbane and follows a young man who finds out he is the last witch in the city… and I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen! Right now, he’s at Bunnings have a sausage in bread while a 400 year old Irish witch buys a drill to hollow out the femur of a dead kangaroo so they can use it as wand/divining rod of some sort. Honestly, I have no clue!

As for the upcoming release of The Book and the Blade (my first novel in case I haven’t mentioned this before 🤣) I have absolutely no idea what is happening there either. Publishing is great fun. It’s long periods of seemingly neverending silence followed by short but massive flurries of activity before falling back into silence. Right now, you could hear a fart at a funeral. But time is ticking. We are just over 2 months away from release!

Squeaky bum time!

Right, I think I’ll go to Bunnings and see if I can drum up some inspiration (or get a sausage, either way, it’ll be fun).

Cheers 🍻

All Hail Emperor Bezos and Bow Down Before the Amazon Overlords!

There is no getting around it. Very soon I will have to get on my knees like everyone else in the world and beg for scraps at the feet of Emperor Bezos. As much as I would love The Book and the Blade to be 100% indie… only available in small shops with quirky cafes and book sellers who double as baristas, or perhaps even in unique little corners of the internet on websites run by enthusiastic book bloggers, I will still need to play The Amazon Game!

3(0) is the magic number! Yes it is, it’s the magic number!

– 30 reviews gets your book noticed by Amazon’s algorithms (Wizards. Wizards sounds cooler.)

– reviews get you onto lists

– lists get you exposure

Lists like these…

Having not released the book yet it is no surprise I’m floundering at the very bottom

But then there’s the strange caveat that reviews from people you know sometimes disappear. I’ve seen this with author friends and there are many indie authors on Twitter who testify to the same thing… any reviews they have which may be linked to, say, people on their Facebook friends list, can mysteriously vanish. Forget algorithms and wizards, that is the work of Amazon’s Dark Overlords!

(A smidge dramatic? Maybe.)

This doesn’t always happen but it has occurred enough times for it to be “a thing” for indie authors.

I don’t know how it will play out for The Book and the Blade but I do ask (and will repeatedly beg) that if you do read my little book, please leave a review. They might vanish into the ether, they might not. Either way, all interaction makes a huge difference. Perhaps together we can unite and overthrow the overlords? And they don’t have to be complex reviews or even analyse the story in any way. They just have to exist.

Here’s a few examples…

***** Excellent cover

I.P. Freely

***** Interesting title

Ivana Tinkle

***** It’s a book

My mate Mitchell

***** Looks great on my shelf

Seymour Butts

***** That bit with the cat was funny

Al Coholic

***** It’s not that shit

Oliver Klozoff

Thanks for reading!

That was some year! (written in June 2021)

It has been just over a year since I woke up one morning to an email from some lovely people in The States who told me they wanted to publish my little book.

A year!

2020.

Nothing much happened there, right? Just an ordinary, boring, humdrum kind of year. So I thought I’d let you know what I got up to during that time (book-related, of course, not just a random diary).

Let’s see…

I made a website… and then entirely failed to write anything.

I made a plan for a monthly newsletter… and then didn’t do it.

I started social media accounts… and kind of half-arsed them all.

It might seem that I’ve done sod all in the last 12 months but it has been bloody busy, although, if I’m honest, that was more through fear than anything else.

Why fear?

Well, I signed a contract for a series but I only really had one book. Oh sure, I was writing the second and I kind of knew what would happen in the third but I saw this as an ‘all eggs in one basket’ kind of situation. I grew very anxious that The Book and the Blade was just a flash in the pan and that when I finally submitted book 2 the publisher would hate it. So I powered through the second book, terrified it would be shit or that I’d forget how to write, and when that was finished I went immediately to three and four. One after the other. Non-stop. Writing like a nutter and feeling like a fraud. Imposter syndrome they call it. Because you see, there’s me, signing a contract as an author but what if I wasn’t one?

What if I just got lucky that one time?

On some odd level, I think I’ve considered this time between contract and publication as a gift, a strange little period of limbo where I haven’t yet been found out. I’m not even sure I really believe it myself. I don’t think I will until I’m holding the book in my hand. Strangely enough, this has spurred me on to write more than ever; to get the most out of it before it all goes tits up.

So, along with some admittedly mediocre social media dabbling, I have spent the year:

Completing two rounds of edits for Book 1

Writing Book 2

Editing Book 2

Submitting Book 2

Writing Book 3

Editing Book 3

Writing Book 4

Writing a completely new novel unrelated to The Book and the Blade

Editing it

Editing a novel I wrote in 2016.

Submitting it (last week in fact)

Drinking too much

Sleeping too little

And boring the ever-living shit out of my wonderful wife and friends with incessant questions about devils, demons, folklore and whether or not ghosts can touch themselves.

Tomorrow I will be submitting the new book and adding that anxiety to the big ball of crazy that is me.

Oh, and I’ve already started working on another project, a zombie project – and it’s probably worth noting here that I’m scared of zombies (a therapist would have a field day with this).

Thank dog I have so many wonderful people around me, many of whom I met this last year. Without them, I think I’d go crazy.

Thanks for reading

Before The Book and the Blade

I wrote six books before I started work on The Book and the Blade. They were not great. One, two and three were terrible in fact. Four showed some small promise but floundered (drowned) in the middle. Five was a present for my kids that I’m still happy with, and six was a silly thing that I enjoyed but will never sell to anyone. Ever.

A sixteen-year-old kid runs away from home in 1992 to watch Nirvana play at the Reading Festival while being part of the most cliche-ridden love triangle imaginable.

It is hardly a literary masterpiece.

I have a number of (very patient) friends and family who read these pieces of rubbish and my uncle quite enjoyed the last one but he did ask, ‘when are you going to write some fantasy?’

And that’s the moment I started thinking about it seriously. Let’s forget the fact it took me until I was well into my thirties to actually write what might be considered a ‘complete novel’, why wasn’t I writing in the genre I most loved? I’ve always read fantasy. Sir Terry Pratchett is my favourite author by a long way. Next to him are Neil Gaiman, Bernard Cornwell, David Gemmell, Stephen Kind and Richard Matheson. So that’s quite a potent mix of fantasy, folklore and horror. Maybe it was about time I started writing my own?

So on the 31st of January 2019, I did. I even marked the date in my diary, but what I didn’t comment on was why I started writing.

The thing that really kicked me into gear was a night out and being really quite unhappy at work.

It is frustrating to admit that last part. I’m a teacher. I love teaching. But I was struggling. We had moved from Australia back to Yorkshire and found a dream house (a cottage below a castle) in a dream town because I’d secured what looked to be a dream job. It was our Big England Adventure. My wife found an amazing job in York, and our kids were happy at school. But I wasn’t. I really struggled to get back into the English way of doing things. For the first time in fourteen years of teaching, I felt really quite shit at it. I was surrounded by amazing people and supportive colleagues who became firm friends but I was unhappy. That unhappiness led to a sense of frustration because I couldn’t control it. And that frustration led me to write… because I could control that.

Just before Christmas, 2018 I’d gone for a day out with the lads from university. Naturally, we met in York and toured all our old haunts (pun absolutely intended) and over Christmas, I couldn’t help but think of the story idea that had come to me decades earlier when we first met. So by the time I was back in the classroom (heading to work in the dark and leaving work in the dark and desperately looking forward to the weekends) I started taking a few moments for myself to write the story I’d always wanted to write.

And it made me happy.

There’s nothing quite like writing about a pissed-up, sarcastic loner talking to dead people to put a smile on your face.

York. Some places just exude atmosphere.

Where have you been?

Years ago I ploughed my way through Frank McCourt’s books because one of my students was reading Angela’s Ashes and raving about it in class, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I read the same book, loved it, and decided to read everything else he had written as well. Somewhere along the way, I came across a quote that really resonated with me. I think it must have been in Teacher Man but I’m not a hundred per cent sure so don’t quote me, ahem, while I quote him…

“I was teaching 11,000 students 33,000 lessons over 28 years. I was too busy to write.”

Frank McCourt

Too busy to write. I hear that all the time. Usually from my own lips. But the truth is I’ve written more in this last year than I ever have before. The Book and the Blade comes out in 2022 and I have a finished sequel, the first draft of a third, and 55k words of a fourth to follow it up with. Then there are short stories and a few little extras flitting around that I’m toying with. In November alone I wrote somewhere in the region of 60k words in what my wife would call a fever, somehow fitting that in around my job… as a teacher. And the thing is, that left me with very little time or energy to put anything down for this website. So here it sits, a neglected and forgotten little corner of the World Wide Web. But one of the great joys of being a teacher, especially a teacher in Australia, is the summer holidays. So after I’ve had a wee bit of a rest and recovered from smashing my way through a few litres of egg nog in 38 degrees I might carve out some time to do this whole social media/internet thing properly. I checked the stats… at least three people visit here a day (Woah! Woah! Calm down, Finlayson. Don’t let the fame go to your head now!) so it would probably be nice if they had something to read.

And here is a pic of a grotesque (not a gargoyle) in York Minster for no reason other than he looks awesome (and I also think it looks like he’s stroking the ear of a quizzical puppy but my kids just think I’m seeing things)

Take care lovely people,

Until next time

Halloween Hearth Stories 2020

I wrote a thing for the Halloween Hearth Stories hosted by Parliament House Press. This weekend and next they are publishing a selection of creepy/spooky/Halloweeny short stories from some of their authors (that’s me, Mum!) and my story is online now for you to have a gander at.

I’ll come clean, I cheated a bit.

The story you will read from me is actually an excerpt from the sequel to The Book and the Blade (coming in 2022, published by the lovely Parliament House Press peeps). So, I guess if you love it then it’s really good advertising for my book. But if you hate it, well then, at least it was short, right?

Here is the link to the story,

https://www.parliamenthousepress.com/post/halloween-hearth-stories-part-one

Happy reading!

The Idea

I had the idea for The Book and the Blade nearly 20 years ago and it hurts me to write that!

When I was 18 I started University in York and one of the drawcards for the city was the rumoured 365 pubs… one for every day of the year.

There’s a famous street called Micklegate that has somewhere in the region of 20 of these establishments all crammed into the one cobbled area and some genius came up with the idea for The Micklegate Run – you start near the ironically named Bar (old Norse for “gate”) and have a drink in every pub on your – increasingly meandering – way down towards the river.

Let’s be honest, even if you only drink water that’s a LOT of liquid!

Well, we were young and stupid and sucked in by three-for-one prices and this wonderful new invention called Red Bull that went remarkably well with vodka and so we tried it.

It didn’t end well.

In fact, I don’t remember it ending at all.

What I do remember is an idea.

Imagine getting so drunk you didn’t realise the people you were talking to were ghosts. The world is spinning. You just want to get home. But you live in one of the most haunted cities in the world and the ghosts know you can see them.

I always thought it was a good idea and now, thanks to Parliament House Press, it will be published in 2022!

22 years after I started uni!

They say good things come to those who wait.

Here’s hoping.

The Start

In the beginning…

31/1/19

I started writing the York ghost story last night… finally! I’m not entirely convinced by the tone yet and it’s a bit cliched but I’m happy I’ve started. The characters are taking shape and I have an idea of where the story is heading. It feels so good to write fiction again but I need to work at 3rd person storytelling. My voice is all really passive… and then I go to bed and read Terry Pratchet who is a master. At some point today I’m going to sit down and write in here exactly what it is that I know I need help doing. This is something that has played on the edges of my mind since I started taking writing seriously. I’m not 100% sure how to articulate it but I’ll give it my best shot. I have 5 classes and an observation today, plus lots of marking but Sam is off poorly (so Kel is at home) so I might stay for longer this afternoon. It was -7 this morning. The car was frozen solid and Charli had to let me out at her school because the handle wouldn’t work in the cold.

Finally!

I wrote that word emphatically because I first had the idea for this story nearly twenty years ago! In my next diary entry, I’ll write about that. But for now, I actually have a record of when I started writing this book… Sunday, January 30, 2019, in Richmond, North Yorkshire… and apparently I stayed behind at work on Monday to write a little more 😀

Cheers folks!