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 🍻

Meet me at the horse’s arse – inspiration

“Where do you get your ideas from?”

This is a question that crops up a lot when people find out I write silly little books. And when they actually read those books and realise just how bloody silly they are the question takes on a whole new inflection. No longer simply curious, more… concerned.

“So, where do you get your ideas from?” (you complete nutter)

The answer is simple… theft and blind luck. I make shit up, I exaggerate, I see something I like or hear something that peaks my interest and I nick it, twist it and turn it into my own. Invariably, and to the ever loving frustration of my wife and friends, this means nothing is safe or sacred. Take the title of this blog post for instance… meet me at the horse’s arse. It’s a little weird, a bit out there, and absolutely not mine. My friend, Andy, once told a story about his parents arranging to meet in the city one rainy Saturday. This was back before we had mobile phones to stalk each other and carry on talking and getting directions while looking at one another. This was the good old 90s.

Fancy a trip into the city?

Sure. Where shall we meet?

ANZAC Square… at the statue.

Done.

Brisbane is a beautiful city. Lots of history, lots of open spaces, lots of handy places to meet. In fact, it’s kind of a right of passage to meet outside the Hungry Jacks in Queen Street but Andy’s parents weren’t teenagers when this story happened and neither were they carrying skateboards (kind of a prerequisite for the Hungry Jacks meet) so they arranged to meet in ANZAC Square next to the Boer War Memorial. It was the perfect spot. A giant bronze soldier astride a bloody great big horse on top of a huge stone plinth. Hard to miss.

Or so they thought.

As the story goes, Andy’s dad got there first and waited.

And waited.

Andy’s mam never showed. The worry set in. Had he been stood up? Was she okay? What was going on? The details from me are a little sketchy here because we were a bit drunk when Andy told me this story so I’m afraid I have no idea what the conclusion was and how these two lovely people finally met. Was it later the same day? Was it somewhere else? Was it at the horse? I don’t know. What I do know is the excellent resolution.

Andy’s mam had not stood her fella up at all.

And neither was she late.

In fact, Andy’s mam was getting just as frustrated as Andy’s dad… who, unbeknownst to her, was standing in the rain a little more than a few metres away! Because you see, the excellent end to this tale is that they both arrived at roughly the same time and yet waited at opposite ends of the horse!

Andy’s family now have this wonderful habit of arranging to meet at ‘the horse’s bum’, which is just so cool, and so lovely, and so easy to steal and throw into my story about the last witch in Brisbane, and of course, I changed ‘bum’ to ‘arse’ because I prefer a little swearyness in my tales.

So, when the question of inspiration comes up, the answer is simple. I steal things, I exaggerate, and I add little twists and turns until it becomes something else entirely. In my current WIP, it will not be a lovely couple missing their meeting at the statue in ANZAC Square. It will be a confused barman with some latent supernatural power waiting for a four-hundred year old Irish witch. Neither of them are going to be happy about it… and it will result in a demon being let loose on the city… and people will die… lots of people… in really weird ways… but it will be fun to read (I hope) and all because they failed to specify heads or tails!

I owe a big thank you to Andy’s mam and dad! We’ve only met once or twice and yet I’ve half-inched one of their family stories to scribble into one of my silly little books. Cheers!

And remember, folks. If you’re going to meet at a bloody great big horse statue… toss a coin, or better yet, just meet at the arse!

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!

I will eviscerate you in fiction!

Every pimple, every character flaw. I was naked for a day; you will be naked for eternity.
Geoffrey Chaucer (sort of)

One of the fun things about writing a book you think pretty much no one will read is putting all your friends and family in there and ending their lives in new and imaginative ways. Not in a ‘secret serial killer’ kind of way you understand, more in a ‘hey lads, won’t this be a laugh?’ kind of way. But when said book bizarrely comes to the verge of publication all those funny little in-jokes and tragic ends suddenly seem a little… odd. What is perhaps even more strange is calling your friends and asking them for permission to end their lives.

So, chaps. I wrote a book. It’s getting published. You’re all kind of in it. Some of you for longer than others. Are you all cool with me using your names? And, well, killing you?

Thankfully, I am blessed with excellent friends. Perhaps my favourite reply was this one…

“Anyway man, can I please use your full name in a short scene where you get brutally torn apart by a…” “If you don’t use my full name, I’ll kill you”

What a legend! And they’re all the same. Everyone said yes. So friends and family are-quite literally in some places-littered throughout the books. What is interesting, however, is that I never once chose the name of a person I dislike (there aren’t that many people to be fair, but my Yorkshire-based stories leave little room for Donalds and Vladimirs. Perhaps I should have used Boris the bumbling oaf somewhere though?)

When Paul Bettany-in his excellent portrayal of Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale (loosely based on The Canterbury Tales)-hissed the wonderful insult,

I will eviscerate you in fiction!

he was going after the rogues and scoundrels. When I do it, I’m going after my friends.

Read into that what you will.

So when these books do eventually come out and you’re sitting there having a little read witnessing a particularly gruesome death (an evisceration perhaps?) Just think, that’s someone I love. And they don’t deserve it at all.

It’s a funny old world.

Zombies, ghosts and nunchucks. What shenaniganary is this?!

Yes, that’s a word (maybe)

A short post here, ladies and gents… I wrote a daft zombie story set in the 90s. A kid dies and comes back as a ghost while his body reanimates as a zombie. He then spends the night trying to summon his inner Patrick Swayze in order to stop the damn thing eating all his loved ones and kickstarting the zombie apocalypse. Erm, in Redcar. My hometown. S

So, yeah. Really high-brow stuff.

But someone wants to publish it! 🤣

I got the official letter today. So watch this space for zombies, ghosts and erm… nunchucks.

A spanking new website!

Things are happening, folks! First of all, the countdown to the book release is on. At the time of writing, there are 149 days left! I also had an exceptionally cool meeting with my amazing editor yesterday but I can’t really dish the goss on that one yet other than to say she is a legend!

The purpose of this post is to let people know that the old website is now offline and has been replaced by this shiny new one. The plan is to actually write things! (I know! Shocking!) In a week or two, it will have its own domain (abfinlayson.com) which seems awfully grown-up and I will be putting together a monthly newsletter that people can subscribe to (thanks Mam!)

As we get closer to the release date I will add more details about where you can buy the book (digital and physical), get merch (if that’s your thing) and all the launch details.

In the meantime, not really knowing what else to do, I built this little website and added Easter Eggs throughout. Never trust a link, ladies and gents, who knows where they will take you?

click me

Go on, I dare you!

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

It’s easy to get a publisher, right?

It turns out I keep this online diary almost as consistently as I keep my personal diary, i.e. hardly ever. This is quite normal for me. I seem to work in flurries of madness separated by long periods of nothing. Well, I say nothing, but the old noggin is always ticking over. It’s like a bag of cats in there. If it’s any help, I have thought about what to write many times.

This diary entry is about my search for a publisher.

The moment I finished writing the book, I had the seed of belief that it was good enough to be put out there, that someone might get a titter out of it and think it was a good fit. This might sound arrogant but when you’ve written so much shit you notice the occasional diamond in the nugget. So I knocked up a hasty cover letter (rubbish), a synopsis (even worse), and started throwing it out into the ether.

I didn’t have a plan and I did next to no research.

And I got results!

Almost immediately. I’m not kidding. I sent the book out on a Sunday and had a reply on Tuesday with an offer of publication. I was stoked! This never happens. This was my shining moment, all that hard work paid off, you love me! You really love me!

And then they asked for money. A lot of money.

Not a publisher.

(In case you’re starting out and you have questions about this, the answer is quite simple… a legit publisher will NEVER ask you for money. Ever.)

I was gutted, but then the next week I received another email, this time from a publisher who only read the first 30 pages… they wanted the rest. Happy days! Back in business!

A week after that they sent me a contract!

And a bill.

Here’s the thing. That bill was remarkably smaller than the first. We’re talking a few hundred instead of a few thousand, and so I was tempted. Really tempted.

At this point my wonderful wife stepped in and did the research I should have done myself. She discovered that the fee I was being asked for was exactly one hundred pounds more than the fee charged by a certain online company that specialises in getting self-published texts ready for ebook distribution. It seemed like another scam, but I was still reeling from the first let-down and thought it might be worth a punt anyway.

Then I saw the cover designs.

Holy snapping duck crap Batman! The font being used for many of the titles was that dodgy ‘Word Art’ thing you get in old editions of Microsoft Publisher and PowerPoint. You know the one, black outline with yellow and orange ‘flames’ in the text. It was the title for every 90s kid’s comic sans created short story. And the less said about the images the better.

(I know you probably want to see some of these but I’m a gentleman – ahem! – and won’t tattle-tale – each to their own and all that. More power to them.)

Did I run away? You’d think so, but not quite. I was still tempted. Other publishers were getting back to me with polite but firm rejections. There was still hope here.

But then I read the contract and there were two clauses that changed everything,

1) I would retain the rights to the original manuscript but any edited manuscript (and all its contents and characters) would become the property of the publisher.

2) I had to take all the swearing out.

No way, get fucked, fuck off! Those fucking characters are fucking mine! I fucking love them! They’ve been rattling around my stupid fucking brain for twenty fucking years!

FYI: The Book and the Blade contains…

38 variations of fuck

15 shits

4 twats

2 bastards

and a partridge in a pear tree.

Needless to say, I walked away.

But then another publisher said yes!

Then they went bankrupt.

Three strikes, you’re out!

I was about ready to give up but I decided to give it one last punt. This time, I would do it properly. This time, I would do my research. This time, I would look for publishers that specialised in my kind of story. And so I did. I created an excel spreadsheet and everything, so you know I was being serious. I categorised every publisher I found in order of preference and at the top of the list emerged an independent publishing house in the USA with a clear sense of style, humour, and an interest in the macabre that mirrored exactly what I was looking for.

But they weren’t taking submissions.

So I waited. I polished the manuscript. I did a better cover letter. Wrote a better synopsis. And then I sat up until midnight on the day the submissions opened and sent it in at 12:01.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

(Apart from the video they asked me to film as a ‘getting to know potential authors’. We don’t talk about that.)

So here we are. Without research… 15 publishers. 3 dodgy yeses. 5 rejections. 5 no responses. And 2 incorrectly addressed emails on my part.

With research… my first choice publisher working hard to bring my book to the world in 2022.

As the incomparable Sir Terry Pratchett said,

“If you trust in yourself. . . and believe in your dreams. . . and follow your star. . . you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”

Amazon: https://amzn.to/2MJzbST

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-book-and-the-blade