Tuesday 23 July 2013

Words are my Playground ...

... which means you'll have to wait a little bit longer for Tube Riders: Exile.

Sorry about that. Let me explain why.

It's done, it's drafted, it's had a couple of good edit passes. It needs perhaps two more and then it'll be ready. No major problems.

And then a friend suggested a little wordcount challenge - 70,000 words in July.

I finished Exile's first draft in March. After that I got to work editing an older book called Head of Words, and once that was published I got into editing Exile. Pretty much March, April, May and June was all editing.

Writing is fun, but editing is work, and it tires me out. I needed new words, so I signed up for the challenge.

I'd been itching to write Tube Riders: Revenge for a while. As always, I made a plan to start in September, after Exile was released and after I'd done some other stuff. As always, I decided to change my plans.

Now the good news.

I started writing Revenge, and now I can't stop. I'm right in there, and I'm doing it everyday, slowly letting it unfold in front of me. I wrote The Tube Riders in 2009, failed to get an agent for it, then left it on a shelf for three years until I came to self-publish it in March, 2012. And after it started to get a little success, I knew I had to go back to it and finish the trilogy.

Exile was a hard book to write. I was just getting back into the world and getting to know the characters. I like it and I think it's a good book, but Revenge was always going to be the absolute apocalypse of the series, a big, fat steamroller of a book that would blow everything else in the genre out of the water and leave people with chin-burn from their jaws scraping along the ground.

I really, really, wanted to write that book.

After I finished Exile, I was right where I wanted to be. I had the characters where I wanted them, and I felt ready to get stuck in. Exile is a complete book with a complete story arc, but it's still only part of a wider story, and I felt like I wanted to get on with that story. Revenge starts a little while after Exile finishes - I'm not telling you how much, but its enough to allow a few side stories, possibly featuring different characters, if I want - but for me I couldn't waste any more time. I thought I'd just write a few chapters, and see how it went.

And it's going swimmingly. I've got 40,000 words down so far, roughly 14 chapters. Ideas are flashing into my mind on a daily basis. I wrote Exile over seven months, and there were whole weeks when I didn't work on it because I was finding it difficult to see the road ahead. With Revenge I've been writing several pages a day, and even though I've hardly done any plotting at all, the stories of all the various characters are revealing themselves quite willingly.

So the bad news is that you'll have to wait a little longer for Exile, but the good news is that Revenge will be along shortly after. Bear with me. It'll be worth it, I promise.

Chris Ward
24th July 2013

Monday 1 July 2013

Exile is officially delayed ...

Okay, I know I said July, but you're going to have to hang on a little bit longer for Tube Riders: Exile. As always, I jumped the gun a bit when I said July and overestimated just how long it would take me to finish off the editing. Rest assured that I'm working on the book every day, and when it's ready it'll be a stormer.

Basically, the book is finished, but I'm currently working through it for the third time. What I'm doing this time is tightening the text, making the characterisation stronger, working out a few issues of character motivation and improving both the tension and pacing. I don't want this to just be a good book, I want this to be an excellent book, one that will have you dying to read part three (which I've also started writing - yeah, I tend to multitask, I'm not good at focusing on any one thing all the time ...).

So, you have my apologies, but I won't be going into any George RR Martin territory. This will be a month or two, we're not talking years. Back when I finished the first draft I was planning on August, but I hoped to get it out a bit earlier. August is far more likely but I'll say September just to be safe ... I hope!

Thanks always for your support,

Chris Ward
July 1st 2013