convincing dialogue

I write in the morning, first thing, before getting out of bed. But much of my thinking about what I am going to write is done on a walk after dinner. This isn’t a matter of striding out across the moors, or along the foreshore in the moonlight, you understand. I live 300 yards down a private lane. Don’t get ideas of a gated drive leading to a Palladian country house. It’s a Pembrokeshire farm lane, owned by our farmer neighbours who never use it, and my evening walk consists of marching up and down between towering hedgerows, occasionally diverted by birds in the overhanging ash trees, or the sight of the first snowdrop, but mostly I’m just stomping along, back and forth, working out the next day’s writing session.

Being of a certain age, I tend to do my thinking out loud. Even when shopping at Tesco’s, which has begun to lead to anxious mothers steering their small children away from the strange woman who’s complaining loudly, to no-one in particular, about the lack of Typhoo tea and lime juice.

However, when I’m taking my after-dinner walk, I can be certain of being safe from any audience, which is very liberating. I can keep conversations between my characters going for half an hour without interruption and it does help to make dialogue more realistic. What I hadn’t appreciated was that I must do quite realistic tones and accents while I’m at it, because today, as I reached the farmyard turning point on my walk, in the middle of a violent argument between a brother and sister, I found I did have an audience – my neighbours, staring at me in alarm, and peering beyond me, in search of the drunken thug who was obviously chasing me.

I am not sure that saying ‘Hello, lovely evening, isn’t it?’ in my best Lutonian accent (despite the drizzling rain), really persuaded them that all was fine. They were exchanging worried looks as I wheeled back down the lane. But at least I’m fairly sure that my brother/sister argument is reasonably convincing.

Living in Interesting Times

There is nothing quite so interesting as being on the very brink of signing a contract with a publisher for a second book, only to discover that said publisher has just gone into liquidation.

Actually, there are probably quite a lot of things far more interesting, but this was sufficient for me.

Endeavour Press published my fourth novel, Shadows, last year. I was on the point of signing a contract for a second when word came through that Endeavour had gone into liquidation. Which was, I thought, a little bit of a nuisance.

Fortunately, it turned out that the liquidation was voluntary, which meant no one was going to lose their royalties and could keep their titles ticking over, if they so chose. The directors of Endeavour were going their separate ways and authors could choose which one to go with. I've gone with Endeavour Media, which will continue to publish Shadows as an e-book and I have now also signed a contract for the e-publication of its companion, Long Shadows.

However, I thought I would use the opportunity of total chaos, to rethink the paperback publication. Endeavour concentrates on e-books and deals brilliantly with them, but though they offer a paperback option, it is available solely through Amazon. I may be wrong, but I suspect that a lot of people who prefer paperbacks to Kindles would really like to buy from good old-fashioned book shops, while they still exist. So, heart in mouth, I have decided to bring out the paperbacks myself, through FeedARead.com.

It does mean that my books are now both conventionally and self-published. I wait to see whether I've opted for the best or the worst of both worlds. Am I mad? Probably, but I am willing to play with fire, and since one of the bonuses of self-publishing is that I can choose my own covers, here are my brand new paperback covers.

  

and to compare and contrast, here are the Endeavour covers for the Kindle versions.

     

I shall not ask you to vote, but the books are available here.

Shadows 

Long Shadows paperback

Long Shadows Kindle