Category Archives: News

And then there were five . . . .

The tale of Adam, the time-travelling amnesiac, is finished. The removal of the ‘immortal’ story arc rendered the original title irrelevant, and the revised edition is now available on Leanpub as The Stranger.

In an earlier blog entry, I speculated on solutions to the impasse I’d created. My speculations were prescient. By demoting one of the characters to lesser status, and abandoning the complex ‘immortal’ thread, I was able to jump-start the narrative and bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. It’s a far more subdued conclusion than the one I envisaged, but it does bring the story full-circle, and introduces some measure of resolution.

During the long hiatus in the writing of The Stranger, Leanpub relegated the book to what it calls cold storage. Bringing it out of storage resulted in several difficulties: difficulties that were overcome by switching to online editing instead of Dropbox. I took this opportunity to move two other books from storage and they are once again available in revised editions with new titles.

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Going Nowhere Fast

Five years ago I promised myself that I would finish the first chapter of The Immortal and then decide whether to press on with the story or abandon it. I ended up doing a little of both.

Writing in sporadic bursts, I completed eight chapters of the saga of a devastatingly handsome time-travelling amnesiac and found that I had written myself into a corner. My attempt to create a convincing male protagonist had triggered the appearance of three strong female leads, all clamouring for more character development and a greater role in the narrative. The male protagonist, meanwhile, stubbornly resisted any unveiling of his hidden depths.

Teleporting and time jumps play a crucial role in the narrative. I tried to keep the inevitable inconsistencies and paradoxes to a minimum, to little avail. The story has reached the point at which the reader would normally expect a steady build-up to an exciting dénouement, a climactic confrontation between the protagonist and his adversaries.

To my guilty surprise, a few weeks ago some gentle soul purchased a copy of The Immortal. That reader (bless her!) is entitled to free updates and is no doubt wondering how the story ends. I owe it to that reader, and to myself, to bring the story to a conclusion.

I may, reluctantly, demote one of the female leads to a lesser role in the story. I may also rely on my readers’ further suspension of disbelief as I take the time jumps to an increasingly more improbable level.

The saga continues…

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Blog Migration

This blog was originally located on Blogger and intended for a discussion of Psychic Awakening, my first attempt at fiction.

A few weeks ago, nearing the end of my third novel, I migrated the blog to its new home on my own website. The content will now cover not only all my fiction works, but will also include comments about e-publishing in general.

Some of the earliest posts now make little sense, referring only to Psychic Awakening, its characters, its locations, and its narrative. I have nevertheless preserved them partly from nostalgia and partly as a record of my changing attitudes to my own books and their publishing.

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