It only seems like a few moments ago that I was posting the last #SampleSunday piece. And here we are again.

This week, I’m posting the prologue to one of my works-in-progress, a crime novel, whose working title is “Death In Print”. It will be published within the next few weeks, and will be available via Amazon for Kindle, and via Smashwords for other readers.

I hope you enjoy it. Please see the #SampleSunday page to read the piece.

If you like this, you can purchase one or both of my short story collections – see the images on the right of the page. Thank you for stopping by.

I’ve just realised that I haven’t posted to this blog since last Sunday. Shame on me.

I’ve got something a little different for you this week. The first thing I have is a very short story (680 words), written when I was sitting, overlooking the sea on a sunny weekend. It occurred to me how the sounds I could hear would paint a picture for someone who wasn’t sighted. That’s “Sights and Sounds” (which appeared in an online anthology a couple of years ago).

I’ve also taken part in something I’ve not seen before – it’s called 5 X 5 (Five By Five). The idea is to write a very short story (sometimes called Flash Fiction), which comprises exactly five sentences, each of exactly five words. It’s actually harder than you think.

I hope you like this weeks #SampleSunday. If you do like it, there’s more in my short story collections, available from Amazon for Kindle, and also on Smashwords for Sony and other readers, and shortly to be available on iBooks and Barnes and Noble, and many other online outlets.

You can find today’s #SampleSunday on the page Sample Sunday

It’s that time of the week again! Another sample of my writing is up on my #SampleSunday page. It’s a very short piece of fiction I wrote a little while ago. I hope you enjoy it! If you do, please see the collections I have through the sidebar here – click on the pictures to take you to my Amazon pages. If you don’t have a Kindle yet, don’t forget you can read my books on your PC or Mac with the Kindle Reader download. Click here for PC or here for Mac.

… you pick up a previously-written novella, work your way through it, editing and rewriting, only to find when you get to the end that you never actually finished it in the first place? Grrr.

So, my first seaside murder mystery novella (or maybe it’s a novelette?) needs more work on it before it’s ready. To be honest, there was a previous one which really should have gone before this one. There’s a change of location which is better explained by the other novella, and the intention was always to release the two as a pair.

So, all drafts saved, all bug files and character outlines saved, and time to open up a whole new story.

C’est la vie.

I’m feeling fairly righteous this evening. I’m sitting on over 3,000 words of edited first draft. This was a novella I wrote a couple of years ago which has been sitting on my hard disk looking for a market.

It seems the Kindle could open up as a market for novellas, where the traditional pricing constraints of tree books don’t apply.

It’s features my series character as police detective, investigating a murder on the British coast. As written, it came out at about 25,000 words. So far, I’ve stuck pretty much to the original pacing, but when it’s rewritten, I’ll look at how it reads to see if it needs more or less, or should stay the same.

After spending some time on the production and marketing side of my writing, and enjoying a fairly quiet Christmas with family, it’s time to write again.

In the Brave New World of Kindle (BNWoK), the traditional restrictions on size of novel have all but disappeared. Micro fiction, short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels and epics can all be marketed and sold in the new electronic reading era.

So I have some ‘things’ I wrote a couple of years ago. In truth, they were two halves to my National Novel Writing Month submission, which both ended up at around 25,000 words. As such, finding a ‘home’ for them was almost impossible without changing them either up into full length novels (somewhere around 70,000 words), or down into long, short stories (say, around 10,000 – 15,000 words). Either would have meant an almost complete rewrite, but the stories themselves wouldn’t have lent themselves to being anything other than what they were – 25,000 word stories.

But now, such things can be edited, polished, and then published via the Amazon Digital text Platform (DTP), where they might find a few readers. This, to me, is much better than them sitting on various hard disks, having put many hours of work into them.

But then I have ideas for new writing. I have a post-apocalyptic story buzzing around in my head, and I have a development of my series character which could work out well.

Maybe I should stop hanging around on forums and Facebook (and updating blogs), and get on and writing.
#amwriting 🙂

I’ve got my second #SampleSunday piece up. It’s taken from my second collection of short and flash fiction, Bleak Midwinter Tales 2 Go to the #SampleSundaypage.

I hope you like it.

Next time, I’ll be posting one of my pieces of short fiction which I thought unsuitable to go into the collection.

Happy #SampleSunday.

My second collection of short stories is now up at Smashwords, available in Sony, Epub and other formats (including PDF), and can be purchased HERE

Please see the details page here for more information and a sample.

The first collection of short stories and micro fiction is now available, currently from Smashwords for Sony, PDF and others HERE , and from Amazon for Kindle very soon.

Please see the description page for more details: Bleak Midwinter Tales

After the brief lull last night to play with graphics, I decided to knuckle down and get my editing done.

And hurrah! It’s done! I have 25 stories for each of the collections, and around 15,000 words in each book.

Now, I have to do the boring bit of checking, formatting, rechecking, reformatting, re-rechecking, … etc etc. But, with a bit of luck and a following wind, the finished first collection should be uploaded sometime tomorrow.