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The Road to a Novel
The paths to writing a novel are many, this was mine to my first one.
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Planning a new novel
Many authors spend time planning their novels to some degree, many don’t plan at all. It’s whatever floats your boat. I’m a planner. When I was half-way through A Patient Man, the third in the Inspector James Given series, I decided I’d kill him off. I’d had enough of him and wanted to move on…
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A new project
So the final draft of my Inspector Given sequel is finished and with my publisher for consideration, it’s also been submitted to a couple of agents and I’m sitting here with fingers crossed – making the typing much more difficult than it needs to be. I’ve had some excellent help from my daughters and their…
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Editing can be fun – or so they tell me.
On Sunday afternoon a wonderful thing happened. I finished the first draft of my second novel. I’m not a Stephen King-type 2,000 words a day writer but I had been consistently pushing out 600-1,000 words every day for the past two or three weeks trying to get the job done. Coming to the end was…
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The joy (?) of being an author
I’ve had my head down for weeks, so apart from five hours a day wasting time on my newly discovered Twitter (@charliegarratt3), I’ve been redrafting the novel, working title: Let Venom Breed. Back at the end of June I was in the mire, still 20k words short of target and lost down narrative arc alley.…
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The vagaries of tense
I tend to write in the first person and in the past tense. I’m in the process of redrafting my second novel and discovered I continually tripped over a particular passage, though couldn’t work out why. Then I made a couple of minor changes, just to see how it looked, and hey-presto, no more tripping.…
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How to find a publisher
A few days ago I was chatting to a writer friend who was saying she’d submitted to around 30 publishers and agents without success before self-publishing. Her book has sold a couple of hundred copies to date and has been widely praised, so why no traditional publisher? If I knew the definite reason for that…
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What a night
Last night we launched A Shadowed Livery in Ireland. It was a great evening, starting with general chat and excellent background piano, then some very kind words from a friend and writer about the ‘new man in her life’ – not me but Inspector James Given, the protagonist in my novel who she followed for months…
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Today’s the day
So that’s it then. After months and months of waiting I clicked onto Amazon this morning and there it is. Finally published. I finished my first draft in November 2012, had interest from a publisher in August 2013 and received a contract in February 2014. It’s taken the last year and some months to redraft…
