Introspection

Been offline for a while. I'd like to say I've been writing, but I haven't even been doing that. Well, not much anyway - although I can report a couple of short story acceptances in e-anthologies coming from MWiDP. One was my blowing-up-Liverpool story, so I guess I can abandon my pathetic attempts at cover production (see an earlier post), although I have since attended two 1-day photoshop courses.

After the near-implosion of the British Fantasy Society towards the end of September (you either know about it or you don't - and believe me it's way too long and complicated to get into any detail here), I've been through a bit of a period of reflection. Two weeks being deluged in emails, blog posts and newspaper articles (broadsheet as well as tabloid) and I've realised how much influence the internet can have over lives and how quickly things can go viral online. It's actually quite scary and has made me pull back slightly from all this. For the first time in a long while, I wasn't checking facebook and twitter every night and I have to confess that a lot of emails were scanned and deleted when I realised I had nothing useful to contribute and was only stressing myself out by reading them. And although I wasn't directly a part of any of it, it's made me question a lot of things, not least how quick people are to be judge and jury. I know I will be less quick to jump in with both feet to volunteer in future, and that's sad.

But time to move on. There are worlds to explore and stories to write. And good friends to keep in touch with.

And I've started Christmas shopping!

Violence in Literature

There's an ongoing discussion going on over at Soooz Says Stuff. This month's topic is Violence in Literature: When is Enough, Enough? There's a guest post up every day or so and it's generating some lively discussions. Today is my guest post, so feel free to hop over and join in!

Sales Report!

So we're up to a huge total of 30 UK kindle sales of Hamelin's Child so far. Can't hand in my resignation yet then. But I do have 4 5-star utterly fabulous reviews on Amazon UK - and not all from my mates either! Handful of US sales and no reviews as yet, but then I have only just discovered that the UK and US sites are completely different. I've been whoring myself around the UK discussion boards and it looks like I'll have to do the same on the US ones too.

I don't find PR easy. Despite the fact that this novel was long-listed (top 20) for the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award a few years back, there's still a small part of me that wonders whether everybody is secretly laughing at me. It may well be as much do with the controversial nature of the content as anything else, but I've been doing some research over the past couple of weeks and there's a lot worse stuff out there.

So I've been contributing to facebook discussions, guest blogging, grabbing every opportunity to yell "ME! ME! ME!" on other peoples' blogs and generally trying to put myself out there. Not sure I'm ready for an all out assault at work yet (there are a couple of guys selling their books in the work canteen in a couple of weeks), but we'll see how brave I'm feeling. It's kind of hard to sell an e-book anywhere other than online.

Sex or porn? When too much is not enough.

Still Missing. A thriller? Misery memoir? Porn? Not read it yet, but will let you know. It does annoy me that industry insiders tell me my sex-and-drugs thriller is not commercial, yet this apparently is? Anything with this amount of pre-publication publicity must be commercial by definition, surely? It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Edited to add: here's a link to an interesting debate on this very topic on HarperCollins authonomy site.

Hmmph.