Keeping speed and motivation up

Currently I am working on the second book of a YA series. Things are moving forward, mostly due to a good pre-structuring. But still, progress could be better. I managed to sit down with my laptop for about two hours to work on the book, however having spent the most of two month on the first third of the story, it is still a long way to go. And due to traveling, I have less time at hand. During the week in a hotel room, it is not so much about motivation but about sheer tiredness (when I am on the road, I usually get up around 6:00 for my morning run and rarely return after dinner before 22:00. And the last two hours of the day are mostly spent unwinding.

Troubleshooter - the influences (Part 2) - Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise



Modesty Blaise entered my life in my late teens when I bought a four-book series of Comics that contained three Modesty Blaise adventures and one The Seekers book. I was hooked immediately. As our home library held the complete works of creator Peter O'Donnell, I was deeply involved in the "escapist" adventures of Modesty and her sidekick Willie Garvin. There are several style elements that influenced my writing of "Troubleshooter" and also "A Brilliant Plan".



  • Shifting viewpoints - something I enjoy to do, moving the viewpoint from chapter to chapter and sometimes, especially during action scenes, within the chapters from paragraph to paragraph;
  • Carefully coreographed action sequences - it is joy to read O'Donnell's fight or shoot-out scenes. Well set up, which means you know who exactly fight whom and why. Physical abilities are carefully explained, including physical shortcomings. Impeccable drama from start to finish of the fight. I wouldn't compare myself to Mr. O'Donnell, but he is definitely the aspiration;
  • People with a past in new situations - I liked the first Modesty Blaise book where Modesty had to free Willie from jail because he got bored in retirement and had started freelancing without success. It is this concept of dangerous people in normal-people situations that fascinates me.
Don't ask me which I like better, books or comics; both have their place in my heart. Just don't ask me about the movies...

Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise series:
Modesty Blaise - the first book-adventure, great introduction
Pieces of Modesty  - a collection of Modesty short stories, very recommendable


 

Writing vs. Publishing

It becomes a little tug of war in my head:
Do I continue optimizing my publishing portfolio? (3 books in a year, not too bad, I guess.)
Or do I reserve the time to write on my next book?

Already posed myself this question a while ago.

For a change, I started the second installment of my Pirate-Trilogy well prepared. Never before I have pre-structured the story from A-Z  (also in lieu of the third installment building upon certain setups I need to introduce in the second book). So writing along this pre-structure is super-easy. I can virtually pick and choose which chapters I write first; depending on my liking and daily motivation. This makes it easy to sit down and simply write, write, write.

On the other hand, the other books could use some advertising and mingling.

Hard decision. I probably will do both: writing on the commute train and publishing tasks at night.


Covers side by side -

I am not a cover designer, by far not. I A-B-tested with my family the two options and started out with the "diamond" cover. After a few weeks, also seeing the print version of the book, I decided to make the cover a little bit more friendly.

The content of the book remained unchanged, but by just changing the outer appearance, it felt as if I sorted my book into a different category:
Black/Diamond: focus on stark, slightly haunting, mysterious
Pink/Thief: sunny, romantic, friendly
I haven't analyzed yet, which version brought in more readers.




I am not very happy with either cover, but so far they will do.
When "Brilliant Actors" will come out in 2014 (Book 2 in the Calendar Moonstone series), I will decide what way to go. Either play on the two existing cover themes or have a professional designer create me stylistically matching covers for book 1 and book 2


Print is coming - "Troubleshooter" submitted to Createspace

Finished today the Createspace submission for books on demand. The processing will take a few days but then I have some nice Christmas gifts ready just in time.

The text body formatting was a breeze but the cover design was a little more difficult this time. Alignment was difficult because the book is some pages smaller than "A Brilliant Plan", about 250 pages. Plus the color management was completely missing (tell no one: my first two book covers were designed and published directly from Powerpoint).  So I got myself a Photoshop 30 day trial and started resigning. I copied over the elements from Powerpoint and whenever I was stuck. (A classic example: I want to center the author name on the front page and receive: "Could not use the move tool because the target channel is hidden." Doh?" But the result turned out to be fine. I think.