What We Are Reading: Robert B. Parker's Spenser

I consider myself a big reader with close to 60 books per year. I had started out with Robert B. Parker's "Goodwulf Manuscript" very early on my reading career, after I had read somewhere that Parker was an epigone of Raymond Chandler, one of my heroes in the early Eighties. But it wasn't my style at that time, too philosophical, too imposing. So I stopped for twenty five years until I started to notice the Jesse Stone TV specials with Tom Selleck by accident. I watched the shows, read the books and got drawn into Parker's Boston, Mass. universe of characters.
One fine day I started out on Spenser and similar to buying a complete DVD series in a box, I bought all Spenser books from 1 to 40. After half a year, I am now almost current ("School Days" being the last one).
I like the long term development of the characters life without a perceptible change in characters. Spenser will always be in love with Susan, Hawk will always be Hawk, Vinnie Morris is always reliably available and Susan will never learn to cook.

The hardest thing to do when writing is finding the voice for the characters so that they act and talk consequently after their character. Spenser's code and type makes him behave one way and not another.

About ten books to go, plus a handful of Sunny Randall's. Too bad it has to end!

What we are writing: Trouble At Christmas

I am about halfway through writing a Paul Trouble novella that had appeared in my little creative head over the Christmas period. What if... Paul Trouble comes home for the Christmas holidays and helps his father solving a mystery. A straightforward storyline that mostly will help understanding Paul's roots.

I'll try and publish it on one of those new platforms that offer piece-by-piece publishing of stories. About ten chapters, means ten weeks of attention of anyone interested in the story. I am undecided whether I will time it with the Christmas season or simply start publishing when I have the story final.

Unfortunately it means my boys will have to wait for the second installment of my YA Pirate novel a little longer.

Update: "A Brilliant Plan" - Free book promotion

A Brilliant Plan will be available on Amazon for free for a brief period of time between Jan 26 and Jan 29.

Strangely enough sales of A Brilliant Plan had been best at Barnes & Noble, so it is time to push the Amazon channel a bit.

UPDATE 3. Feb.: Despite a forced interruption of the promotion period due to my parallel published eBook through Smashwords (violation of the KDP Select promotion program that asks for electronic exclusivity), I managed to get at least exposure in the three days of "free:  2058 Downloads!!!  Let's see how the cross-pollination works out.
An additional benefit: I received the first five star review on amazon.com.

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.