Brilliant Actors - Calendar Moonstone's second adventure is coming up!

Long time no hear. Been busy finalizing "Brilliant Actors", the second installment of cat burglar Calendar Moonstone's adventures. The editor had done a great job finding my errors and it took the weekend to finalize the script. During next week all is left to do is to prepare the manuscript for publishing.
First channel will be Kindle Direct Publishing, followed by Createspace for the print edition. I'll experiment a little bit with KDP and advertising first, and then will open the other channels later (i.e. Smashword).

Here is the eBook cover as a teaser and the promo-text.

On Writing: when enough is enough is not enough?

In my current work in progress Troubleshooter novella (working title "Private Trouble", I have an interesting 5th act problem:
The story is over, the conflict is resolved and Paul Trouble rides into the sunset (well, to Somalia's war theatre of the early Nineties). However, I have another layer of resolution which I could add.
The regular resolution brings the bad guys behind bars. Paul manages to retrieve the McGuffin. All well. This is the "enough is enough" part.
But now comes another twist: one of the cops who brings the bad guys behind bars, is also a corrupt cop. Paul is the only one who knows. (So there is another conflict and another resolution to be had).
Not enough?

As a writer (God of the story) I have three options:
- I leave it out, to keep the original story mean and lean, like a good novella.
- I put the second ending in (as kind of Act 5.5) and bring another spice into the story
- I weave the storyline in earlier  (which is tricky, as the story is a very quick one with around 40 print pages), so the estate is a bit crammed.

Let's find out which way I go! "Private Trouble" should come out somewhen in summer as a marketing vehicle. And that means for you: free for a period of time on Amazon.  (Otherwise only a buck, equals for the price of a sip of Frappucino.)

Troubleshooter - the influences (Part 3 Donald Hamilton)

Another series of excellent forgotten books is the Matt Helm series by US author Donald Hamilton. The 20-plus books cycle the adventures of a killer in the services of a black-ops problem solving unit. I like them for several reasons, that's why I aspired to emulate some of the elements in "Troubleshooter":

  • A ruthless hero - Matt is uncompromisingly focussed on the success of his missions, killing another agent (foreign or own) is just a collateral damage for an otherwise very sympathetic hero. In one of the books there is a nice scene where Matt runs off a foreign agent from the road, resulting in a devastating car crash for the other agent. Matt drives on without helping to continue the mission. Another agency in pursuit of them stops to help the foreign agent in his car wreck—instead of following the mission protocol—and promptly gets killed. (Soft gets you killed in this job)
  • Independence - In the early books Matt still has a family but has this secret agent / killer past. After that breaks down, he basically moves through the adventures alone, occasionally a fellow agent at his side, but most repeating characters are killed off after a few adventures. Plan is to give Paul Trouble a reverse journey—from loner to social human being—in the following books.
  • Clear right and wrong - Donald Hamilton's spy novels play during the cold war area where things were black and white: red = bad, USA = good. 

Writing news: The last 100 yards - The first 5 yards - The longest yard - A single inch

I just discovered that my last post had been almost a month ago. Here is a brief update on my works in progress. Maybe as clarification: I have a pretty chaotic non-linear writing behavior. Not in story-telling itself, there I rely on a well-built structure with all twists and turns predefined. But when it comes to the production process. Today's snapshot is a good example:
The last 100 yards:  "Brilliant Actors", my second Calendar Moonstone cat burglary adventure, is on its final editing stretch on my desk. It was one of the books I had already written about ten years ago and after "A Brilliant Plan" was done and sold well, I dragged this out and ran the edit process through it (great work for the commute). I will finalize my edit and the few rewrites this weekend and will ship it off to the professional editor. Which brings us to a launch date on Amazon around June.  An ideal read for the beach.

The first 5 yards:  In parallel I started working on the second full length Paul Trouble Troubleshooter novel, working title "T2".  Paul and his little team will be involved in a kidnapping that turns south. I have some great ideas for fighting scenes, one-handed, weaponless Paul against a group of five fully armed mercenaries in the endless New England woods. The first five yards for me is designing the story structure, collecting it from the various brainstorm notes I took in the last year since Troubleshooter came out.

The longest yard: Where "Brilliant Actors" was already designed and written in the digital drawer, my second (German-only, sorry) young adult novel needs to be written from scratch and is coming along slowly. Veeery slooowwwwly The first two parts went relatively quick, but the third part where I need to resolve but also in parallel prepare for Part 3 is forcing me to restructure. I already threw away two full 3rd part structures and had to built again. Not my most favorite work. But I need to hurry up, or my kids are no longer interested in this type of story.

A single inch: My little Troubleshooter novella "Trouble at Christmas" had given me another idea for a little Paul Trouble backstory. Where "Christmas" took us back to Paul's hometown, the new novella with the working title "Private Trouble" will actually play in the past shortly before Paul is deployed to Somalia, just finishing his Marines training. It shows the two-handed not yet fully resourced Paul who is still in his anger-mode paired with the fresh training he received. The story is done except for a last chapter where I am unsure why I should add it.

You can see, I always write on several pieces at once. The main advantage for me is: motivation. There are parts of novel writing that bores me: editing, editing, editing.  And, to an extend, the marketing part. You stop writing and the creative flow completely. By having various books in production, I can decide on the fly what I want to do when and where. I edit on the commute, write a novella while traveling and design a new story in the evening.

KDP Select promotion for "Trouble at Christmas"

First day of Trouble at Christmas promotion is a little than half over and 33 curious readers downloaded the book at Amazon. This is really an experiment to see how a little "free" influences the other two books "Troubleshooter" and "Brilliant Plan". I purchased a registration service to show up on most of the major "eBooks for free" sites, so let's see what return on investment we will get.