Richard Faraday At The End Of The World - NOW AVAILABLE

After a long slog of things, I have finally made my new novel available from Lulu. This has been a long time coming, and I think it's worth what went into it. It's twice as big, ten times as epic, and with a whole host of new characters joining the existing-- and surviving (and not so surviving!)-- characters from the first.

And God DAMN am I proud of it.

(Click the cover to buy)

This one wouldn't be here without the help of all the people who purchased the first, that's the most important thing. If no one wanted to see more from the characters then why would I even bother? It's all well and good writing for yourself but at the same time... fuck it! Who cares about what I want? A big thank you to Kate Hannon and Jon Wilkins for editing the bad boy, but also the continuing support of Sam Miller, who, whilst unable to edit it, was a guiding light during the earlier stages and also in shaping the first book. Ramon Villalobos created the cover, and it's a beauty of a thing. I love it so.

And what's next?

Well, I think I've finalised the title of the third book in the series... Scarlett Faraday Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea. If that sticks around, awesome, but the only way you won't see it is if I come up with something better! Not only that, but there will be a CHRISTMAS surprise, fingers crossed.

Having an ultimate brain ache with the formatting of the second novel these last few days. The first proof had a few chapters formatted wrong, the chapter layouts were off, so I fixed it, sent off for another proof. That's fine, that's why you order a proof. Then, after discussing alignment with someone, I went back and intended to change the paragraph alignment again (I had time, everything else was okay, format-wise) but then found that I had somehow fucked up the chapters again, so I fixed it but now I've got a few days to my deadline and no hope of hitting my target of Halloween release (with proof in hand) unless I take a chance and trust that I haven't fucked it up even further...

Balls.

Richard Faraday At The End Of The World - Cover Update

Me (Thu 16th October): "Holy shit, that's amazing. What was the thought process behind it?"

Ramon (Sat 20th October): "My thought process was you had kind of asked for the eyes and the trees as elements so I figured as long as I incorporated both of those we'd be set so after that I just played around with different images of trees that I distorted and different mask faces that I mostly disembodied so that it is kind of graphic. I'm a huge fan of Chip Kidd's design work for covers so I looked at his book a ton and tried to add some of that class. I wanted to use red and green because those colors feel kind of like dangerous and acidic in most contexts other than Christmas so yeah I did that and just rolled with it. At first I had the features of the face way more obscured but then I was like nah, this thing is really creepy, I'm going to just... put it out there on the front. It draws the viewers attention in heavy and adds a lot more visual interest to what otherwise was looking too simple, you know? haha, so when I wrote this, I thought I still had the green color on the cover but it was a last minute decision to change it to gray because I thought the green made it too... not christmassy but I thought I was using red and green too much lately and this felt a little more washed out and creepy."

NaNoWriMo Update #1: The Non-Writing Update Update

Today was the first NaNoWriMo* meeting I have ever attended and I was surprised by how much I got out of it! The fact of the matter is I didn't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't disappointed. Right now, I'm stuck in a purgatory of not meeting new people who share my interests but being surrounded by people who write fiction and get the same buzz out of it that I do was so inspiring. I'm just disappointed I'm not allowed to start writing until November. Surely there has to be some pre-NaNoWriMo writing allowance**?

I have two weeks before it begins. I know what I'm going to write so I might start plotting. I think this will be difficult, because I don't normally plot so heavily. I have A and C sorted out, but B is up in the air, usually dictated by characters than the story itself, which I think is the right direction to go in. So I'll try plotting, but I can't let myself get too heavily pulled into it else all hell will break loose.

We'll see, eh?

*National Novel Writing Month, obviously.
**I know there isn't, sob.