Things of the Week: 9th July 2016

*Brandishes sword in triumph*
*falls over and passes out*

Well, it's been hard work, but Devil's Highway is finally completed. Slightly past the deadline, but not disastrously so.

I finally admitted defeat on trying to type up the pre-recorded notes last month, realising that the text I was getting was rambly and in need of serious rewriting. So I rewrote the hell out of what I had and set about writing the rest of it again from scratch.

There were just under 40,000 words in the draft at that point. Between two and three weeks later, there are now 107,000.

There's still rewriting to do, but the beast is done. And it may, actually (whisper it) not suck.

Emma Barnes of Snowbooks has just tweeted Devil's Highway's inclusion in the Inpress catalogue, so

it's finally been announced outside my blog. Here's the blurb, for those who prefer to read these things without dislocating your necks:

Their hair was bleached and matted, their chalk-white skin dry and fissured like sun-baked earth. Their eyes were near-black, glistening clots with a gleam of red; when they grinned their teeth were needles of bone. “Don’t worry, Helen. We won’t hurt you. But something will.”

In the haunted desolation of post-nuclear Britain, the Catchman walks. Spawned from the nightmare of Project Tindalos, it doesn’t tire, stop, or die. It exists only for one purpose: to find and kill Helen Damnation, leader of the growing revolt against the tyrannical Reapers and their Commander, Tereus Winterborn.

 

Meanwhile, Helen is threatened both from without and within. Her nightmares of the Black Road have returned, and the ghosts of her murdered family demand vengeance, in the form of either Winterborn’s death or her own. And close behind the Catchman, a massive Reaper assault, led by Helen’s nemesis, Colonel Jarrett, is nearing the rebels’ base. Killing Helen has become Jarrett’s obsession: only one of them can emerge from this conflict alive.

 

With the fate of the rebellion in the balance, Helen faces her deadliest challenge yet, pitted in single combat against an unstoppable killer, commanding armies in a bloody and pitiless battle – and, at last, confronting the demons of her past on the Black Road.

Also in the last week, the first royalty statement for Hell's Ditch arrived. I did my best not to dream of private islands or having my own personal airship when I clicked the email, but I cried anyway.

HE IS NOT SUPPOSED TO LOOK HAPPY.

Luckily, along with an incredibly loving and supportive wife, I also have good friends - including one author whose career is currently all writers hope for, and who's been unfailingly kind and generous with their time and advice. When I bemoaned my sales figures, I got a healthy dose of real talk about how many copies most writers sell. Left me feeling better anyway...

Similar real talk, as ever, can be found in this blog here, by Kameron Hurley.

In other news, we got Sky. (Yeah, I know.)  Mainly because having just finished the Game Of Thrones Season 5 box set, we would actually like to see Season 6 some time before 2017. It helped us catch up on the BBC's The Living And The Dead (which despite the gorgeous landscapes and good cast, managed to be yet another wasted opportunity) and The Tunnel, which is damn good, although I'm still getting used to the sight of Stephen Dillane smiling, after four seasons of him as Stannis Baratheon in GoT.

Anyway, time to step away from the computer and into the real world. Catch you all next week, and take care.