My Writing Year: A Look Back and A Look Forward

Another year is over, and besides my usual trip to North Africa (more on that in my next post) it's time for my annual roundup of writing.

I had a fairly productive year, writing 930,000 words. While this was shy of my goal of one million words, I'm not unhappy because this year 409,000 of those words were published under my own name, more than in many years. I do a lot of ghostwriting, you see, and while I need the income it does cut down on my own work.

Part of the reason my word count under my own name was so high was a collaboration with British Science fiction author David Ryker. We came out with the first two in the Ark Ship series, about a colony ship that leaves a dying Earth only to get into more trouble than it left. It's done very well in sales, thanks in no small part to Ryker's marketing abilities.

I also came out with three books of my own. Three Passports to Trouble is the second in my Interzone Mystery series. This was followed by Emergency Transmission, Book Four of my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series. At the end of the year I came out with The Case of the Golden Greeks, Book Three of my Masked Man of Cairo mystery series.

Hmmm....I sense a trend. Lots of series! I haven't written a standalone novel in a while. Perhaps I'll remedy that in 2020. I have a Western that's been bubbling in the back of my head. I'm also going to write more in each of my series, including Trench Raiders. Yes, I've been letting that one lapse for far too long, and some of you have grumbled about that. Don't worry, you'll be getting more adventures from Company E in the autumn at the latest.

You can keep track of all my work on the right-hand side of my blog, where I'll be regularly updating the progress of each book.

Now I got to get back to work!
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The Fourth in the Toxic World Series is Out Now!

The fourth book in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series is out now. It's called Emergency Transmission and takes up where We Had Flags left off. Yu-jin is back, and we get to learn more about some of the other characters who have been in previous books but haven't had their chance to shine. A blurb is below:

Trust is the only thing that can save the world.
The problem is, everyone has their own agenda.
When an offshore platform starts emitting toxic fumes that threaten to destroy the last outposts of civilization, the residents of New City have to team up with a foreign freighter to fix it. But a lingering mistrust remains, and neither side has the resources to stop the leak.
That is, until help comes from the least reliable source.
Can old enemies finally set aside their differences for the greater good?

Emergency Transmission is available on Amazon US and all the other Amazons.

New Print Edition Available and New Release Soon to Come

The print edition of The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus, the second in my Masked Man of Cairo historical mystery series, is out now. There was a big delay thanks to a hopeless layout company I will never hire again. Publishing is full of landmines. Now, at last, it's available.

The third in the series, The Case of the Golden Greeks, is moving forward again after a long spell of ghostwriting that will fund some trips later in the year to Morocco and Egypt. I'm also in final edits for Emergency Transmission, the fourth in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series. That will be coming out in early June. I'll be sure to announce it here.

If you want to hear more from me, you might consider joining my Facebook page, where I make all my announcements as well as share my online writing for other sites and one or two interesting articles on archaeology or history every week.

Update on my books

I haven't blogged for a while because I was busy up in Oxford researching and seeing friends. Now I'm back in Madrid, hard at work getting you folks some more books. Three titles will be coming to you by the end of the year:

Tangier Bank Heist is a mystery with a dash of humor set in 1950s Tangier. In those days it was the wildest city in Africa, as this book will show. It's all set except for the cover. The artist is working on that now. This is the first book in a new series!

Writing Secrets of the World's Most Prolific Authors is with the beta readers at the moment. This is a book aimed at beginning and early career writers. It looks at a dozen famous writers such as Edith Blyton and Isaac Asimov, and how they managed to write hundreds of books while still maintaining a high standard of quality. It's been inspiring and helpful for me, and hopefully will be to the readers too.

Emergency Transmission is in the copyediting stage. It's the fourth in the Toxic World series of post-apocalyptic books. New City's Chinese population decides to assert its civil rights by celebrating Chinese New Year, and people begin to take sides. Then a mysterious preacher sails into port. . .

All of these books will be out by the end of the year, in the order that I've written them up here. My current project another Tangier mystery to follow up Tangier Bank Heist.

So of course I'll be spending the next couple of weeks in Morocco! Then it's back to Cairo to work on the next Masked Man of Cairo novel.

I'll also try to blog a bit more regularly. I know, I know, famous last words. . .

Word Count Wobbles

You might have noticed the word count meters I have on the right-hand margin of this blog. It helps my readers keep track of where my projects are and helps inspire me to write more. The book I'm currently working on the most is The Masked Man of Cairo: The Case of the Purloined Pyramid, a neo-pulp detective story set in 1919 Cairo. I'm almost done with that, but I've been almost done for a couple of weeks. At first I thought it would be 60,000 words. Then I upped it to 65,000. Then a minor character sent the plot sideways and I corrected it to 75,000. Now I really am almost done and it will be 75,000 words or a little less.

This is unusual for me. I can usually guess the final word count of a novel to within 5%, even before I start. I know how a story feels to me. Perhaps it's because this is a new genre for me.

You'll also notice that annual goal of one million words. I just reached the one-third mark on that yesterday, but of course we are slightly more than a third of the way through the year. I'm going to have to pick up speed if I want to hit that goal.

Then there are the other two books. Emergency Transmission, the fourth in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series, has been on hold for the past couple of months. I'll get started on that again the first week of June. Last but not least is The Saga of Egil Thorfinnsson and the Weaklings, a historical fantasy about Norse Greenland. That was a novel that stopped dead in its tracks years ago before I really hit my stride of daily productivity. I've put it up there to remind myself to finish it someday. And I will. Someday.

Then there's all the ghostwriting I'm doing. . .

I update the word count meters every Sunday if you want to watch my progress!

Finished National Novel Writing Month!

Hello from Morocco! I'm down here for one of my regular writing retreats and making a rare appearance online. I mostly ignore the existence of the Internet when I'm here. Anyway, I just wanted to announce that I made it through another National Novel Writing Month, a movement of mass craziness every November when people around the world write 50,000 words in 30 days.

Actually it's not as hard as it sounds. Like any other skill, writing becomes easier with practice. The more you write, the more you can write. It helps that in Morocco I don't have any distractions to lower my word count!

Mostly I've been working on the fourth of my Toxic World series of post-apocalyptic novels, Emergency Transmission, which sees the reappearance of the mysterious freighter`and the reappearance of a certain crazed cult that wasn't fully done away with in the first book. I also did some ghostwriting. I've been getting a lot of that sort of work lately.

I'll be in Morocco for another couple of weeks. I'll post some pictures when I can!

Doing National Novel Writing Month Again This Year!

It's that time of year again, when writers all around the world brew an extra post of coffee and pound their keyboards until their fingers bleed. That's right, it's National Novel Writing Month, when we go for the goal of writing 50,000 words in a month.

This year is a bit different for me because I'm in the middle of a bunch of things, so instead of writing a whole novel in a month, I'm finishing one ghostwriting novel, starting another, and continuing work on Emergency Transmission, the fourth in my Toxic World series of post-apocalyptic novels. I guess that means I'm doing National Partially Write Three Novels Month. Whatever, as long as I make 50,000 words!

If you're doing NaNo and want to hook up online, you find me at my participant page.

My Next Writing Challenge

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've just been sucked into my latest novel, Emergency Transmission, the fourth in my Toxic World series of post-apocalyptic novels. Every time I do a novel, I always set up some sort of challenge, something I haven't done before. Once it was writing from the point of view of a child, another time from a Hispanic woman, once I wrote suspense rather than my usual full-on action. Each book is a bit different, because that makes the writing more interesting.
When I start a novel, I have a general idea of the characters and a fairly clear idea of the ending. The fun is figuring out how to write to that ending. Sometimes the ending changes; usually it doesn't. For Emergency Transmission, I've thought up a great ending, one that fits perfectly with where I want to take the series. The only problem is, I have absolutely no idea how to get there. It doesn't seem possible to get from where I am to where I need to be.
I guess I've found my challenge for this book!

Working on the next Toxic World novel

You might have noticed that on the right-hand column I keep a running tally of my word count for various projects. Things have been changing over there because I finally got my Tangier novel, The Last Hotel Room, to beta readers and started on Book Four of my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series, Emergency Transmission.
It's always fun to get back to the folks in New City and the Burbs as they desperately try to keep the last remnant of civilization alive. As usual with this series, the action shifts between three characters. Song Yu-Jin is back after being introduced in Book Three; Roy Jones, the owner of everyone's favorite bar, finally becomes a major character; and a certain gentleman from the Righteous Horde also makes an appearance. You didn't those crazies were gone, did you?
People might be wondering about that other book, The Saga of Egil Thorfinnsson and the Weaklings. The more observant among you will have noticed that the word count never seems to go up. Yeah, this was a project I started a couple of years ago and it stalled. I'll get it done this year. I promise. Really. It's a historical fantasy set in Norse Greenland. The Norse called the Inuit skraeling, which means "weakling". Not very nice, especially considering who survived and who didn't! It's going to be a fun novella with a really nasty critter straight out of Inuit mythology. Stay tuned.
The meter I use comes from the NaNo page and is a good way to keep tabs on my various books. The final word counts are estimates, of course, but I'm almost always within five percent.
Back to writing!