Tag Archives: Writing process

Work In Progress 4.9

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Starting with Secrets

120,000 words and I am about to start the last chapter. When that’s done, I will start on the second draft, although I have already done some editing. I was knocked sideways by a combination of allergies, a head cold and my 4th Covid vax all arriving on the same day, and haven’t been up to much these past three weeks. I’ve improved in the past couple of days, apart from a couple of hours of constant sneezing first thing in the morning, so I am able to get back to the typewriter. I did some writing during this time, but wasn’t happy with the results, so instead, I returned to chapter one and read through what I had so far, and made improvements. This also helped me see what needed to be explained and answered at the end of the book.

All being well, the first draft of Starting with Secrets will be done in the next couple of days. As this is part one of a two-parter, I need to devise a last chapter which is both an ending and a beginning. If the two books were a film, I would now be at the halfway point and the big twist, or something which pushes the story in another direction. That other direction will be the follow-on book, The Larkspur Legacy, and I already know how that is going to end, and what will happen along the way.

Before then, though, there is this one to finish and polish, a cover to devise, a blurb to write, the proofreading to do and an illustration to commission. All that will happen after I’ve finished the second or third drafts, so don’t hold your breath just yet.

Instead, if you haven’t embarked on the action-adventure, male bonding, bromance, and historical mysteries based on the truth series which ire the Larkspur Mysteries, you should start at book one, Guardians of the Poor.

Work In Progress 4.8

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Starting with Secrets, The Larkspur Mysteries Book Six

This week’s update sees me still at 118,000 words, but for a good reason. Sometimes, when writing a longer novel, it’s important to do as Thomas Payne used to do when a butler: stop, take stock and start again. In the case of Starting with Secretes, I have gone back to the beginning to start reading again, rather than rewriting; that will come later. I wanted to be sure that the ending I originally envisioned will still work with what I have created so far.

This week has been about rereading from chapter one, changing the odd typo here and there, and omitting some repetition. I am gaining a clearer understanding of where every character is at, emotionally as well as within the action, and where I need them to end up in a few chapters’ time when I reach the end. The end, by the way, is also the beginning of the next novel, because Starting with Secrets is the first part of a longer story. Having said that, it is also a complete story in itself in that character conflicts resolve, and certain characters grow. There will be a sense of something ending, and yet something left unfinished, and that’s why I have to get the ending just right.

I will get there, probably in a week or so. I am aiming to have the book finished by the end of October at the latest, so it can either be in proofreading or publication when I am away at my Stepson’s wedding in early November. Stay tuned.

Some of the Clearwater family who also appear in the Larkspur Mysteries. Left to right Andrej (Fecker), Mrs Norwood, James Wright, Thomas Payne when a butler and Jasper Blackwood.

From Dreams to Secrets

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What I did then Vs what I’d do now.

‘Times have changed, and we’ve often rewound the clock…’

The opening lines of ‘Anything Goes’, and the starting place for today’s blog.

Not only have times changed, but so has my writing. It has changed greatly from when I wrote ‘Other People’s Dreams’ in 1996 to now, when I am writing ‘Starting with Secrets’, my 35th novel. I thought it would be interesting to look at how I write 26 years after beginning my career. Reading what I have already published is not something I do very often, because I always think ‘I wish I’d written that better,’ and that causes regret. However, it is a useful exercise as long as you turn the ‘I wish I had…’ into ‘The next time, I will…’ and learn from your own naïveté.

The more I have written, the more I have learnt to write better.

Let’s start by improving that.

The more I write, the better I get.

I don’t like the word ‘better’ or ‘get’ come to that, and ‘come to that’ is not necessary.

The more accurate I become? The more literary? The more I improve?

The more I write, the more improved my writing becomes…

You know what I am trying to say. Like a fine wine, a writer improves with age, as long as he continues to write, criticize his own work, and learn from his experience. The first novel I wrote is called ‘Other People’s Dreams,’ a line from a song by Janis Ian that has always resonated with me.

Other People’s Dreams

I began writing this novel while on holiday on Symi, Greece in 1996. When I returned home, I read parts of it to my flatmate and, as all new writers do, I thought it was the best thing since The Catcher in the Rye. It wasn’t, but my flatmate was encouraging, offered positive advice (he was a published journalist), and most of all, encouraged me to finish it, and then rewrite it. I rewrote it several times, and then put it away, and it didn’t see the publishing light of day until some years later.

The story opens with an advertisement. A thirty-six-year-old man is looking for four handsome young men to crew his yacht in the Greek islands. It’s a perfect summer job opportunity, but there are ‘Certain strings attached.’ That’s the hook, and I liked the way it set up the premise and a little mystery.

Then, we have a section of a screenplay in which there is an accident at sea. That’s unexplained, and we have another hook.

Then we have a flashback which sets up a third hook as we wonder what that story is all about, and it’s not until after that’s done that the present-day story starts.

Blimey. These days, I wouldn’t write so many introductions.

In the next chapter, we meet one of the four young men who will form the crew. This scene sets up people’s reactions to the advertisement, the ‘present day’ to separate the action from the flashback, and a character called John. Fine.

Then, we jump to a swimming pool, and we meet Mick, another of the four, and a character who doesn’t know where he’s going or what he’s doing. He will become the impact character when we finally meet the anti-hero.

Which we do in chapter four. Yippee! We finally feel the story is settling down, and then we’re hit with the job applications. These are presented as snippets of letters, and the chapter gives us more of an insight into our anti-hero, Jake, and another of the boys who will be the third to join the crew. It’s a neat device, and I still use letters in my novels as they make the stories feel more real. Letter writing is also a good way of putting across a character’s inner thoughts. I am using the device in ‘Starting with Secrets.’

As ‘Other People’s Dreams’ progresses, we meet the fourth character, and the first act comes to an end when Jake has selected his four men, and they are about to set off to Greece. Meanwhile, the flashback story has also reached its act one ending as the man in the past meets the object of his lust, a Greek lad called Andreas.

Looking back at the book now, it’s interesting to see that I must have had a natural feel for the four-act structure even though I knew nothing about it. There’s a turning point halfway through both stories (the flashback and the present day), and both lead to a crisis and then a climax and resolution. It’s at the climax that we know for sure how the two stories and the screenplay relate, though most readers would have worked that out along the way.

When I sent OPD to a publisher, and they sent it to their readers for an opinion, I received some positive criticism with the rejection. Although the readers found the characters ‘well drawn, especially the Greek man, Nikos, their final decision was ‘Almost but not quite’, which I think should be the title of my autobiography. I wasn’t disappointed, but took the critique on board and was actually quite buoyed by it. So much so, that I looked for an agent and found one. She took OPD to read, and I was so thrilled, I immediately began a second book.

This was a dreadful thing full of dodgy sex and a murder mystery. Set in the street in which I lived in Brighton, it was titled ‘Neighbourhood Watch.’ Although it was never published, it did turn up on some gay adult sites, because I licenced it as filler content along with some erotic short stories. This, by the way, was years later, and as far as I know, it might still be out there. I sent ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ to the agent, she read it, had a heart attack, and emigrated to Spain.

Almost but not quite…

Dreams Vs Secrets

Looking back at OPD and the way it is written, I can see plenty of things I would not do now, and I don’t just mean the structure of the opening. When examining your own past work, it’s important to look at everything from characterisation to the old ‘show and tell’ mystery, to the sentences themselves. I do this on every rewrite of every book, and there are now particular things I look out for and try to avoid.

Here are some examples of what I did in older novels that I try not to do in the newer ones. Some are necessary, some are unavoidable, but the fewer I have of them, the better I feel. (The more satisfied I feel, damn it!)

Starting a sentence with ‘He…’

At some point in my writing past, I noticed I often started sentences with He. He heard no engine, no unnatural noise, just the animals. That’s telling not showing. We know who we are reading about, we’re in his point of view, so why not write, The silence of a dead engine was the canvas on which goats and sheep painted their bleating. Well, it’s a bit naff, but I am thinking off the top of my head. Starting a sentence with He is fine now and then, but in some passages of my early books, I do it all the time. It’s a cop-out. He saw… He knew… He felt… These, to my mind, are all telling and thus, robbing the reader of the chance to experience the atmosphere.

Punctuation

This is why I have a proof reader. My punctuation, I notice, is based on how I speak, and is not always grammatically correct. I have to admit, now I use a proof reader, I don’t bother dithering over whether my punctuation is 100% accurate, because I know someone else will sort it out. However, I do know what to avoid. The other day, someone showed me the first proof of their first book, and with great excitement, asked me what I thought. I opened it at random and leapt in shock. The whole thing was in a sans serif font, Ariel or something. That’s a no-no, because serif fonts like Times New Roman are much easier on the eye when reading large blocks of text. Sans serif is fine on web pages like the one you are reading now, but, in my opinion, they should be kept out of print books.

Another thing this chap had done was hammer out exclamation marks as if they were the three-million rivets on the Titanic! I mean, one or two in a novel is fine, but eight or nine on each page! I mean, that’s overkill! Exclamation marks add emphasis for sure! But they also add an upturn in your reading voice! And if every sentence is exclaimed, the reading suffers from hiccups! And repetition! You see what I mean?!

?! is even worse, and try to avoid starting sentences with And and But. Although it can be argued it’s a style thing, there’s always a better way to start a sentence than with a conjunction.

Similar words

Again, my proof reader comes into play when I write discreet but mean discrete. The same applies to practice and practise, and several others. However, thanks to her notes, I now know to check certain words to ensure I have the verb rather than the noun, or the adjective rather than the verb. I also know what my most common typos are, and I keep a list of them so I can run a search/find on the full manuscript and change form to from and fro to for, etc.

Repetition reminders

Something I do a great deal of when writing a first draft is remind myself that I have already said that. I will state a fact the reader needs to know, and then I’ll state it again from someone else’s point of view later, and probably, do it a third time. This is a subconscious thing in the first draft, and I do it because I am unsure if I’ve mentioned the fact before. Either that, or I repeat it so the reader knows a different character knows the fact. I reckon a reader only needs to be told once, so, in the second draft, I consciously look for such repetitions and ask myself, ‘Do we know this already?’ Very often the answer is yes, so I take it out. An exception might be if a vital fact or clue is mentioned in chapter one and comes into play again in chapter thirty; then, it’s acceptable to remind the reader, but it must be done subtly.

Shoe Leather

Every chapter must have a point, and I keep a list I call POC. Point Of Chapter. As long as the plot or character details I want known come across, then the chapter has a point. That’s one thing, but another is the shoe leather scene, as they call it in screenplay writing. These are scenes to be avoided and, in some screenplays, they are there because the writer needs to present 90 pages and only has 87. A chapter only needs to be as long as it needs to be, you don’t have to aim for 3,000 or 4,000 words. In fact, it is better to vary the length of chapters as it is to vary the length of sentences. If your chapter feels too short, don’t bung in any old description or, worse, repetition just to make it longer. I used to do this, but now as I reread, I think to myself, ‘Do we need this?’ ‘What’s the point of this paragraph?’ ‘We’ve been here before.’ ‘We’ve done this…’ Ad infinitum

And Finally, Cyril

I am in danger of wittering on ad infinitum, so I will stop there. The point of this post has been to highlight how a writer can, and must, learn from his or her own writing. The above is simply an early morning reflection on what I have to say about the subject, and I hope you found it of use. To finish with, and just for fun, I want to give a few lines from both ‘Other People’s Dreams’ (1996) and ‘Starting with Secrets’ (2022, first draft). Both sections are from towards the beginning of the novels. See if you can spot the differences.

Other People’s Dreams

There was no doubt about it, the older man in the red trunks was flirting. This was the second time he had walked slowly past the lifeguard station, staring up and looking for a moment too long. Mick caught his eye again and immediately looked away, tiring of the attention. Not only was he working, he was simply not interested.

He had become used to the admiring glances of the men and women whose lives he guarded for six hours a day; there was no more novelty to it.

Starting with Secrets

[Character name]* tore the page from the newspaper, and threw the rest into the coal scuttle to use as kindling. Beyond the window, a sickly glow of yellow light coloured the overhanging fug, through which came the sound of clatter-carts and costermongers calling their wares, the sharp cackle of the prostitute and the crash and roar of warring couples. A policeman’s whistle pierced the night, and boots thudded on the cobbled street, chased by others and accompanied by shouts. Slops cascaded from the room above to catch a child unawares, resulting in screams and foul language, and soon after, came the threatening tread of a father mounting the stairs to seek revenge.

* I removed the name because it might have been a spoiler

Other People’s Dreams is on sale here.

Starting with Secrets should be ready for publication by the end of October. It will be the sixth book in the Larkspur Mystery series.

Work In Progress 4.7

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Last week I wrote, ‘I am fast approaching the end of draft one’ (of Starting with Secrets). I also said I was just about to head into the finale, I was at 113,000 words, and on chapter 31.

This week, I have to report I have made little progress. I am at 118,000 words and about to start chapter 33, the aftermath chapter. It has taken me a week to write what I could usually write in two days because of a variety of excuses, and not all of them fun ones.

Last week was our 5th wedding anniversary, 20 years since we came to live on Symi and Neil’s birthday all on the same day. I’d only just got over the visit from our friends we met in Canada, and I was able to get some writing done on Wednesday. However, Thursday came along and with it came a surprise visit from my nephew, and a late-night dinner party for 24 people at the taverna. On the previous Monday, I had woken up with bad hay fever but had to have my 4th Covid jab, so just got on with it. By Wednesday evening, I was feeling pretty done in, but kept going through the dinner party and celebrations the next night. Friday, however, and over the weekend, I was able to do little more than bang out some paid typing (because I had to), sit on the sofa playing SimCity and blow my nose, sneeze and groan. I’m still feeling knackered, and I think the hay fever was actually a cold which, on top of a few late nights and a C4 jab, flattened me.

So, there’s my excuse for only writing 4,000 words in a week. Today, cold or no cold, I am battling on and changing my routine. I intend to pause my typing work when the sun comes up, walk around the block for half an hour, get back to work, and then dedicate the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon to Starting with Secrets.

Check back in next Wednesday for the WIP and I hope to be able to tell you I am about to start the last chapter. We shall see.

Work In Progress: 4.6

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Starting with Secrets

So, where am I now…? I am up at 113,000 words, and the climax is about to get underway. I have two characters trying to reach three others before they are in mortal danger. A storm has just broken, the land is flooding, and there’s something to do with a crumbling building that holds a vital clue…

It’s all go.

I haven’t been able to write as much as I wanted these last couple of days, mainly because of taking on some necessary freelance work and having my 4th Covid jab, which, on top of a cold, knocked me out for a day. We also had friends visiting yesterday, a couple we met on our trip across Canada in 2020 when we had to race home two days early because Covid broke out. The two days we missed were a stay in Athens we’d planned, but as the city was, by then, closed, it didn’t matter. That’s a story for another day. Today, I am sitting down to write at least half a chapter of Starting with Secrets, and I imagine I have four more chapters to go before I can leave you wanting more. This book is half of a longer story, which will probably bring the Larkspur Series to a close. Kind of.

I have an idea for a book after ‘The Larkspur Legacy’ which will be a companion book on the side. There are things that need explaining which wouldn’t make an entire 100k novel. What I am mulling over is the idea of having some short stories, character outlines, background information, illustrations, cuts and outtakes from the Clearwater and Larkspur series, and putting them together in one volume that fans of the two series will enjoy. At the moment, I am playing with the title, ‘Barbary Fleet and Other Matters’, because one of the things we’ve yet to discover is how Fleet came to be at the academy. What’s his history, and why does he call Clem Mr Yeobright? Then, we might want to know about Frank Andino and his past tribulations. There’s a big gap in the story of Edward and Henry’s four years of survival in the Old Nichol Slum, and what happened to the men who entrapped Chester Cadman? Come to that, what happened to Skaggot from ‘Guardians of the Poor’? I may also write some vignettes for the other minor but fun characters like Doc Markland, the barrister, Cresswell, and Mrs Norwood…

That’s all for the future. For now, I’m heading off into the finale of ‘Starting with Secrets’ and I am fast approaching the end of draft one.

I Can’t Stay Long

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I can’t stay long today because I am halfway through a climax. I mean, I am halfway through writing the climactic scene of ‘Starting with Secrets’ and don’t want to lose my impetus. This is another way of saying I haven’t had time to prepare an in-depth blog for today, or if you like, this is an excuse for laziness. Well, it’s not really, because I have been writing a lot, for my novel and for other people. I am averaging around 7,000 words per day at the moment. It’s no wonder I’ve got a bad back.

I was going to write about what makes a good story climax, and I will do that one day soon, but off the top of my head, I’d say a good climax is the pivotal point in the story, whether it’s an action one (like I am working on) or a romantic one. It’s the point when everything comes together in a section of drama that turns the plot. I use them to insert twists during or after the high-octane action, and also to insert questions marks. I.e., what happens next?

Thinking back, in the Clearwater and Larkspur series, I have set my climaxes in a variety of places and situations.

A burning warehouse

On a runaway steam train

The Royal Opera House during a performance

A disused lighthouse and a London court

At a formal dinner at a stately home

Hanging over a 1,000-foot drop down a mineshaft

At a piano

A race to meet a departing Atlantic liner

A Scottish cliff edge

A sword fight

In a church crypt

A fogu on Bodmin Moor

At a masked ball

Disused smugglers’ tunnels

The Savoy Hotel

All these places and dire situations have seen the culmination of a long and hopefully interesting mystery, and each of them has then led the main character(s) off in a different direction. They also make use of weather, daylight, nighttime and other outside and uncontrollable factors as a way of heightening the tension.

My ‘Starting with Secrets’ characters are about to do battle, there’s a race against time, a storm’s a-coming in, and by the time the climax is over, we will have seen a dramatic twist and you’ll be left hanging. Not literally, but hopefully, you’ll want to know what happens next. That won’t happen unless I get back to work, so with that, I shall carry on climaxing and see you back here on Wednesday for another work-in-progress update.

Work In Progress: 4.5

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Starting With Secrets

This week’s update: I am at Chapter 28 and at 99,000 words with, I imagine, four major scenes left to go as we fall into the finale. A scene might be one chapter, or it might be two or three, so I reckon I am looking at around 130,000 words by the time draft one is finished. Remember, this is the first part of a much longer story, which will conclude in the following book. How I am going to make the second one as intriguing, complex and rewarding as this one remains to be seen, but I know I have a fair amount of research to do. How to sail a 19th-century sailing ship for one thing.

Work was briefly interrupted on Monday, and here’s why. For the last couple of weeks, we’ve had a rat living in the lean-to roof. I saw the evidence before I heard it, and wondered how we were going to get rid of it. They come in from the ruins and pieces of wasteland around our hillside village, and we’ve had one before that used to leave its droppings in the spare toilet, though it never learnt to flush. As the lean-to roof is inaccessible without pulling the whole thing apart, we bought some humane poison from the pet shop. I put down three tablets and left the other five in the bag on the counter. The next day, not only had all three gone but so had the bag.

Victorian rat catcher and his dog (Wikicommons)

The rat continued to occupy the roof and our minds, and the ‘treatment’ appeared not to be working (though it can take up to 10 days, they say). However, on Monday, I heard a yell/scream, and called from across the courtyard, ‘Rat?’ to which Neil replied, ‘Yes.’ Attending the scene, I found he had the thing pinned to the spokes of our godson’s bike, which we keep in the laundry room lean-to, and he was using his crutch to keep it in place. (Neil recently had a bout of transient osteoporosis, so he was using his crutch, not his crotch.) We devised a cunning plan. Wearing an oven glove, I lifted the intruder by the tail and dropped it into an old ice cream tub. Holding the lid down but not sealed, I took the thing up to our dustbin station and left it in a paladin with a bag of rubbish on top. The bin men empty these stations at least twice per day and a visit was due. Ratty would have made his escape when the trash was tipped into the back of the truck, if not there, then when it reached the landfill way up the mountain.

And now, with that story told, I can resume work on the next work in progress. Thinking about it, I might have to write in a rat catcher because that was a busy job back in Victorian times, and now I know what it feels like to be one.

Work In Progress: 4.4

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Starting with Secrets

Here we are at 80,000 words of the next Larkspur Mystery, and I have characters all over the place. I have some in London chasing one clue, others on their way to Shropshire chasing another, and a third team about to set off to Kent. ‘Starting with Secrets’ is a treasure hunt at the end of which lies ‘A great treasure and a great secret’ according to the two women who set Archer, Lord Clearwater, the quest. From one clue grew four, hence we have three teams. The fourth clue has not yet been addressed.

I am nearing the beginning of the staggered climax of the story. I say staggered because there are three storylines to resolve, and the first has reached a dead end, leaving two more set pieces to write before the final climax and the resolve. Except, in this case, the resolution will have to wait for the book that comes next, ‘The Larkspur Legacy.’ You see, ‘Starting with Secrets’ is the first half of a longer story, and thus, its ending is the halfway point of the overall tale.

It will all make sense when you read both books, but when that will be is anyone’s guess. ‘Secrets’ is coming on well and is turning out to be one of those first drafts that writes itself. In the second and subsequent drafts, I will address and expand the emotional side of the story, because, at the moment, we are action-driven. I don’t mind that, but I don’t want it to be one of those Clive Cussler-style books where we leap from one action scene to the next with very little human relationship thread and emotional throughline that will engage the reader.

If you like solving clues, you’ll love ‘Secrets’ and, as usual, they are all based on facts. Obscure facts at times, but still…

And so, to chapter 23 in which I return to clue two and a journey from Hertfordshire to Shropshire to hunt down a clue that reads like this:

By now, I think, you should have found,
Numbers lead beneath the ground.
52.62
-2.31

Starting With Secrets

Work In Progress: 4.3

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Starting with Secrets

We’re up to 67,000 words now folks. I’ve been beavering away at around 3,000 words per day and the story is progressing well. This is going to be something of an epic because I am building in four strands emanating from one initial clue. I’ve got Silas, Joe and Dalston in London, James and a new character, Archie Tucker, in Hertfordshire, Thomas and the others at Larkspur, and a fourth strand/clue yet to be addressed. Meanwhile, our villains are out and about, and we still don’t know where the evil Tripp is or what he is up to.

I am trying to give previous characters cameo roles now and then, so yesterday, I had a scene with Jake O’Hara, who appears in ‘Unspeakable Acts’ in the Clearwater series, and pops up now and then in other books. I even mentioned Oleg, one of Lady Marshall’s footmen who turned up in an early Clearwater, and more characters will pop in as the story progresses. There are reasons for their appearances, though, so it’s not a gratuitous thing.

In fact, there are reasons all characters have appeared in previous Clearwater and/or Larkspur books, and ‘Starting with Secrets’ and the one that will come after it, draw them all together in one way or another for the ultimate ‘chase the clues before the deadline’ story. What I still need to include more of is an emotional throughline or two. I have one running, and I know where that is going, but there needs to be more. That will come with the second draft which, at this rate, will be ready next week. (Only joking; this book is going to take some time to get right and ready.) As a teaser the mystery actually starts here….. with Victorian flatware cutlery…

The start of the mystery in ‘Starting with Secrets.’ (Victorian flatware cutlery)

Yesterday, I was pottering around the British Museum in 1891, and today I have to return to Larkspur to catch up on what’s happening there, so if you will excuse me, I’ll head off there now and see you on Saturday for my next blog post.

Stock Photo – British Museum interior of the Egyptian gallery from 1890. Electric lights enabling the museum to be opened to the public in the evenings

Work In Progress: 4.2

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Starting with Secrets

Well, I’m not sure how this happened, but by the end of today, I shall be at 50,000 words of the next book in the Larkspur Mysteries series, ‘Starting with Secrets.’ This is only WIP blog 2! One of the reasons this one is going so smoothly is that I have been planning it since starting book four, and it’s already plotted, I know all but a few of the characters, and I started writing scenes for it while I was writing ‘Speaking in Silence’, which, I am pleased to say, is doing well. Thank you for your reviews!

But 50,000 words? That’s like half a novel already and yet I am only a third of the way through the planned story. This book is either going to be another epic like ‘The Clearwater Inheritance’, or it’s going to end up being two books. It is, in fact, the first part of a two-part finale to the series, and I intend to write on and on until I reach the end and not worry about word length. Then, when it’s done, I will take a look and decide if it’s a) is over-written and needs massive editing, b) it’s a two-parter or c) it’s just a long book with lots of mystery, thrills and spills.

It is a very simple story: Archer is left a treasure hunt which he wants to solve. However, the clues are obscure and, it turns out, they are also many. This means the ‘crew’ has to split into three teams, including the academy men, and among them is a new character, Bertie Tucker. While not being sure of why he is at the academy, Bertie becomes a distraction for Edward and that means he becomes a concern for Henry, and it’s down to James (Jimmy Wright) to play the part of mentor while investigating one line of clues. Meanwhile, Silas takes the lead on a London-based hunt, leaving Tom to consider the last two cryptics back at Larkspur. Behind all of this, there is a villain trying to stay one step ahead and bringing in other characters to his evil team, and there will be moments of danger, excitement and, of course, bromance.

I’m putting a lot of background research into this one, as I usually do, but as the story is so big and diverse, so is my background reading. All will be revealed in time, but for now, I am ploughing on with chapter 14, and wondering what the word count will be this time next week. Be here then to find out.