Michael Drysdale

I’ve started going again to creative writing classes with Anne Aylor.  A couple of years ago I went to a few of her classes while writing The Banker. What I liked about her classes that as well as tutorials there are plenty of writing practice sessions on a given theme. Usually 3 or 4 students would read their work and the rest of us would comment.  So in a couple of hours you get to listen to several different writing styles.

The first topic was getting started writing your novel.  I won’t attempt to summarize all we covered, just some of the points made.

Write little but often. Just 250 words a day will result in 81,000 at the end of a year (70,000 words is regarded as the minimum for a full-length novel).

Immerse yourself in your characters and their worlds. Think about what clothes they own , what shoes they might wear for a night on the town.

You don’t have to start at the beginning; the writing need not be linear. Start where your ideas are flowing.

Always have a writer’s notebook, preferably bound, to hand.

A few quotes from the class:

A good writer finds it difficult to write.  – Thomas Mann

Stop when you get to an interesting place. – Ernest Hemingway

Write first, think later. – Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s a good source for quotes, he not only wrote prolifically but he had a lot to say about the writing process.  I’ve come across another version of that last quote:

Write drunk, edit sober.

In this post I’ll explain my reasons for self-publishing. It’s all about odds really.  The chances of a debut novelist finding a traditional publisher, unless he or she is already a celebrity (in any field) are very low indeed. The traditional route to having fiction published is first to find a literary agent who in turn will find, and negotiate with, a publisher.  Agents claim to receive two or three hundred manuscripts a week; of course it’s in their interest to talk up these numbers, so the actual figure may be a bit lower. Most agents will take on three or four new authors a year.  So the odds of being taken on by an agent is less than one in a thousand. Of course if your novel is really marketable the odds are more in your favour but they’re still pretty slim.

Nevertheless I still tried finding an agent. I sent the first 3 chapters of my manuscript to about a dozen agents specializing in thrillers.  I picked a mix of large, medium and small agencies. With the smaller agencies I made sure they had a good track record; I didn’t want to have to commit to an inexperienced agent who might take me on then spend a year or two and not find me a publisher at the end of it all. The rejections came as no surprise to me. I felt I had given finding a literary agent a shot and it was time to look at alternatives.

In the past it was very difficult to sell more than a few hundred books by self publishing. But with the advent of print on demand technology, on-line retailing and especially ebooks, it is possible to generate reasonable sales by means of self publishing.  I still wanted some of the services an agent provides such as editing, copyediting, proofreading and jacket design.  Rather than buy-in each of these services individually I decided to use a self-publishing company.

I picked Acorn Independent Press, a self publishing company that only started up at the beginning of 2011.  I picked them because of the personal service you tend to get with a start-up and because they are based in Crystal Palace, a London suburb not far from my home.

That’s all for this post. In my next post I hope to have an interview with London author Terry Jenkins.

Happy New Year.

Merry Christmas to you all. I’m off to Cornwall for a few days. My reading list consists of 39 steps and Greenmantle by John Buchan,  Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke and a couple of inspector Zhang short stories by Stephen Leather. 
I picked John Buchan because he’s supposed to be the world’s first thriller author and I hope to learn something from the master. I’ve seen two of the 39 steps films so that may influence my reading of the book. That’s why I’ve added Greenmantle as well.  I’ve never heard of James Lee Burke but a colleague recommended him to me so I thought I’ll give him a try. Stephen Leather is another thriller author new to me, so I’ve added him to my list.

I saw Another Earth last night. The film was not what I was expecting, but I thought it was good all the same. The film had been advertised as a sci-fi dealing with a parallel universe. In fact it was more a psychological drama dealing with guilt and atonement. 

The plot is about a drunken student, Rhoda, who drives her car into oncoming traffic, killing a woman and her child and injuring her husband. Four years later having served time in prison Rhoda tracks down the husband, John, with the intention of apologizing.  John doesn’t recognize Rhoda and a relationship of sorts develops.  At the same time another planet is discovered, an exact replica of earth and its inhabitants. But this other earth is really only a background to the story.  Although clearly a low budget movie, the acting and production was good.  The material was a bit dark for the festive season so see the film when you’re in the right mood for it.

This post is for newbies in the selfpublishing ebook scene. You can only browse for iBookstore titles on an ipad or iphone. This makes it tricky for authors who don’t have one of these devices and who want to find out if their book is available or if they want to add a link on their website. It took me a bit of googling to find out how do this from a computer.

First go to http://leatherbound.me/   Then enter an author name or title in the search box. This will return books available on Kindle, Nook and iBookstore in the United States. If you click on the iBookstore entry you will get a page with an address something like
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-banker/id484082537?mt=11&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

To find the iBookstore entry for other countries just replace the ‘us’ above with the country code. So for the United Kingdom the link in the above example will be

http://itunes.apple.com/uk/book/the-banker/id484082537?mt=11&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

There are probably other ways of doing this, but the above worked for me.

The Banker was published today.

It’s available as paperback from on-line stores, including Amazon, at 7.99 pounds in the UK.

It’s also available as an ebook from Amazon Kindle store and the Apple iBookstore.  Its priced in UK at 1.99 pounds, in the US at $2.99 and 2.99 euros in euroland.

Well just under an hour actually. I had just collected some business cards from a shop which happened to be located next to the HQ of the Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6) in Vauxhall, London. SIS and its HQ (known as Legoland in the intelligence community) feature in The Banker. It was around 5 pm and people were leaving the building, so I thought it would be fun to try to tail a spook.

I won’t compromise national security by describing the spook or exactly the route we took. Of course the individual may not have been a spook – it could have been a visiting plumber or cleaner.

I tailed the spook as far as redacted station, and followed the spook at a very brisk pace onto platform redacted. There were several people on the platform so I was able to get to within 30 yards of the spook, who looked in my general direction but showed no reaction. The train, heading for redacted, arrived and at the last minute the spook moved 2 carriages down – was this evasive action? I just managed to get in the same carriage and was able to have visual contact with the spook. I had a Travelcard so as long as we were within the Greater London area I could play this game. At redacted station the spook got off – I was able to follow despite the brisk pace but the station was very crowded and I soon lost the target.

Not a great job, still I’m an amateur and the spook a professional.

Acorn Independent Press are now uploading the mobi files to Amazon. So the Kindle version should be available in a few days.

Welcome to my inaugural blog. In this blog not only will I be promoting my debut thriller, The Banker,  but I will be discussing my writing and publishing experience and what I’m currently reading, and new writing projects.  This blog won’t always be about books, occasionally I’ll talk about  films I’ve seen and other stuff that interests me.

The Banker is being published as a paperback print on demand as well as an e-book.  The jacket design , copy editing and proof reading have all been done and the book should be published in early December.