Okay so here we are… it’s mid-March and I am buzzing around like a blue-assed fly trying to get everything finished and put into place.

Thank God I took the call to have one last editing pass through the book because I’ve actually been finding a couple of tiny errors.  These have been fixed, so far, as I’m about three quarters of the way through the chapters.  My spies are looking—and reading—better than ever before and I’m very pleased with how it’s turning out.

In other news, Steve my internet marketing – tech – social media entrepreneur / guru / chief cook and bottle washer has been driving traffic to my Twitter feed.  Goodness knows how he does it, but I’ve now got more than 600 folk following me on there.  Amazing!  Apparently, once you get to ten thousand, they offer you all sorts of mad incentives and advertising deals.  Cool – I’m 1/17th of the way there!

Okay I’m going to go out on a limb and say I will be able to announce the title NEXT WEEK!  So stay tuned – the best laid plans of mice and men being what they are!  Whilst you’re at it, go ‘like’ my author page on Facebook please!

That’s all from this blogger for today.  Roger and out, X.

I had a short discussion recently about the very start of a novel, that very first sentence, line or paragraph.  My nephew Zac drew my attention to the inaugural line of Philip Reeve’s ‘Mortal Engines‘, which is “It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.”   What a fascinating way to draw one’s reader into the story.  There is a clear meteorological description to which the reader can relate and which can be easily imagined, followed by something totally abstract (towns and cities which move?!) and then some information; the North Sea has dried up, and it happened historically.  All of this combines to lure the reader in by letting them know that there is something interesting here; so let’s explore it.

The very clever and (to me) highly useful James Thayer has put an excellent article about this very subject on his superb blog, Novelpro.net.  Thayer presents a number of examples from notable works including ‘Agincourt‘ by Bernard Cornwell and Alexander Dumas’ ‘The Three Musketeers‘.   Although he doesn’t cite it, I think my favorite is this, from Max Shulman’s ‘Sleep Till Noon‘:  “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life!”   Sounds painful!

For a long time the first line of my espionage novel was, I confess, rather bland.  So I changed it.  That line is still in the text, but in a place where its blandness becomes informative and part of the telling.  I recall a story about another author—whose name slips my mind for the moment—that received a rather discouraging rejection from a publisher.  They changed the first and last pages, sent it back and got an immediate acceptance!  So I’ve got a new first line and, whilst I don’t think it’s really up there with Reeve and Shulman, I think it’s good.  My spy novel simply begins with the words “Why do I have to kill him?” — a ‘death’ sentence.

Roger and out, X.