Sunday 19 December 2010

Erk! Nearly Christmas and no blogs for yonks! Oops - no delivery...

Good grief, how did this happen?  Am very busy these days but didn't think it had been that long since my last post.  You may or may not know that I've now signed my contract with US Penguin imprint Berkley Books for the first two of my historical crime series - set in Georgian England.

Hence am on a deadline for Book Two and every spare moment is concentrated on writing it.  Life, of course, intervenes and so my normal activities have still got to be done.  I'm sure I wrote a blog a while back on the theme of life versus writing life.

You don't want to know about the horrors of getting an ITIN number (this is your official US tax identification) and ensuring you are allowed to invoke the tax treaty with the UK so you don't have 30% of your earnings withheld by the IRS.  It's still pending....

I've only got one little snippet of advice today.  It pays to decide as a writer that you will always deliver on your promise.  I'm not talking about deadlines, but that too.  What I mean here is that if you set out to give the reader something, you need to deliver on it.

Examples:  If you hint at troubles and crises to come, make sure they happen.  If you give the idea your character is an introverted brooding bastard with a heart of gold, show it in the story.  If your character looks ahead to an oncoming storm (internal or external - battle, row, whatever), we want to see it - and make it a humdinger.

In other words, don't promise what you can't deliver.  And deliver everything you promise.  If you can't deliver, just cut the promise.  You lose your reader if you set something up on the horizon and then the story goes flat and it all fizzles out.  Like Christmas without the pudding and the presents.

And on that note, I hope everyone manages to get through the snow to their festivities and you all have a terrific time on Christmas Day.