Princelings Revolution Launch Tour – starts today

The Princelings Revolution Launch Blog Tour starts today with the cover reveal on my blog.

I’ve had to be careful about not showing the cover publicly until now, because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise. I expect people have got used to the ‘holding’ cover which Dani did for me last October, soon after finishing the Chronicles one. I’ve had the general idea for some time, even before finishing the book, but Dani gave it wings! Literally, as it happened!

I love the way she wrecked the castle, although I had to get her to go further and rip off the banners flying from the turrets! I copied her changes to make the last picture of the castle for the chapter illustrations.

But now we’re all ready to launch. The ebook is loaded on most of the websites, and I hope the paperback gets onto the online store files before the launch too.

The Blog Tour

I’m very grateful for everyone who responded to my call for bloggers and tweeters and any other way they would like to get involved with the launch. Officially the tour lasts for the duration of the Giveaway: 15th September to 23rd October. The generic link is to this blog, and the banner on the front page here links to this post. So anyone wanting more information can check out the tour stops here, and enter the Giveaway here as well if they wish.

This is the current schedule (may be updated).

and one to look out for on November 18th, a party with Patricia Josephine on both our blogs!

The Giveaway

If you meant to enter the giveaway or lost track of it, you can enter or catch up with it here. Entries close 11.59pm New York time on 23rd October 2020.

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July news for the Princelings Series

three princelings audiobook covers

Yes it’s July already. Here’s your update on Princelings Revolution, its launch, and the audiobooks

I don’t feel that I’ve done much since the last update, but in fact things made significant progress… then stalled!

Princelings Revolution

Book 10 pre-draft

April saw me finish the beta version of Princelings Revolution, the last in the series. My beta readers pulled out all the stops and gave me their time and wonderful insights into what I’d written.

When you’re writing a book, there are times when you really can’t see the story in among the words. You don’t know whether it makes sense on paper, even though you think there’s some sort of sense going into the computer from your head.

I’m very grateful to my beta readers for great feedback, gently delivered (always important when giving a critique!). They also patiently answered some specific questions I had on nuts and bolts and passing details in the story. And they even added support and encouragement – and a sense of sadness at the saga’s end.

Is it really the end?

Every time I read the last few paragraphs I am really sad it’s the end.

There are some things a reader might wonder about. What happens to some of the peripheral characters? Does Fred ever…?

I was tempted to do a bigger finish, but in a way, I am minded of JRR Tolkien’s ending to the Lord of the Rings. Yes, it was good to add the last few chapters and get to the Grey Havens, but really, I wish it had stopped sooner. I can imagine them all living happily ever after. In fact, I sometimes think it would be great if everyone wrote their own version of what happened after ‘the end’.

But my decision is made, and it’s stopping there. Unless I do some short stories involving other characters!

It would be fun to have readers do their own versions of what happened to x&Y, though. Maybe I’ll run it as a competion one year.

So I have made all the amendments and rewritten some sections in response to my betas’ comments, and one of them has a ‘safety’ copy (in case I go down with coronavirus) and she likes the changes (I think that’s what she said!)

And Dani is working on the final cover , and I’m working on the chapter illustrations.

We may even get it out for 1st October, It’s already listed on Smashwords, iTunes, B&N, Kobo and Amazon! You can pre-order most places (not Smashwords), and except for Amazon, the price is definitely an introductory one!

If you are a really good geek, you’ll remember that ‘October the 1st is too late’ was the password Mariusz and Saku worked out when Mariusz first went down the time tunnel, and needed to prove who he was if he got stuck there (book 4). It’s also the title of a book by Fred Hoyle that I still love.

On the other hand, releasing it in late November would be nine years after the first one came out on Kindle. Well, if it had been ten, maybe it would have been worth celebrating!

Audiobooks

The audiobook of Princelings of the East is available on Audible, Amazon and iTunes, and has sold several copies! If you would like a free copy to review, let me know and I’ll send you a special code.

The audio files for the Princelings and the Pirates are complete. I just need to give them a final check against the kindle file and upload them. Then I’ll upload a new edition of Pirates so that Kindle’s whispersynch works with it. The changes are very small. Mainly a couple of words and a punctuation issue that should have been fixed years ago! The paperback book will stay the same, though.

And then… I need to give Chris Preece the tidied up/edited version of Princelings and the Lost City.

The main things I change in those edits are to do with style changes over the years. When I started, I used the old-fashioned ‘saif Fred’ most of the time. “Fred said’ is now the accepted norm. You should not notice either; it’s a tag when reading. There are also things that even now I realise I missed when I hear Chris’s production. Like using ‘use’ three times in three lines. Sometimes that can be deliberate, but other times it’s just boring – and you can tell which is which when you read it!

I’m interested to see how Chris solves the voice problem of Kira’s imposter. I’m going to suggest he uses Kira’s voice, but makes her always tenser, more worried – a style rather than an actual voice difference. There are a lot of girls in this one, but I’m sure he’ll cope. How he copes with the girls’ choir is another matter. I must find a recording of the song for him. I could have sung it for him a couple of years back, but my voice has cracked up completely during lockdown. And, of course, George is having trouble forming his words as he recovers from his head injury. I hope Chris is looking forward to the challenge!

Again, if you’d like a code for a free download of the audiobooks, as and when they’re published, let me know (and remind me when they come out).

I need some help!

I’m going to need help with the launch of Princelings Revolution. I’d love to do a blog tour again, so if you know of someone who organises good blog tours for these types of books, let me know.

If you know how to do trailers, and can teach me, or run up something simple… let me know!

Also, if you’d like to do a cover reveal or a launch page, let me know again. I can do special interviews as well.

Have a good summer (or winter if you’re in the southern hemisphere)!

PS: Watchout for a special Guinea Pig Appreciation Day Princelings offer/competition on Jemima’s blog 15-17 July.

I know I keep saying it but…

Fire in the hay wagon

I know I keep saying that I’m writing books 9 and 10.  I really am.  It’s just that I haven’t actually typed any words for a few months.

Ideas

I do keep picking up more ideas because, around the ultimate issue of George building a flying machine that will take Vex to Hattan and bring back Wozna Cola (come on, that was the end of book 1, keep up, won’t you?), there is the whole reason for that not being straightforward.  Revolution!

Barriers

Fire in the hay wagonWhen I originally thought of this, all was reasonably sane in our world.  Mr Obama was running the USA in a fair and reasonable manner that gave the rest of the world hope that he wouldn’t destroy it.  The world, that is.  The UK was being run by a coalition that, even though it was mad, self-serving and overturning everything we’d done to make the country a fairer and more democratic place, turned into a single-party, self-servative con-trick.

And with all the turmoil that had been going on for the past two and a half years, frankly, anything I could write would be tame by comparison.

More ideas

I’ve finally got to the stage where I can understand where I’m coming from in the Princelings world again.  I read a great book involving rebellion (Rebel in the Sands) which I’m reviewing early in February on my blog. It gave me great food for thought over exactly who and how my rebellion might unfold.

In a chat to my brother he moaned yet again about our current trouble being the UK does not have written constitution, so people make up ‘rules’ to suit themselves.  He also reminded me that one of the Spanish regions had elected women to all its key posts, which resulted in the leader saying, ‘this is bad, we should have a man in at least one of them’ and finding the rule which said that was a right and proper way to go about things.

My first thought was – I knew the women of the Lost City of Arbor had a role in this I hadn’t developed yet!

So, with the second book of my science fiction series finally out, I can get back to writing the last two Princelings books.  They are both works in progress 🙂

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Update on the last two books

clock tower of a castle at 2 am

You deserve an update on the last two books, since it’s been four months since I last posted.

In that time I’ve mainly been working on my other series, and on other things entirely.  That’s my excuse, anyway.

Finishing a series is hard

I read the first two volumes of a book recently, and hunted for the third of what was indicated as a trilogy.  I couldn’t find it. There was no evidence the author was writing anything else.  It’s possible he had an accident of some sort, but for reason I’ll tell you on my blog in a week or so, I think he’s suffering from the ‘finishing the series’ syndrome.

What I’ve discovered, is that however much I’ve been thinking about that last book—and I started writing it when I thought it was going to be number six—it is really painful to get going on it. Writing the last book of your darling characters is hard, especially when you’re going to put them through pain and torment.

I remember JK Rowling saying they had to lock her in a hotel room to get her to finish the last Harry Potter.  I start to understand what she meant.  All those plans, all the loose ends, all the final expositions, all have to come together in a way that your readers love – or hate, but come on the journey with your hero(s) to the bitter end, in hope it’ll all turn out well in the end.

Progress

The other day I got the start of the plan for the final book.

Now I have to write it down.

And then, maybe, I’ll be able to make further progress on book 9.

I think, as I have thought before, that I might even have to write book 10 to make sure that everything needed in book 9 goes in it.

Then again, it might just be one glorious book 9 to finish the series, and some novellas to fill in some gaps in it.

I don’t expect to be doing much actual writing, as opposed to planning, before the new year, though.

Watch this space 🙂