Hobson & Choi quiz! Poem! Guest posts a go-go!

Hi!

After producing a slightly loose post last week, I was perhaps considering writing a real one this time, but I became unexpectedly busy and the remaining time had to be given over to the important tasks of actually writing and watching TV shows based on comics.

But as luck would have it, I've written some proper structured Hobson & Choi related bits for other blogs that have gone up this week, so at least I can link to those.

They're a little more esoteric than some of the guest posts I've done in my time, as there's only so much I can say about my Amazing Writing Process.

Firstly, there's the "Which Hobson & Choi Character Are You?" quiz, which is perhaps the most important personality test of our generation. Yes, even though it contains an arguable factual error re: whether Breaking Bad is a "current" TV show. Ahem.

Thanks to the always-excellent Chelley of Tales of Yesterday for hosting that one, including doing all the actual set-up for the quiz - I just sent over a set of questions and answers. Much obliged.

Second, and even more in-jokey than the first one, it's Gentrificapocalypse Now, a poem by Sad Receptionist. This is an actual creative work by a character from the H&C books, who you can follow on Twitter if you want. His backstory is (partially) unveiled in the second book, but the actual Twitter account is just stupid rhyming jokes really. More details in the actual blog post, kindly hosted by Andrew of The Pewter Wolf.

And that is it for now. Next week, if I'm not unexpectedly busy, maybe a real blog post here?

Writing challenge update! Guest post! GollanczFest! ADMINARAMA!

This is going to be another post which mish-mashes together some smaller points rather than having an amazing structure of its own, I'm afraid, as I've been writing a lot of guest-posts for other people's blogs, so haven't got a huge amount of fuel left in the Blog-Engine (or spare time left in the day) to produce a properly-structured masterpiece for my own.

However, I want to do some kind of update on my ongoing thousand-words-a-day writing challenge and I've got a few other bits and bobs too, so here's another disjointed general summary!

NickNoWriQuart - OOH WE'RE HALFWAY THERE

The big news (for me anyway) is that I've made it over the halfway mark of the daily writing challenge I outlined on this blog a month ago. My day job got quite busy for a while and then I had to publish the third Hobson & Choi book and write all those guest posts and I really thought one of those things would smash it to bits, but no, I'm still on track. In fact, I'm a few days over quota, as I'm busy most of the weekend - for reasons I'll outline a little further down - and wanted to make sure I didn't drop the challenge.

So, the good news is that I've done nearly 50k and, if this were NaNoWriMo rather than NickNoWriQuart, would have won by now. But NickNoWriQuart is both more hardcore (longer total!) and less (smaller daily wordcount!) than NaNo.

The bad news is, as with nearly all my first drafts, decent-sized chunks of the plan haven't really survived contact with reality and various changes became necessary as I went along. This is something I've blogged about a fair bit - here I am talking about making less mistakes and here I am talking about plans going awry - and yet still it happens.

But I've got my notes, the broad plot remains in place, so I'm going to try and swoop onwards for now. Mostly because I think it would be useful to have taken a swing at the ending - more infuriating to go back now and make a huge amount of substantial change, then discover this new version doesn't work for my ending and have to change everything again.

So, in short, everything continues as normal. I still want a full first draft by the end of November (or possibly the end of the year if I need to write a final couple of chapters in Dec) and I'll do another update at some point.

Guest Post - Five High Street Institutions I Could Turn Evil in Future H&C Books

If you want something that more closely resembles a structured blog post, I've written this one for Jim over at YA Yeah Yeah in which I talk about five fixtures of the British high street that I could theoretically turn all crimey for a future Hobson & Choi novel.

Do give it a look for some fun. Even if you've no interest in hearing about my writing process (in which case the previous section of this post must've just killed you), this really is all silly jokes.

Oh, and as this is the only H&C-relevant section of this post - yes, the book 3 launch went fine, thanks for asking. Sold a decent amount of book three, gave away a huge amount of the newly-free-on-ebook book one. Coming up next: some promotion, including a few more guest posts (I'll try and list them here in some kind of link compilation) and maybe even some Multimedia Content. We'll see if that works out.

GollanczFest - Will it be GollanczBest?

This weekend, I am going to GollanczFest in London, in which a bunch of sci-fi/fantasy authors (who happen to all be published by Gollancz) will be talking in general about their work on Saturday and in a more advice-to-writers way on Sunday. I hope it'll be interesting, there are some great authors in attendance (including Joe Abercrombie, Ben Aaronovitch, Paul Cornell, loads of others) and after the excellent fun of Nine Worlds in August, I'm up for more of this kinda thing.

Linking back up to the first part, GollanczFest is why I've written a short way ahead on the NickNoWriQuart challenge. It may also be the topic of its own blog next week, if I can think of much to say beyond "Yeah, it was good." If you want that level of analysis, follow me on Twitter and it's a safe bet you'll get some over the weekend.

Okay, that turned out a decent length (if still quite bitty) post in the end. Cool cool.

Trapped In The Bargain Basement - Hobson & Choi Case Three - OUT NOW

One of those blog posts that kinda writes itself - Trapped In The Bargain Basement, the third book in my mismatched-detective-duo London crime series Hobson & Choi comes out today! It should be out now!

In this third book, the team look into the dark heart of a massive towering shopping centre. But how is it evil? And why? And whose fault is it, and can it be proven? All these answers plus romantic subplot complications in this third volume!

I'll be honest, it's a very plot-heavy series, so I'd recommend starting from the first book (The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf) if you've not read any before. Helpfully, said debut book is currently free and you can get that from the links on the main Hobson & Choi page.

However, I do think Case Three could be one of the best yet and you don't have to just take my word for it. The first review went up yesterday on fellow indie author Virginia McClain's blog, which you can see here accompanied by a nice guest post by me about how to turn your serial into a novel.

Here's a nice pertinent quote from Virginia's review: "This third installment of the Hobson & Choi mysteries delivers just as much fun and whimsy as the first two books, but with the delightful addition of more wolfhound. My favorite thing about all three books is the characters and their engagement with each other.... Whoever's perspective we're following, there's a good chance that we are going to be forced to take a good look at our own privilege, even if we aren't forced to stare at it too long, and can safely return to pinning things on the 'bad guys' a few pages later. It's this odd but compelling mixture of dark humor and introspection that keeps me returning to Bryan's books."

(It's weird being referred to by my surname again, by the way. Reminds me of being back at all-boys grammar school.)

So there we go. Trapped In The Bargain Basement is out now in both print and digital and below should be a rank of buttons to help you buy it. Enjoy!