Authors Electric

You know the pickle I was in if you've written a mystery series or thought of writing one. How the devil do you keep it fresh in book after book after book? Are there ways to pick up speed if your novels typically take you a couple of years to write? And can you accomplish this without loss of quality? You fear that the genie Slyboots may prove to be a false friend: Fear not. The late great Lawrence Sanders proved that Slyboots can be a best friend. His star-making Deadly Sins were long, intricate, densely plotted and gorgeously written mysteries that must have come damn close to breaking his back. Four years passed between each of the four series entries. Sanders's solution: a lighter and breezier series of Commandment novels, each with a different cast, in between. And, churned out in his twilight years, the fluffy Archy McNally mysteries read as if dictated while sipping bubbly. Thinking of Sanders, I wondered if I might start a spin-off of my Boss MacTa...

This is book in question... My WIP is crawling along so slowly that I got to thinking about word counts and just how long it can take to write a novel. And I remembered a blog I’d written a couple of years back. I’m a believer in recycling and it’s relevant, so this is a rewrite of it. I’d just finished the first draft of a book about Study Skills for Pearson. On the basis of other things I’d written for them, they reckoned I was just the bloke to rewrite it for a different market from the one in which it was already operating very successfully. I had a meeting with the publisher and we agreed on a 145,000 word target. (Well, he said the number and I rather weakly nodded confident assent.) That was in September and my impression was that it was to be delivered the following Spring. But when I got home from London , there was an email telling me that Spring was when promotional work would start, which meant having it ready by December. As we exchanged more emails, one appare...