Category: Buy Now

Ten Reasons why I Love Books for World Book Day

Ten Reasons why I Love Books … and one extra

1) Easy travel without buying a ticket
2) Legal voyeurism
3) You can fall in love but behave outrageous and see other people too
4) A novel of the proper length enables you to support your head when lying on the floor to straighten your spine
5) Turning pages is good exercise for turning pages

COMMERCIAL BREAK:

Three books I wrote (the last one with David)

6) You don’t need to share a book and you don’t get told off for it
7) You can meet such nice people
8) You don’t have to put up with the company of people you don’t like (for long)
9) Words in books help you to understand more about the world
10) I’ve never been stood up by a book

Bonus 1:

Continue reading Ten Reasons why I Love Books for World Book Day

That Difficult Second Album

In the days before streaming, MP3s and such like – when proper music came in vinyl that they called ‘long players’, there was something called ‘Difficult Second Album Syndrome’.

An album was another name for a LP (long player), being a number of audio recordings issued as a collection, which after vinyl’s heyday was then also used for both tape cassettes and CD collections – gosh, it’s like a history lesson!

And the ‘difficult second album’ was what they called the follow-up LP a band or singer had to bring out pretty quickly after the initial success of their debut. Usually with the record label pushing them hard! The problem referenced the fact that recording artistes had, apparently, often used up all their best ideas on that impressive first record.

Now, novels having been around a lot longer than LPs (did any classical music composers have ‘that difficult second symphony syndrome’?)  you would think more would have been written about ‘Second Novel Syndrome’. Of course it must exist, after all Margaret Mitchell never managed another book after ‘Gone with the Wind’. J D Salinger rather dried up after ‘Catcher in the Rye’. Maybe it’s more success related than the actual writing?

What then can be done to get over this problem? And did I ever suffer from ‘Difficult Second Novel Syndrome’ when writing ‘The King of Elfland’s Little Sister’ (KELS)? This being the second adventure of the ‘#1 Kindle Bestselling’ Master Detective Nicely Strongoak. (Not exactly ‘Gone With The Wind’ or ‘Catcher in the Rye’ fame I know!)

The answer is no. And not because I’d already published ‘The Resolution Show’ with David Alter in between, because chronologically  that was actually written a lot later.

The explanation, and the way to get round ‘Difficult Second Novel Syndrome’, is to start the second novel before you finish the first! Well, that’s what I did with KELS.

What’s this all about then? Simply put, when writing Nicely’s first adventure ‘Detective Strongoak and the Case of the Dead Elf’ I found that there was a lot of material being generated that just didn’t fit in that first book. It was either connected to events, or characters, which just didn’t belong in ‘A Dead Elf’. They were too good to waste though and I put them elsewhere (in my fester box) and gradually KELS began to take shape there.

Bottom line, I had half of this book finished before I had completed Nicely’s first adventure. This meant I had none of that ‘blank page’ problem when it came to writing KELS for real. There were a lot of other problems of course, but not to do with the actual writing.

And, guess what?

While I was getting the rest of KELS together the elements of Book 3 of Nicely’s adventures were taking shape. Now, on ‘The King of Elfland’s Little Sister’ publication day, I am delighted to announce that the first draft of Book 3 is also complete. It’s called …

Sorry, you’ll have to wait for that treat, but in putting that book together the basis for Book 4 began to take shape as well. But that, as they say, is another story.

Continue reading That Difficult Second Album

The Further Adventures of Commander Cold – ‘Putting the Science in Fiction’

 

To help celebrate the forthcoming publication of the inspirational ‘Putting the Science in Fiction’ (PSF) ten of the contributors are providing further contributions and story prompts based on their field of expertise. Before I became a comedy writer, playwright and scriptwriter I had another identity – I was Commander Cold and you can read about problems associated with freezing biological material, for preservation and reanimation, in the mighty tome that is ‘Putting the Science in Fiction’.

With National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) coming up you might find some stimulus and (frozen) food for thought here in:

The Further Adventures of Commander Cold

Chemical fixatives – the agents used for immobilising the constituents of cells and tissues for structural studies – act too slowly to get more than an ‘averaged’ view of the biological material. Cellular events, like secretory activities, muscle contraction and nerve transmission, are far too rapid to be caught as they take place. That is why ultra-rapid freezing provides a viable alternative for the initial immobilisation of the parts of cell involved in fast processes.

Freezing, particularly using ultra-pure copper cooled by liquid helium, has been successful in capturing even very rapid events like synaptic release. However, helium is not cheap. Other cryogens, like refreezing Freon and liquid nitrogen slush (liquid/solid mix) have their place, but better and more convenient alternatives are always worth looking into.

This helps explain why I was jetting high pressure liquid nitrogen at small lump of muscle, but not why I needed the stockings and the thermal insulation against the gas that got me dubbed ‘Commander Cold’.

On a general point – a lot of this relates to how science is actually done, rather than how the layperson may think science gets done. If you are considering how a scientist might act in your story, do consider a place for improvisation and thinking outside the box .

A company that I had connections to had a good idea. They realised that liquid helium was expensive while liquid nitrogen was cheap. Liquid nitrogen is not actually a good freezing agent though because of something called the Leidenfrost effect (reference book for more information). It is concerned with the small range between liquid nitrogen’s melting and boiling points. This means that if you put something warm into liquid nitrogen you get an insulating layer of gas formed that then slows the freezing rate. One way round this, which doctors use for wart removal, is to direct a high-pressure jet of liquid nitrogen at what you want cooled and the insulating gas layer is thereby striped away and fresh liquid exposed to do the cooling. This is exactly the way you might well see somebody (or something) being frozen in a film or on TV and it usually results in them being frozen in seconds or even milliseconds. This would not be the case – it would be an incredibly inefficient and painful way to kill somebody probably involving them going blind first and stumbling around in agony. The chances of recovery would be zero.

The company’s idea was to ramp up the pressure of the liquid nitrogen considerably and direct the biological tissue requiring freezing into its path. Very small amounts of biological material it has to be emphasised! They needed somebody to evaluate how well the material was freezing. It seemed an interesting idea and it was – in theory. The problem was that the jet that did the freezing tended to spray the biological material all around the room. I tried suitably arranged thermos flasks to catch it, but the jet made finding the sample very difficult.

Of course the room filled alarmingly with nitrogen too – and so ‘Commander Cold’ was born. Incidentally this activity was no more dangerous than what would happen upon filling up a Dewar from a large liquid nitrogen storage cylinder. ‘Health and Safety’ first – just because you may not freeze quickly it doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways to kill yourself with coolants, asphyxiation being a prime example.

This is where the stockings came in. A single stocking over the whole jetting apparatus turned out to be the best way of catching the sample – in the stocking toe as it happens. They were flexible and actually thawed quite quickly.

The freezing rate of the jet freezer was never really good enough though.

The idea of jetting liquid nitrogen didn’t leave me though. Thinking about the properties of liquid nitrogen I remembered that you can also produce supercritical liquid nitrogen. A supercritical fluid is any substance at a temperature and pressure above its critical point, where distinct liquid and gas phases do not exist. In effect, if you can keep maintain the pressure of the liquid nitrogen above its critical point as you jet you will not get the Leidenfrost effect and freezing rates of biological material should be excellent.

So I designed the world’s first (probably) Super Critical Liquid Nitrogen Jet Freezer. And very neat it seemed, requiring no stockings at all! I found a company interested in prototyping it for me and all seemed great, until my university’s Business Department stepped in.

They thought a Super Critical Liquid Nitrogen Jet Freezer was going to bring great wealth to all concerned and outlined the various ‘cuts’ they would expect from any profits. At which point the company pulled out. As the company boss said to me, ‘there’s probably only a demand for a dozen in the whole world Terry and at the price they are anticipating it just won’t sell.’

And so the Super Critical Liquid Nitrogen Jet Freezer never did see the light of day, but Commander Cold lived to freeze another day. And always remember, the world of the very small can be just as exciting as the world of the very small. For example: nobody knows what this is!

So have you been having chilly thoughts in your writing? Here are some ideas to get you warmed up!

Story Prompt 1: A scientist thinks outside the box (just as I tried) and discovers a totally new method that allows cryogenically frozen plants and animals to be re-animated – until it all goes wrong of course.

Story Prompt 2: A company that has made a fortune out of fraudulently freezing the dead discovers that the departed have been mysteriously disappearing.

Story Prompt 3: A deep space colony ship has passengers in deep freeze. But is everybody really as inactive as they should be?

And if you want a chance to win a copy of ‘Putting the Science in Fiction simply enter the Rafflecoptor giveaway below:

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Continue reading The Further Adventures of Commander Cold – ‘Putting the Science in Fiction’

That about covers it

We have had a quite a few questions about the excellent cover for ‘The Resurrection Show’ The talented, award-winning, illustrator Tom Morgan-Jones of Inkymess.com is responsible – and we are a delighted two-hearted Dalter T Newman.

 

We chose Tom because his superb, energetic style of penmanship beautifully complemented the buzzing energy of ‘The Resurrection Show’. You can almost smell the ink drying!

Tom has illustrated numerous books including over 70 for children. Recently he has also written and illustrated his first book: THE RED DREAD and, of course, we hope it does tremendously well, although we can’t say we really approve of him being allowed on the keyboard.

Continue reading That about covers it

Something for the Children

I never really thought about writing for children. I don’t necessarily think you do. All of my stories – the ones in my thoughts, my notes and my daydreams were very adult.

No, not that sort of adult!

I mean they were complex, very ideas-based, plot heavy SF novels or knowing, reference-rich fantasy mash-ups. They weren’t children’s books!

And then there was one. It came unexpected and unlooked for and it really was a joy to write. I loved it. The book is called WHEELWORLD and I now need to find it a home, but I will persevere. WHEELWORLD isn’t actually what I’m writing about here today though.

It was just that writing WHEELWORLD put me in a completely different mindset about exactly what writing for children involves and what it is all about. And I enjoyed doing it.

Since then I have written a five-part children’s animation series about two little princesses, a selection of fun verses for a book of lovely child-friendly illustrations and had a commission for a glorious tale about a young boy and his elephant called ‘The Duke of Delhi’.

That’s what I do want to write about. ‘The Duke of Delhi’, it may surprise you to learn, is set in my own East Sussex countryside, in an entirely imaginary Topley Castle Indian Wild Life Park. A young Anglo-Indian boy, Safin, has to live with his maternal grandfather at Topley Castle and his life there is changed around when a baby, Indian white elephant, rescued from an animal trafficker, also comes to live.

A boy and his elephant, and a group of likeable school friends, what more could you want in a children’s book? Some fun black and white illustrations from the pen of illustrator Les Garrett, just like many classic children’s book of old, of course.

The result is what will hopefully be the first in a series of books featuring the lovable ‘Duke of Delhi’ and his chum Safin. Available in both paperback and ebook, everybody involved hopes children everywhere will fall in love with this first book: ‘The White Elephant’.

Continue reading Something for the Children

Black Friday Non-Special!

Eek! Black Friday #1 Epic Fantasy Bestseller special:

‘Chandler meets Tolkien’ ‘Dashiell Hammett meets Terry Pratchett’*

118 Amazon Review >50% 5*. Price now:

black-moon-cover

 

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Continue reading Black Friday Non-Special!