Author: ChanAtkins

Update on Upcoming Books!

~ ChanAtkins ~ 2 Comments

I often post to my Facebook author page updating my followers on my writing progress and publication schedule. Those posts get quite long as there is always a lot to explain when it comes to my writing! With that in mind, I decided to write a blog post instead. Here you will find a full update on books updated/revamped, books waiting to be published, books waiting for further drafts, and books in progress/early stages, plus my writing on Medium!

I have to say that for the first time in my life I feel like a real writer. Probably because I write so much. But that’s nothing new – it’s just that finally I feel like my writing is getting noticed. Not in any huge, life-changing way, but in a way that makes me feel secure in my skills and abilities and in a way that is having a positive effect on my finances.

A lot of this is down to Medium, but I don’t want to too get sidetracked from my topic. However, the money I am making on Medium is a huge boost to my confidence, my exposure and my financial situation, so right now, I couldn’t be happier. For example, I have noticed an increase in sales of my books since Medium took off for me, and aside from April being a poor month, Medium still proves to be the perfect home for me and my style of writing. In May I got boosted four times and this has happened again for June. Now, it does vary – boosted articles themselves vary greatly in reads and in earnings, but I cannot deny it makes a huge difference and it’s exciting too. Being boosted means far more people read your writing and I am sure this must be contributing to better sales of my books. I hope so anyway! And finally, I just feel alive with confidence! Sales and reviews are hard to come by as an indie author on a low budget, but with Medium, I am getting regular reviews in the form of comments on my posts and it has made me feel vindicated, I guess. Like I was right all along to pursue writing and stick at it!

Anyway, enough of gushing about Medium for now. Back to the books.

As you already know all four books in The Day The Earth Turned series are now available in ebook and paperback on multiple platforms and due to so many readers claiming they wanted more, I got ideas about carrying on the series. I will see how it goes but I have enough ideas for four more books and have tentatively started what will probably be called, The Day The Earth Turned Book Five: Conquest. The first four books were named after the seasons and the next four will be named after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse! Make of that what you will. So far I have reached Chapter 11 with the new book but it is not my priority and I am only writing it if I get the urge to.

Meanwhile, At Night We Played In The Road is ready and waiting for a release date. This is the spin-off book from The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series and the only thing holding it up is the front cover. My son and I worked on a few designs and thought we were happy but then I changed my mind again. I am now waiting for him to see if he can make my latest idea work! I am still hoping for an August release date for this. Here is the blurb:

When Tom Lane was born, he accidentally killed his mother and, in the process, his father’s love.

In order to protect Tom from their father’s criminal business, older brother Alfie becomes Tom’s father, mother and protector. It’s the two of them against the world until the day Tom chooses a life of crime over Alfie’s dream of a normal life.

Ten years later the estranged brothers are reunited when a violent gang bring Tom to Alfie’s door with a gun to his head.

Tom’s partners in crime have turned on him and he needs his brother to save him one more time…

Following this book, I will release The Mess Of Us (long awaited sequel to my debut novel, The Mess Of Me) in the autumn, possibly October/November time. This book is totally ready to go and does have a front cover! I just need to write the blurb.

The Mess Of Us sets up part of the storyline for my crossover book, The Dark Finds You. This is the book I am currently working on! After revamping the entire The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series and The Mess Of Me, I had to adjust the timeline in the upcoming books that are part of this universe. I am now doing this for The Dark Finds You. After that, it will go to beta readers for the first time and then to my editor, and I hope to release it by early 2025. This crossover book brings characters from the Holds End Series, The Mess Of Me, Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature and The Boy With The Thorn In His Side together in one storyline and it effectively ties up all their stories. It is probably my favourite book I’ve written – I absolutely love it! Editing it at the moment is pure pleasure.

Once this edit is done and the book is either with beta readers or my editor, I will be going back to Black Hare Valley. This book was quickly written two years ago into notebooks and recently typed up on the laptop. It still needs a lot of work and since I finished the first draft, I have had lots of new ideas to develop it further. I think it will almost feel like a first draft once I get back to it and I can’t wait! I could be tackling this very soon – probably in the next week or so! Exciting!!

That will keep me busy for a while but at some point next year it will be ready for beta readers to assess and what will I write then? The above books will all be published. I may still be writing The Day The Earth Turned Book 5, but there are six other books waiting their turn and at the moment I am not sure which one I will focus on after Black Hare Valley.

They are:

The 7th Child – a family crime/mystery – mostly plotted, characters created, first few chapters written. It will be a dark exploration of family dysfunction and secrets around the death of a child.

Diary of The Dead – a diary form story written by a young boy surviving a zombie apocalypse – first draft almost finished but I haven’t touched it in a while. I think it will be a series.

We Hate The Cool Kids – a YA psychological drama/thriller – first draft done, but no ending! Have not touched it in years but it would be an easy one to pick and finish.

Anya and Cody Start The Apocalpyse – characters created, first few chapters written, but needs a lot more plotting and research. It’s a sort of modern day Bonnie and Clyde story where two misfits plot to bring on the apocalypse.

The Few – YA dystopian – characters created, mostly plotted, first chapter written.

Untitled collaborative story – characters created, plot in progress for a serial killer/crime/psychological thriller I’m going to write with my daughter!

We will just have to see which one calls to me the most! Which would you be most excited to read?

Dirty Little Feet: What Followed Us Back From The Holloway (a short story)

~ ChanAtkins ~ Leave a comment

This short story was recently posted on Medium where it sadly didn’t get a lot of reads. I thought it was a better story than a similar one I posted called Into The Green. That one got boosted and has earned me nearly £30, but I prefer this one. See what you think!

Dirty Little Feet

It was cool and dark in the Holloway – our impatient bare feet slipped effortlessly into the tracks laid down by our ancestors. Their faces were etched into the earth and the clay – their long-dead eyes followed our movements from the walls as we darted along the ancient track.

Our feet thundered upon theirs, our laughter mingled with echoes of their own as we sprang down the tunnel, splashing through cool streams, our toes curling into claggy mud. The walls of the Holloway sheltered us as we ran. This space was our fortress, our underground lair, our tunnel system, our playground. It was our link to the past.

Above us the trees linked hands; their vibrant green canopy a roof above our heads, bursts of late evening sunlight fragmented by trembling leaves. All around us, the stillness of time. We laughed and played as if time did not exist for us and down there, it didn’t. We wouldn’t grow old, we wouldn’t age or decay or die. Much like everything else that lived in the Holloway, we were eternal.

Photo is mine

But as dusk fell, we knew we were breaking a rule passed down by our parents and grandparents: don’t linger in the Holloway after sundown or you risk inviting one of the old back home with you.

To us, rules were made to be broken and returning home after sundown offered a delicious risk we could not resist. That evening, my siblings — twins, George and Arthur, Grace, the oldest and I, the youngest — stayed longer than we should.

Still, it was not quite dark by the time the old warnings infiltrated our consciences and prickled the hairs on the back of our necks. We scuttled out, hand in hand, giggling as our muddy feet raced back up the centuries old track, reaching for gnarled roots and boughs to lead us home and leaving the faces of our ancestors on the walls behind us.

Photo is mine

We tore across the sheep field — their eyes glittering back at us in the semi-darkness, and we returned home, leaving tell-tale muddy footprints across the kitchen tiles.

Grace washed away the evidence of our childish rebellion and come morning, we all thought our indiscretion had gone unnoticed by Mother.

Not so.

She was raging as she swept her old mop across the tiles where small brown footprints could be seen trailing in from the back door and stopping in the middle of the kitchen. We denied they were ours (ours had been a criss-cross pattern made by four sets of feet…) but it did no good. We were banned from the Holloway and given arduous chores to complete to make it up to her.

Later that day we heard her scream in rage once again; the noise drawing us out of our sulking to witness yet another trail of muddied prints on her floor. Who had defied her? It was my George who pointed out that the prints were far smaller than ours. He made me, the youngest, stand next to them to prove his point. My feet were small but not that small.

Mother’s face paled.

We watched as she sank into the nearest chair and stared dully at nothing. Then;

‘You stupid, stupid children. Why didn’t you listen to us? Why can’t you ever just listen?’

We swapped guilty glances, then released a collective gasp when a childish giggle echoed gleefully around us. We all froze. I reached for Grace and gripped her hand in mine. Tears shone in our mother’s eyes.

We all heard the sudden drumming — at first like a steady heartbeat, then louder, boom, boom, boom, until it faded out into something that was closer to a soft pattering.

Footsteps.

‘You’ll never get rid of it. We’ll have to move!’ Our mother wept again, dropping her head into her hands.

We were silent as we watched her get up and solemnly slosh the mop over the footprints. Still, we didn’t fully realise what we had done, even then. The dirty little footprints came back again and again. As fast as Mother washed them away, they would reappear. Sometimes they came in from the door and just stopped. Sometimes they made circles, as if the culprit was spinning around and around. Sometimes they ran up the walls and across the kitchen surfaces.

Next came the smell.

It started in the kitchen — a musty, earthy, swampy sort of smell. Mother was in despair. She claimed the house would never be clean again. She punished us with more chores and often we would hear her on the phone begging to be rehoused. We would fall into bed exhausted every night.

And that’s when the drumming would begin.

Footsteps at first, light and gleeful, teasing, dancing. Then they would build up. Harder, faster, angrier. Tearing up and down the stairs while we huddled in our beds, our breath frozen in our chests. Our eyes met in the darkness. We had done this. This was all our fault.

The dirty little feet stomped and thumped. Up and down the stairs, across the landing, into our rooms and around our beds while we quivered under the covers, clutching hands. Cold laughter echoed through the house as it kept us awake night after night.

Then one night, I woke up, muddled and sweating from a dream where the thing that followed us from the Holloway was smiling at me from the shadows. It had black holes for eyes and a wide sneering mouth and its skin was as white as bone.

I heard something new.

A frantic pounding. The panicked drumming of tiny angry heels. I ran to my window and there it was — I saw it for the first time. I saw its feet. Small, dirty, they beat as if in a great tantrum against my window pane from the outside. Had it somehow found itself shut out again? There was a great sadness emanating from it, a lonely desperation in its incessant thudding.

‘What do you want?’ I asked it, but the feet continued to kick. I pressed my hands to the glass. I wanted to see it properly. I wanted to see what had followed us home. I wanted to know why. It refused to show its face. Only two dirty little feet were visible and when I finally flung open the window, they were gone too.

In the morning, my mother looked disheveled as she started packing up our things. We had led a simple life there in the little stone cottage and it only took a few hours to pack up our lives and move out. Us children were bereft to be leaving the place we loved.

We trooped down to the Holloway to say our goodbyes but we did not go in. Instead, we held hands at the entrance, our heads lowered in sorrow. We stared at the ancient path, created by the constant tread of endless feet and rolling cartwheels, pushed into the earth deeper and deeper over centuries of old. Our own feet had pressed into it. Our own blood had flowed into the earth and the mud. Our laughter had echoed down the track and up into the giant trees and now we had to say goodbye.

The new home was nice. Small and neat, on the outskirts of the nearest town. Our walk to school was quicker, at least. We were happy there for a year until one morning we awoke to the sound of our mother screaming.

The screams were followed by wails, which soon dissolved into hopeless sobs.

When we ran down to comfort her, we all stopped just outside the kitchen, too afraid to step in.

The kitchen floor was covered in the gleeful dancing footprints of two dirty little feet.

Thank you for reading! I’ve wanted to write a story set in a Holloway since I visited the fascinating Hell Lane in Symondsbury, Dorset, UK. West Dorset is predominantly sandstone so has several Holloways. The name comes from the anglo-saxon word ‘sunken road’ and they are believed to be at least 300 years old with some traced back to the iron age. At one point they would have been trails to drive cattle along, popular highways if you like, to move people, goods and livestock from one place to another. They would have been ground level tracks back then but eventually centuries of human and animal feet and the wheels of carts would have eroded the soft earth and widened it, with help from the water running off the surrounding land. These days many Holloways are 20 or 30 feet deep. They are mysterious and magical places, eerily silent and still and you can’t help feel a real connection to the past as you follow the ancient paths so many centuries of feet have trodden.

What Happens When Pen Hits Paper? – I Am Me, and I Am Free

~ ChanAtkins ~ 2 Comments

This piece was previously published on Medium!

Image by Bruno from Pixabay

What happens when pen hits paper is I am home. I am me. I am also not here, because I am free.

I am in a world of my own creation — multiple worlds even, interconnected universes I invented myself for my own enjoyment and entertainment. That’s one of the things that happens when pen hits paper. I am entertaining myself.

When pen hits paper, words just flow, almost as if they are not mine, almost as if something else is taking control. Often, it’s the characters. I don’t know how or why they fill me so much, until I feel fit to bursting, about to explode, but they do. They always have done.

They suggest the stories; they have so much to say. I go where they lead me, though I try to plan ahead, jotting down ideas for the next few chapters. But what happens a lot of the time is the words take on a life of their own. They do their own thing. I feel disconnected sometimes, especially when I reread words I have written. Sometimes I cannot remember writing them. I am not sure that was me. 

When pen hits paper, everything is let loose. Set free. Every detail, every observation, all the conversations overhead, the people watched and the emotions absorbed. The weather, the seasons, the landscape, the beauty and the tragedy. I never quite realise how much is pent up inside of me until pen hits paper and it all rushes out.

When pen hits paper I feel a release. I experience true freedom. I am making magic. Life feels limitless. Joyous. Glorious. I know why I am here. I know who I am. I am never more me than when I am writing.

When pen hits paper I am rebelling. I am breaking the rules. I am escaping reality and living within dreams. I am exploring difficult subjects, dipping toes into the darkness, asking questions, upsetting the status quo…

When pen hits paper anything can happen.

When pen hits paper I sit back and enjoy the ride, never knowing where I will end up.

When pen hits paper I have hope in a better world, a better day, a better me.

When pen hits paper, I start writing and I never want to stop…

Medium A Year On – Unexpected Success Plus A Warning Not To Be Complacent

~ ChanAtkins ~ 4 Comments
Image by Joshua Woroniecki from Pixabay

I’ve been writing and publishing on Medium for over a year now and thought I’d write an update post on how it’s going but first I need to highlight the biggest negative for me so far.

Not having enough time to write my blog!

To be fair, I can’t blame Medium entirely for that – although obviously it’s more tempting to publish stories, poems, articles and essays on a platform that pays rather than my blog, but Medium doesn’t mind pieces being republished so again, so I can in theory repost things here.

The trouble is time and the constant, never-ending juggling act that is being an indie author, or indeed, any author, I suspect.

Recently I’ve been updating all my old books and this has been very time consuming, but it needed to be done. Some have had new covers, some have had extra edits and some have just been tightened up and updated in other ways. I’ve done it now, although I’ve yet to finish uploading new paperback versions to Amazon, but all the ebooks have been updated there and on Draft 2 Digital.

This means I’m now free to get on with preparing the next three books for release. More on that another day!

The thing is though, there is only so much I can do. Being an author involves marketing, promoting, writing, editing, submitting, revising, rewriting and trying to build and maintain your author platform. These are all balls I need to keep spinning in the air – not to mention being a mum, running a house and having a day job – so inevitably, there is always a ball or two getting dropped.

Lately, that’s been this blog!

I hope to rectify that today with this Medium update and over the next few weeks I will probably republish some popular Medium articles, stories and poems here just to get me going again.

So, a year after I joined Medium, how is it going?

It’s going well. Very well. I joined the Partner Program in September 2023 and was paid in October for my first three paid pieces. I just about covered my membership fee! In October 2023 I got boosted for the first time so my November payment was a lot bigger. That month I published six pieces of writing and the lowest payment was $0.18 for an article about different types of writers, while the highest paid was $57.49 for my first boosted piece.

I posted fifteen pieces of writing in November 2023 and got boosted again. An article about a haircut, of all things, made me $127.32. The lowest paid that month was $0.27 for a poem. December 2023 was an even better month for me when I got boosted three times. These boosts make a huge difference to payments. My three boosted posts earned me, $69.11, $78.10 and $81.59, but my other pieces were well received that month too. For example, an article that was not boosted still earned me $7.13 and a few others earned me between $2 and $5 dollars. It all adds up!

By this point I was extremely grateful and excited to be boosted but I was starting to worry about it too. Obviously boosted posts are shown to more readers, so that boosts your reads and views, and hence your payment. It also encourages people to read your other pieces so I tend to notice views and reads go up for unboosted writing too. Even now, looking at my older stats to write this blog post, I can see that some of my first pieces of writing have earned me more money since I originally shared them.

Why was I worrying about the boosts? Well, for a few reasons. I currently have 936 followers but like most social media and writing platforms, those followers do no automatically transfer into reads and views. Often, I assume, people follow you in the hope you will follow back. Without boosts, my posts were varying between $0.18 at the lowest and $7.13 at the highest. Like I said, it all adds up, but the boosts seem to make a huge difference.

Obviously, getting paid for your writing is a dream come true. It makes you feel validated and like your writing is worth getting paid for. It made me feel really good to know these payments were going towards paying our bills and rent, for example, but I was wary of relying on it. Of course, I was tempted to dream; maybe if I really put the effort in, in years to come I could give up my day job and just be a full time writer on Medium and with my books. That was always the dream and it suddenly seemed almost feasible…

Luckily, I didn’t let myself get carried away. I was still relying on those boosts and I figured my luck would run out at some point.

However, January was another good month. I got boosted three times again. At the end of this post you’ll find a list of my boosted articles in case, like me, you’re trying to figure out what types of writing gain boosts on Medium! I think I’m starting to figure it out but that in itself brings its own issues. I didn’t want to start trying to write with a boost in mind, but it was hard not to!

My lowest paid piece in January was zero for a poem, closely followed by $0.06 for another poem! My highest paid was a boosted article, $90.04, and my highest unboosted article made me $8.01.

February 2024 was crazy! I responded to a prompt about pet ownership with an article questioning the ethics of it and detailing my own increasing uneasiness about pet ownership and it got boosted. It’s my biggest earner to date, probably because it was so controversial. It earned me $231.49 and the most amount of comments I’d ever had, not all of them nice! This was an eye opener for me. It demonstrated that relatable topics people agree or disagree strongly with are probably a good way to secure views and reads, but it also showed me that people will read an article, totally misunderstand it and then leave slightly unhinged comments on it. In the end, I started thanking the critics for making me more money!

I had another post boosted that month but it made me a mere $26.11 so it just goes to show that even getting boosted isn’t a guarantee of hundreds of reads.

March was another crazy month. I got boosted three times, making me $66.78, $92.68 and $107.73.

April was a wake up call.

It had all been going so well! My earnings had been increasing every month and I had started to factor them into our spending and outgoings, in other words, I’d started counting on them. In April I posted twelve times and did not get boosted. I earned roughly $50 and the highest paid piece was actually a piece of flash fiction I wrote in response to a prompt. That earned me $7.08 but everything else was dire that month.

I was worried. I feared the bubble had burst. I looked at my posts and tried to figure out what was wrong with them. I was really proud of some of them but they just fell flat, barely got any reads. I did see other people saying the same thing about April though, so I don’t think it was just me that saw things slow down. Weird.

But it was a wake up call I probably needed. I need to think of Medium earnings as bonus, extra money, not something to be relied on. I cannot take getting boosted for granted and I don’t want to write with boosts in mind. So I am trying to forge a way forward by posting poems and stories when they come to me, writing about anything I am thinking or experiencing at the moment and by responding to the many wonderful prompts and challenges.

May, so far, is going well. I’ve been boosted three times and I’ve published thirteen pieces of writing. My highest paid piece for May is currently on $151.43. Not bad! And I was really surprised the other pieces got boosted.

So, the update is that Medium continues to be a wonderful platform for writers and readers. Members are still overwhelmingly supportive and kind, and it is still well worth the time I spend on it. The downsides are of course, accepting that some months you will earn a lot less than others, and that dedicating so much time to Medium means I drop the ball on other things, like this blog!

Anyway, I will be back next week as there is lots of writing related news to share and plenty of posts on Medium I can repost here for you!

But as promised, here is a list of the articles that got boosted:

Less Is More – The Most Important Lesson The Perimenopause Has Taught Me

An Emotional Haircut – At Age 45 I Finally Like My Hair

I Was The All-Seeing Eye – But Who Saw Me?

Take It From A True Cry-Baby – It’s Far Healthier To Let It Out Than To Keep It In

One Toothbrush – A Tale of Days Gone By

I See You, Single White Eyebrow Hair – And You Don’t Scare Me At All

The Best Life Advice I Ever Had Came From A Character I Created – Prove Them Wrong, A Mantra For Misfits

Why Do The Women In My Family Insist On Talking About Weight? – Breaking Free From Focusing on ‘Fat’

I’ve Been An Animal Love My Whole Life But I’m Not Sure I’ll Own Pets Again – Getting To Grips With The Ethics of ‘Owning’ Animals

All We Can Ever Strive To Do Is A Better Job Than Our Parents – On Loving Ourselves and Our Children

Does Losing our ‘Stuff’ Mean We Are Less Us? – On downsizing our lives and letting go of the past

Why Do I Write? – Because In Many Ways It Feels Like A Rebellious Act

Child’s Play or Telling Stories? – Children’s Play Proves We All Begin As Storytellers

Mental Health and The Perimenopause – A Second Puberty But With Far Less Support – mental health challenges at either end of my life and the difference in support available

Being A Mother Saved Me From Myself – Parenting Made Me A Better Person

Standing At A Crossroads In My Life Is Not Terrifying Anymore – when middle-age gives you the gift of trusting yourself

These boosted pieces all have a few things in common, which is interesting:

They are all articles or essays, rather than poems, stories or flash fiction.

They are all personal and emotional stories where I am extremely honest.

They are all about universal and relatable topics, such as ageing, womanhood, parenthood, childhood, body image, life lessons and life changes.

Something to think about anyway!

See you next week!