Writing

Elliot Pie Wins Two Chill With A Book Awards!

~ ChanAtkins ~ 6 Comments

Hi guys,

I’m sorry I haven’t blogged in a few weeks. I do actually have some draft and half-finished posts written, but have not had the time to polish them up. I’ve been very busy with work-related projects, and my own writing.

However, I wanted to write a quick post to let you know that Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature has won two Chill With A Book Awards! Having won a Reader’s Award, it was automatically entered into Book Cover of The Month award for March and won that too!

Chill Logo Cover of the Month Award 2019

I am, obviously, over the moon. Many years of work went into this novel, with numerous rewrites, and revisions. It came very close to being picked up by two traditional publishers but in the end I published with Pict Publishing, an all-women indie publishing collective. It’s just always nice to have the hard work recognised, as it gives you a confidence boost and the kick up the bum you need to keep going!

Anyway, I better get back to work and I promise I will have some new posts for you in the upcoming weeks!

 

New Release! The Boy With The Thorn In His Side Part 3…

~ ChanAtkins ~ 2 Comments

This week’s post is just a quick one letting you know that I have a brand new book coming out on 22nd February!

The Boy With The Thorn In His Side Part Three started life as a screenplay around a year ago. At that time, I had The Boy With The Thorn In His Side Parts One and Two merged into one large book, and the sequel which is set seven years later, This Is The Day also available. However, as I’ve said before, this story and these characters who have been with me since I was twelve, would just not leave me alone. I had this niggling idea for new material, which would move the ending of the original book,  slotting a brand new book between that one and the sequel.

It was a crazy idea, as the new material would mean making subtle changes to Parts One and Two, and the sequel, which would mean unpublishing them all, revising, revamping with new covers and then releasing again. I wasn’t sure it would be worth the risk so I decided to write the new material in screenplay form first.

I did this for a few reasons. First, I’ve always dreamt of these particular books being on the screen. I think they’d make an amazing gritty TV series with a killer soundtrack. I’ve been interested in screenwriting for some time and had Scrivener downloaded with a few screenplay ideas in motion. I also read some books and completed an online course. Also, this was a quick way to get the new material out of my head and onto paper. I used a notebook and carried it around with me, often writing into it while sitting in carparks waiting for school to finish. I’d scribble into it during brief moments of peace at home, writing alongside a coffee before I rushed back out the house. I sat with it in the evenings too, and it just kept growing.

It was so much fun and such an obsession! Of course, when it was done, I knew I had to turn the material into a novel, I just had to. There was no going back now. This was going to happen. I wrote the first draft quite quickly and after a few more sent it to my trusted beta readers. While waiting for feedback, I separated parts one and two and went over them both, cutting the word count, and rejigging a few scenes here and there so that Part Three would make sense.

Parts One and Two were originally published separately so I already had them on my Amazon dashboard, plus they already had reviews. I had to contact the cover designer to see if he could whip up new covers, or make changes to existing ones. A lot of work basically! I then had to redo This Is The Day, making more changes, adding scenes and changing the title to Part Four…

I thought I was crazy more than once but now that the brand new Part Three is ready for release, I’m really excited and certain that I made the right choice. By the time I got to the end of the Part Four edit, I already knew there was going to be a Part Five and Six.

This was very exciting! Part Five has already been written, in rough into a notebook, and Part Six is plotted. I’m not working on either of these just yet, due to other projects, but you would not believe how excited I am to get my teeth into them when the time comes!

If there is one thing I’ve learned from being an indie writer, it’s to leave things open. In fact, I’d say that ALL of my books have a potential sequel coming. Once I’ve created these character I never want it to be over, and it doesn’t have to be.

 

Embracing All Forms of Writing

~ ChanAtkins ~ 4 Comments

There was once a time I considered myself a novel writer and a novel writer only. It was what I wanted to do and it was my comfort zone. I will probably always be happiest when lost inside the numerous drafts it takes to construct a novel. I’m confident with this form of writing, and a few years ago I would never have considered any other.

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Of course, that attitude had to change when I started publishing. I soon noticed that all authors had a blog or website and I shyly embraced this as a way of sharing my writing and gaining followers. It took me a while to get into the spirit of it, but it’s fair to say, once I found my feet, I began to relish writing my blog posts, and most of the time I’ve been fairly good at writing on a weekly basis.

As my attitude to blog writing changed, so did my attitude towards other types of writing. Back when I considered myself just a novel writer, I would never have considered trying my hand at writing articles. But somewhere along the line, I gained the confidence and started submitting articles about writing to Author’s Publish. This style of writing did not come naturally for me and I spent a lot of time reading and analysing their previous articles in order to work out what was wanted. When I had the first few accepted, I was over the moon. It was a real confidence boost.

Short stories were another form I once dismissed. I write such long books, that writing something short just seemed impossible. However, when someone mentioned writing short stories to compliment your books, I did get excited. This eventually led to Bird People and Other Stories, and now that I’m more practiced, short stories are a regular thing for me and I hope to have another collection out this year.

Screenwriting was another form of writing I never would have tried a few years back, despite how much I’ve always longed any of my books to be made into films or TV programmes. In fact, I often write as if imagining a real scene and pen my dialogue this way. Last year, when I had the new material for The Boy With The Thorn In His Side filling my head, I was reluctant to do anything about it but decided writing the material in screenplay form would be quick and fun and would help get it out of my head. It became ridiculously addictive! I read a few books about screenwriting and downloaded Scrivener, and off I went. Writing the book as a screenplay first was so much fun, and as I carried the notebook around with me everywhere, I got it done really quickly. Just recently I completed a free Introduction To Screenwriting course with Futurelearn, and I absolutely loved it!

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And just lately, I’ve been playing around with another form of writing I once turned away from. Poetry. When I was a young teenager, I did go through a poetry and song-writing phase. But I was put off by the poetry we had to study at school. It was so wonderful and complex, it just made me feel I could never compete, so why bother?

Poetry was not my thing, or so I told myself. But something weird happened very recently. I started getting ideas, or thoughts, quite randomly, which were really all just things I wanted to say. They were too short, random and weird for blog posts, articles or short stories though, so I started writing them in note style, like poems. I also starting re-reading a Bukowski poetry book I have, one of the only poetry books I’ve really enjoyed, and his style encourages you to have a go. I don’t think he followed any rules or was ever taught how to structure a poem, he just did it. He just wrote what he thought and felt. There is something really raw and beautiful about that and I think people should be encouraged to do it.

Once I started writing, more started to flow. I’ve nearly filled a notebook now and I’ve even decided to put some of them in my next short story collection and make a short story and poetry collection instead. I don’t try to force them or rush them, and they all seem to come from an emotional place, rather than a descriptive or rational place. Which is weird, and interesting.

I thought I would be really brave and share two of them with you today. These are two of the really early ones that came to me when this poetry thing started. These are first drafts and I’ve not messed with them or edited them since I wrote them, so please bear this in mind! I’m looking out for a local poetry workshop to go to, as I’d like to learn more and get my poems as well crafted as I can.

As always feel free to comment and share! How do you gain the courage to try new things? Do you have a comfort zone you wish to edge out of?

 

Murder

The crows were pissed off today

Fury in their hacking call

Feet pounding, heart racing

Breath hissing

Because I am not as young 

As I used to be

The crows took flight

Reluctant, squawking rage

Lifting and falling

Silhouettes in the black bones

of trees

The crows were pissed off today

Do they plot murder?

They say they hold funerals for their fallen

If this is true

What might be in store for us?

The crows were pissed off today

As I ran on

But I am not the one

Who shoots them with a gun

So that they live their lives

With one eye trained down

No wonder they screech and cry and hack

I’m pissing them off just being here

On the way back

A rasping sound

Like they are dying

Maybe they know

That everything is

Things You Don’t Want To Do

What’s that tangled mess in your belly?

For no reason

‘Cause nothing is wrong

Yet, it’s there like a disease

Writhing and tightening

Til you can’t breathe

With the weight of it all 

Following you around

Maybe it’s just the fear

Of the unknown

Of death in a metal mess

Of breathing your last

Ragged breath

Or maybe it’s just

All the things you don’t want to do

How My Books Are All Linked Up

~ ChanAtkins ~ 4 Comments

With the imminent release of The Boy With The Thorn In His Side – Part Three, (released February 22nd, available for pre-order now!) I thought I would write a post about how all of my books are linked to each other.

Some of the links are quite obvious, but others are more subtle so you might have missed them. Let’s start with my first release, YA novel, The Mess Of Me.

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The Mess Of Me is linked to The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series, by location. Lou and her best friend Joe live on an estate on one side of a bypass and have to cross over the bypass via a bridge to reach their school on the Somerley estate. In The Boy With The Thorn In His Side, Danny and his friends attend Somerley school in the first two books. Danny is also mentioned in The Mess Of Me, by Joe, who is angry with his stepfather and issues a vague threat about doing what Danny Bryans did in the 90’s. The narrator Lou explains to the reader that Danny Bryans was imprisoned for knifing his stepfather to death, and that his is a well-known and notorious story in their area. She also mentioned his name is engraved on a bench near where he used to live.

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The Boy With The Thorn In His Side will later on in the series, have links to two as yet unreleased books. A Song For Bill Robinson, which I hope to release later this year, and a book which has the working title of The Lane Brothers. The Lane brothers appear in The Boy With The Thorn In His Side Parts 5 and 6, which are not out yet. Danny will also appear in their spin-off book.

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This Is Nowhere is linked to Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature by location. This Is Nowhere is set almost entirely in my home village, Hurn. All of my books contain real locations, but I usually fictionalise them and change the names of towns and streets. In this book, I kept everything real. The character of Jake returns home to Hurn after running away as a teenager, and the house he lives in is my actual house now. In Elliot Pie, I have fictionalised some of the locations, but kept Hurn real. Elliot cycles out to Hurn when exploring new places and befriends a lady called Sandra. Sandra lives next door to Jake and May. They are not mentioned by name, but eagle-eyed readers might have picked up on her mentions of the neighbours, and the fact she dislikes the long-legged lurcher type dogs they keep. Both books contain scenes set on the beautiful Sopley Common, a real place, and probably my favourite place in the world.

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Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature is linked to A Song For Bill Robinson, a YA book I hope to release later this year. Both characters live on Hoppers Close, on the Holds End estate. In Elliot Pie, he longs to escape this small world and frequently cycles away from the area to make new friends. At the start of the book, he mentioned the other people who live on Hoppers Close (based on a close I used to live on as a teenager) and tells the reader a bit about the Robinson family. He also spots Bill Robinson walking across the close with his guitar on his back. A Song For Bill Robinson is set almost exclusively on the Holds End estate. It’s a fictionalised version of a council estate named Townsend, which is where I grew up.

And as I have already mentioned, A Song For Bill Robinson links to The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series, in particular, the last three books, where Danny is an adult and running his own nightclub. Indie nightclub Chaos features heavily in The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series, and in the later books is a place up and coming bands can audition for regular slots. At the end of A Song For Bill Robinson, he and his band secure such an audition at Chaos, and Danny Bryans is mentioned. He may even appear briefly in the sequel to A Song For Bill Robinson, Emily’s Baby.

The only book not obviously linked to the others is The Tree Of Rebels, because it is set in the future. In my mind however, the location is a future version of the places I have already fictionalised in my other books.

I’m not sure why I like to link my books up. It sort of happened naturally and has become a habit. It’s easy to do because I tend to use the same real and fictionalised locations and my characters tend to be similar in class and background. Plus, it’s fun. It means I never really have to say goodbye to anyone!