gritty

The Dark Finds You Is Out Now!!

~ ChanAtkins ~ 2 Comments

And is it about to become a trilogy??

Image is mine https://books2read.com/u/mKjewB

Last Friday I released by 24th book, gritty crime thriller, The Dark Finds You. This book about dark pasts converging in the battle to find a missing teenager, can be read and enjoyed as a standalone, but it also fits into a bigger universe of connected characters and plots. If you’ve read The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series, The Holds End Trilogy, The Mess of Me, The Mess of Us, Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature or At Night We Played In The Road, you will find some familiar faces and locations in The Dark Finds You!

The idea for this novel came to me when writing The Mess Of Us and At Night We Played In The Road. Those books already fitted into a connected universe, as At Night We Played In The Road is technically a spin-off from The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series, and The Mess of Us and Me are set in the same universe and location. These books also had connecting plotlines with drug abuse, drug running, music and community being common themes.

The Holds End trilogy, essentially a murder mystery centred around enigmatic teenage singer, Bill Robinson, also takes place in the same universe and has similar plotlines converging.

This is why The Dark Finds You was so easy to write! All these characters had already converged, their storylines connected and their locations crossed over. The plot of a missing boy was then used to pull them all together and the plan was to end this universe for good. Tie up their individual storylines as well as the missing boy plot. I wrote The Dark Finds You over six weeks back in 2023 and it’s had to wait this long to get its release date. It is now available in ebook and paperback across multiple platforms.

So, what next? Well, in checking The Dark Finds You paperback proof for any errors just before Christmas, I suddenly got some new ideas and a sequel exploded in my head. There were a few things I left open at the end of the book and that crack was enough to let the ideas seep in. I had the whole plot within a day and simply could not resist writing it! Over Christmas I had three weeks off work and the book just poured out of me in a total of four weeks. Of course, that’s a rough first draft and it needs a lot of work!

This week I dived into my second draft of The Dark Finds You – Part Two. This is what I call a read-through draft, (where I remind myself of what I wrote!) and a timeline draft, (where I set out the timeline of events in a notebook to ensure there are no inconsistencies.) This didn’t take long to complete and by the end of it I had some things I wanted to change.

A few minor things to add and embellish and one major thing to change. This means that draft three which starts now, will be a rewrite more than an edit.

And then, guess what happened?

My rewrite ideas, which undoubtedly make the whole novel more twisty and unpredictable, led me to ideas for a possible part three…

Noooooooo!

I was meant to be releasing the Black Hare Valley series this year…

I have delayed that for the moment because it feels right to fully concentrate on this potential trilogy and get it done. I won’t say it will end the universe forever because that’s probably not going to happen, is it? It seems I love this world too much.

I am not 100% certain I will write a part three and make The Dark Finds You a trilogy… but the changes I make to part two will certainly leave that as a possibility.

In the meantime, I have got to crack on with this third draft/rewrite and also not neglect to market the first book!

As usual, thanks for joining me hear in my tiny corner of the internet! Thank you for your support in 2025 and for sticking with me into 2026!

The Mess Of Us is Available to Preorder!

~ ChanAtkins ~ 4 Comments

The sequel to my debut novel, The Mess Of Me, is coming soon.

https://amzn.eu/d/1tSsuD1

Exciting news! The Mess Of Us is nearly here! Over ten years have passed since I published my debut YA novel, The Mess Of Me, but I’m delighted to share that the sequel can now be preordered on Amazon! I only have the ebook set up at the moment and it is currently discounted at just 99p. I will have the paperback version set up soon, followed by both ebook and paperback on multiple platforms.

Here is the blurb:

“Dear World, so, obviously we made a mess of it. Inevitably. Otherwise I wouldn’t be writing to you again, would I?”

What do you do when the man who beat your boyfriend into a coma is about to be released from prison? What do you do when that man is your boyfriend’s older brother who wants to make amends?

Now a couple, Lou and Joe are struggling to get over the traumatic events of two years ago. When Joe’s brother Leon is released from prison, they must decide if either of them are able to forgive and forget what he did.
Meanwhile, an unexpected pregnancy throws their lives into chaos and when tragedy reawakens Lou’s self-destructive tendencies, she faces losing everything they have built. Can she fight her body image demons once again? Can either of them trust Leon? As Joe and Lou try to decide whether bad people can truly change, they are about to have one mess of a summer.

This sequel has been a long time coming but as you know, I have been very busy writing and publishing other books within this universe, as well as The Day The Earth Turned series. November saw the release of At Night We Played In The Road, which is a spin-off from The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series, and The Mess Of Us, which also connects to these books, will be released on February 14th 2025.

There will then be one final book in this universe, The Dark finds You, which I hope to release in the summer of 2025. That book is a crossover book, taking characters from lots of the other books in order to tie up all their stories.

For example, at the end of The Mess Of Us you might wonder what happens next to Leon, whose redemption arc is a pivotal plot point of the book, and you will find out in The Dark Finds You. This final book will basically pick up where The Mess Of Us ends!

If you are new to my books and are interested in gritty, character led stories that share a universe, this is the suggested reading order of the books:

The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series
The Mess Of Me
Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature
The Holds End trilogy
At Night We Played In The Road
The Mess Of Us
The Dark Finds You

It was a lot of fun being back with these characters again. The sequel had been building quietly in my head for a few years, and what concerned me most was Leon’s release from prison. How would Joe and Lou react to this? Would Leon want to apologise to Joe for what he did to him? And would Joe and Lou be able to forgive and forget what happened? I was curious about Leon as a character. In The Mess Of Me he is painted, quite rightly, as a total villain. However, towards the end of the book he commits a vile crime on the same day he saves someone’s life. I found that really interesting to explore and The Mess Of Us started to form in my head.

I hope you enjoy it and as always, thank you so much for following my journey!

A Song For Bill Robinson is released today!!

~ ChanAtkins ~ 2 Comments

It’s been a funny old week. A funny few weeks, maybe even months. Thanks perhaps to the stage of life I have now reached, my emotions are up and down like a yo-yo, with my moods springing from one extreme to the other on a daily basis. Not what I’m talking about today obviously, but, wow, I exhaust myself. Truly.

So, where one minute I am excited beyond belief that I have released yet another book, the next I am down about it for a multitude of reasons. I am writing this on publication day and my mood has dipped low. A few hours ago I was as high as a kite. A few days ago this would have had a very different tone to it.

But I digress…this is really just a very quick post to let you lovely people know that my new YA novel A Song For Bill Robinson is now live. The paperback will follow shortly. Hopefully, so will some reviews!

I would have liked to have done a lot more in the run up to this release, but my moods have really interfered with the whole process. Also, my laptop decided to die, come alive again, die again, and come alive again. I think it’s a bit like me at the moment! Raring to go one moment, completely frazzled the next. A new one is on the cards, but in the meantime I may be slightly hampered with internet type stuff! Tonight it is working just fine! Yesterday, not a peep.

Anyway, the link is below if you fancy getting your teeth into a really gritty YA novel about an unsolved murder, a neighbourhood feud and a teenager singing sensation! The first in a trilogy. See you soon xxx

The Mess Of Me Now

~ ChanAtkins ~ 3 Comments

In 2013 I released my debut Young Adult novel, The Mess Of Me. Originally, it was part of the self-publishing platform, Autharium. I then got a publishing deal with a small press and removed it from Autharium. This did not go to plan as a whole year later the small press had done nothing and not responded to my messages, so I decided to take it back and put it back with Autharium…who then closed. Since then, it has been with Pronoun, who also closed, and with Amazon. Currently, like my other books, The Mess Of Me is self-published through the indie collective Pict Publishing, and there I hope, it will stay.

Six years though! In that time I have published eight more books, had another child and started my own Community Interest Company; Chasing Driftwood Writing Group. Life has indeed changed a lot.

But in many ways, Lou Carling, the 16-year-old narrator of The Mess Of Me, is still with me, perhaps increasingly so. I will perhaps explain in another blog post, another day, but for a while now I have not been feeling myself and in times when I am feeling down, Lou is the voice I hear the loudest.

Perhaps because she is the character most like me. They say that a grain of truth seeps into every work of fiction and I agree. They say that characters are often at least partially based on people we know, or on parts of ourselves, and again, I agree.

In fact, Lou is not just the character most like me. She pretty much is me. When I wrote that book, it was perhaps the most cathartic process for me. I had an idea for a plot, for characters, back story and so on, but more than all of that, I had a burning desire to just speak my thoughts through her. Everything Lou says, thinks and feels in The Mess Of Me comes from me. Me when I was a teenager, and me now. I still think of myself as a mess and I probably always will.

The issues with food are still there, just as I suspect they will always be there for Lou. It’s just that as you grow older, you work out ways to rationalise your irrational thoughts. Or as in my case, you have your own children and are determined to set a good example and not let them down.

But for me, The Mess Of Me is a voice in my head, and Lou’s voice is one I hear more than ever lately. I feel the strongest urge to write the sequel, which contains a storyline which is also something true from my own life, but at the moment there are too many other books in progress to focus on it.

Anyway, here are a few reasons why Lou is me and I am Lou;

  • She is obsessed with being thinner
  • she thinks her life will be better if she is thinner
  • every day she thinks and obsesses about being thinner
  • if she does not do anything to help her get thinner she feels like a failure
  • she puts all her thoughts and feelings in writing rather than actually telling people
  • she’s feels the pull of self-destructive behaviour and tries hard to resist
  • she thinks everyone else’s lives are far more interesting than her own
  • for this reason, despite not really liking humans too much, she is endlessly fascinated with them
  • she is in love with her best friend

For those of you perhaps interested in reading about Lou and Joe’s messy summer, the ebook is currently just 99p on Amazon and all other ebook platforms. Please consider leaving an honest review if you do happen to purchase the book. Many thanks!