reading

My Next Release ‘The Dark Finds You’ is Now Available to Pre-Order!

~ ChanAtkins ~ Leave a comment

The final book in an interconnected universe is finally here…

image owned by Luke Fielding Art

First of all, let me apologise for the lack of blog posts since I started sharing Black Hare Valley Book 1 with you a few months back! A huge thank you to those who read along and left me feedback. I really appreciate it and serialising was an overwhelmingly positive thing to do. I will be serialising something else soon but more on that next week!

This week the good news is I finally have a new book on the horizon. The Dark Finds You is a gritty crime thriller drama about a fractured community and a missing boy. It also contains characters from many of my previous books in a shared universe. However, it can very much be read as a standalone and you do not have to read any of the previous books to enjoy this one.

If you are interested in exploring the connected universe however, I’ve listed the order to read them in. If you start with The Boy With The Thorn In His Side series and work your way through, you will find that The Dark Finds You makes a satisfying conclusion to previous storylines in that world. The main characters in The Dark Finds You are: Danny Bryans (nightclub owner), Leon Lawrenson (drug dealer) Bill Robinson (lead singer in a band who play at Danny’s nightclub) Elliot Pie (Bill’s father is having a baby with Elliot’s mother so they are now almost brothers) Laura Pie, (Elliot’s mother) Leah Barratt (Elliot’s friend) and Finn Douglas (Elliot’s other friend and the catalyst for the storyline when he goes missing.)

And here are the order the characters appear in books I have already published. In other words, read in this order!

Danny Bryans – The Boy With The Thorn In His Side – Part One (5 book series)

Leon and Joe Lawrenson – The Mess Of Me

Elliot and Laura Pie, Leah Barratt and Finn Douglas – Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature

Bill Robinson – A Song For Bill Robinson, Emily’s Baby and The Search For Summer (also known as The Holds End Trilogy)

Danny Bryans also appears in At Night We Played In The Road and the events at the end of that book lead on to…

Leon and Joe Lawrenson – The Mess Of Us

Here is the blurb for The Dark Finds You:

14 year-old Finn Douglas is missing.

Best friend Elliot is desperate to find him, but why is mutual friend Leah strangely reluctant to help?

Elliot’s pregnant mother fears her agoraphobia has returned, while his almost-brother, Bill, agrees to help look for Finn but risks exposing his secret drug habit in the process.

Meanwhile, ex-con Danny knows his nightclub is being infiltrated by drug dealers who work for a gang from his past. And drug dealer Leon can’t have the fresh start he wants until he has repaid his debt to the same criminal gang.

A collection of characters with dark pasts find themselves linked by a common mystery that they all have a clue to solving – what has happened to Finn Douglas?

And you can pre-order the ebook here: https://books2read.com/u/m07dgP

At the time of writing you can’t pre-order the paperback because I am currently waiting for the proof copies arrive for me to check over! I will let you know as soon as the order links are live.

Should I Serialise My Work-In-Progress?

~ ChanAtkins ~ 4 Comments

A fun way to gain new readers or a huge piracy risk?

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

I’ve been feeling the urge for a while now to serialise my work-in-progress. I’m not sure which one. Perhaps Black Hare Valley Book 1 – testing the waters before it’s eventual release. Or perhaps a book I’ve not written yet – in other words, I’ll write a chapter each week and share it’s progress as it happens.

I’m not sure where this urge came from other than the fact I’ve seen other authors doing this and thought it looked fun. It could potentially be a cool way to gain interest and new readers. It could bring me some useful feedback too. It would be a nice incentive to write. And, I’ve sort of done it before.

If you’ve followed my blog from it’s very early days you’ll remember me sharing The Boy With The Thorn In Its Side chapter by chapter, way, way before it was published. This blog was the first part of my author platform to exist and sharing my work back then was scary but exciting! Nothing bad came of doing that either. In fact, I got regular supportive comments and those early readers gave me the confidence to keep going. I also wrote The Tree Of Rebels straight onto Wattpad, sharing a chapter a week until it was written. The final book I released was a more polished version.

These days though, I worry more about the risks of posting a future book like this. I recently found out that one of my books has been illegally pirated onto the LibGen site. This is the site Meta has been scraping books without the author’s permission, and without any payment to the author, to use the data to train its AI models. There is a court battle on the horizon that will affect us all.

My books being pirated and illegally downloaded is horrible enough, but the thought of a book not yet published being stolen in this way worries me more. I guess it didn’t worry me so much back in the day because I was just starting out. I wasn’t even sure I would ever publish anything at that point.

But now… I’d feel sick if I shared a work-in-progress only to have it stolen by someone else.

I guess I’m writing this to ask if anyone has any advice? I’d like to know if readers would be interested in this sort of thing. Would you like to receive a chapter a week as a book is being written? Would you prefer something like that to be free? Or do you think it’s something I should only offer to paid subscribers? Does anyone know how best I could protect the work against theft?

And finally, if I did do it, what would you be more interested in? Black Hare Valley which is written but not ready for release…. Or something brand new, something I write on the go, just for you?

Let me know!

This Week I Had Five WIPS Vying For Attention In My Head

~ ChanAtkins ~ 5 Comments

I Need More Me’s!

Image by TyliJura from Pixabay

If you’ve followed my blog for a while you’ll probably know that I find it impossible to work on just one writing project at a time. Ideally, I would love to. One story idea, one plot, one set of characters, one job to do! I envy writers whose minds work like that. It must feel very in control.

It’s never that way with me. There is always the book ready to be published that needs quotes posting, cover sorting, final edits and so on. There is always the current priority work-in-progress and sometimes that’s a series, not a standalone. And there are always the future books, the ideas, all in various stages!

It’s been like that this week, and then some.

First, I am trying to draw attention to The Mess Of Us which came out on Valentines Day. That means promoting it as best I can and creating graphics of quotes from the book and reviews as they come in.

Second, I am preparing my next book for release at the end of the year. I need to sort out the cover, finalise the blurb and send it to my editor. Recently I read it through on my kindle to pick up any lingering typos or plot holes and found it to be a very clean read. But it still needs that professional edit and proofread. I hope to release The Dark Finds You towards the end of the year.

Third, I’ve been adding stories and poems to my next anthology Dirty Feet. I’ve no idea when I will release this, but every now and then I add new bits and pieces to it, so it’s always on the go.

Next, I’ve been working on my official work-in-progress, Black Hare Valley. It was never meant to be a series but book one inspired two more books and then I had the idea of a diary style companion book. That’s what I am writing at the moment, and once that is finished, I will be going through each book in the series with a fine toothed comb, ensuring there are no plot holes and a clear timeline that makes sense!

But as well as all this I started getting the urge to create a graphic novel style version of Black Hare Valley. Don’t ask me why. I can’t even draw very well! I haven’t done anything about this. But the urge is there and it’s very strong!

Plus, I’ve been thinking a lot about which book I will work on once Black Hare Valley is complete and decided it will be The Seventh Child, a family mystery thriller. This idea has been building for a while, and I already had the whole plot, the location and the character bios in a notebook. A while back I wrote the first chapter, because, why not? This week, this book has been screaming at me to get on with it! Please, someone tell it it has to wait!

On top of that another book idea keeps growing and swelling and this week I figured out exactly how I will tell it. Anya and Cody Start The Apocalypse is an idea that came to me in bits and pieces with the characters showing up first. I eventually started a notebook to keep track of things and soon had character bios and locations and a loose plot. That plot has since tightened up but I was still unsure of how to tell the story. Then I figured it out. Epistolary style! The book will be written by another narrator who is writing a dissertation project on Anya and Cody after their story is over. It will be told by the narrator compiling diaries, letters, news reports and social media posts in order to explain what happened. I’ve written diary style books before, (The Mess Of Me and The Mess Of Us, plus the companion diary for Black Hare Valley) but I’ve never tried anything like this so I am really, really excited! And I want to do it now!

But it has to wait! I will carry on adding bits to the notebook of course. But that doesn’t mean it will shut up.

My head is full of all these stories all the time. I wish I could create some extra me’s or some extra hands to get it all done. I think I will feel better once I finish the Black Hare Valley diary book. I can then fully concentrate on getting the whole series ready for publication in 2026. I would love to have the first book ready to go in January 2026, for example. The rest of the books will follow one by one throughout that year, and in that time I will be busy writing The Seventh Child.

Then it will be Anya and Cody’s turn…

What is wrong with me?

The Mess Of Us Is Released Next Week!

~ ChanAtkins ~ Leave a comment

Only a week to go until my 23rd book is released…

https://books2read.com/u/4NNka6

Exactly one week from now, my 23rd book, which just so happens to be the sequel to my first ever book, will be released! The Mess Of Us came out way back in 2013.

This is very exciting for several reasons. Of course, it is always exciting to release a new book and it never gets old holding that book in your hands and knowing that you did it!

It’s extra exciting because it’s taken me so long to get around to writing the sequel. I did have ideas for it years ago but didn’t do anything with them for a very long time. Then, a couple of years back I started to think about how the first book ended and that got me wondering exactly what the characters would have done next…

I decided to set the sequel two years after the events of the first book. A violent altercation between Joe and his oldest brother, Leon, led everyone in the book to an uncertain place, fraught with anger, fear, resentment and guilt.

I started thinking a lot about Leon. He is a villain through and through in the first book. Main character and narrator Lou describes him best:

“Leon scares me. I don’t like being in his presence. He makes me feel uncomfortable, but I am unable to really articulate why. He wants to be a hard man; he wants to not care about anyone or anything, as if somehow, he believes this to be the best way to go through life. It is what he seeks to achieve. Not giving a shit. Dealing drugs, if that is what he is doing, (and we can strongly suppose that it is), is just his latest ploy to try to achieve this. He is bizarrely determined to live as crooked and brutal a life as possible, and you can see it in every inch of him – his empty, hard eyes, his lack of remorse or empathy for anything or anyone; the way his body ripples and bristles, as if every muscle within it has been injected with pure blind rage. I wonder whom he is trying to impress, and I can only imagine that it is himself.”

But there are moments in The Mess Of Me where Lou concedes that Leon didn’t exactly have a kind or caring upbringing. As the oldest, he is the scapegoat in their dysfunctional and often violent family:

‘Yeah, he grabbed the frying pan and clocked Mick over the head with it. Jesus Christ there was blood everywhere. He had to have eight stitches.’
‘And the police turned up.’
‘And arrested Leon. Mum and Mick told them to.’
I turn my head and look at the side of Joe’s face. ‘Joe, I’ve never really thought about it much until now, but you do know that is really disgusting, don’t you?’ I watch as Joe nods back at me. ‘He was about fourteen then? He was just trying to protect his mum. I’ve never ever felt sorry for Leon before, but thinking about it now, that was pretty harsh on him.’
‘He’s hard to feel sorry for.’
‘Do you think your mum and Mick ever feel sorry about that? Letting him get taken away, when it was them fighting in the first place? I couldn’t live with myself.’
Joe snorts again. ‘They always think they’re right,’ he replies. ‘Doesn’t matter what you say or do. Doesn’t matter if you prove them wrong or whatever. Neither of them are ever fucking wrong, ever. So no, I don’t think they would ever feel guilty about that.’

It was moments like this one that made Lou wonder about Leon. In The Mess Of Me, she was disgusted by him and frightened of him, but she was also endlessly curious about him and his secret, shady life.

It made me think what had driven Leon to a life of crime. Lack of money and parental support at home are often factors that drive youngsters towards crime. Children from deprived areas are far more likely to be groomed into running drugs for gangs, for example, and in The Mess of Us, as both Lou and Joe attempt to get past what Leon did, she finally discovers how he got into crime:

‘Leon, how old were you were you first started doing it?’
‘Thirteen,’ he replies without hesitation. My eyes grow wider. I think back, trying to picture him at thirteen. He had longer hair back then. He was always bigger than us but he wasn’t huge, or muscled. He was just a kid. I’m still staring, feeling dazed as the realisation hits me. He frowns back at me. ‘What?’
‘I mean… How? How did…’
‘This older kid at school,’ he says. ‘He let us try a bit of grass for free. After school, walking home. Me and Travis, some others. Not long after that he wanted us to pay for it and not long after that he wanted us to, you know. Run errands.’
Shit. I slump back and stare ahead. I had never imagined it like this. I had only ever seen Leon as the aggressor, the bully, the criminal. I had never once imagined that someone else had done this to him, lured him in, made him promises, got him on side. At thirteen…

The Mess Of Us is about a lot of things. The main plot follows Lou and Joe grappling with an unplanned pregnancy alongside dealing with the fact Leon has just been released from prison. But it is also a story about forgiveness and redemption and about what happens to people to turn them hard and cold…

And what is even more exciting for me is that by the time I finished writing it, The Mess Of Us gave me an amazing and unexpected gift!

An idea for a brand new book! A book connecting all of my characters who lives inhabit and cross paths within the same universe. A book that would tie up all of their original stories, whilst dealing with the mystery of a missing child, and delving into Leon more fully as a character.

I had the best fun writing it. It was the easiest and fastest book I’ve ever written, probably because I already knew all the characters so well!

It’s called The Dark Finds You and I hope to release it towards the end of 2025, so stay tuned. I will be posting a lot about it and how it connects to my other books nearer the time!

Meanwhile, I’d really appreciate it if you grabbed a copy of The Mess Of Us whilst it’s still just 99p for the ebook! It does help if you have read the first book, but it can certainly be read as a standalone.

Thank you!

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.