2013-09-20

Editing Update: More Sequels, New Crimes

Here are my latest announcements:

I am currently working on the development of the sequel to Innocent in Las Vegas with AR Winters. Always a pleasure to work on detective fiction and I like the way that the author mixes up the gritty, the romantic and the comedic.

I'm also working with the Wearmouth boys (like the Hardy Boys but not really like them at all) on developing the sequel to First Activation which has been given the working title of … I'll let you guess.


Damon Courtney asked me to take an in-depth look at the character development for the final instalment of his Dragon Bond trilogy. This is always a wise thing to do in a trilogy (and even more so in longer series) as you the will tend to accumulate characters, and when you come to the end, all the important ones need to have their stories brought to a satisfactory conclusion.

You self-editors, the exercise I prescribe is to categorize each chapter according to which characters appear, so that for each character, you can read back to back the chapters that feature them.

One of my discoveries was that the Big Bad was referred to in almost every chapter, even though he only actually appears in a few of them. When one character becomes a preoccupation of all the others, it is important to assess all the references to him, to see how he is reflected in the attitudes of others towards him. This can be revealing about all characters.

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