A big, huge thank you to all who’ve downloaded (or are about to download) BloodTide. I hope you enjoy it.
In the north it’s rather grey and wet, not the best of weekends but I hope you have a good one, wherever you are. And if you’re writing here is a piece of top drawer advice from the author John Irving (something which took me at least two books to realise!)
‘I always try to think when I am writing of someone I do not know. The age of this unknown person is always either elderly and impatient in the way that elderly people can be impatient, or quite young, maybe too young to drive a car, 15, a difficult age, and impatient in the sense that the attention is always hopping to something else. I like to think that my principle task is to get that person’s attention and not lose it… If you turn your back on that reader and just amuse yourself, when you look back the reader will be reading another book or watching television or gone to the movies or fallen asleep.’ [ The Times Magazine 23/3/96]
Our job as writers is not to amuse ourselves. We must never forget our readers. I learned a lot of things writing crime fiction (more of that to come) but this was probably the most important of them all.
