Sam Boyd's Blog: Sam Boyd Author
March 13, 2019
Back to writing
Got back to putting words on paper today and put the first 2000 words to my new novel Conspirator. The first chapter is on the Uffingham Estate the ancestral home of the Marquess of Uffingham. He lord Jack Turners, girlfriend, Fiona Templeton’s father.
It’s the wedding reception of Pamela Harper and Mel Doyle. It is not the happy occasion it should be. A shot is fired and someone killed. With so many high profile people present was the person killed the real target? The SF02 team don’t think so. They need time to find out. To buy time the cause of death of the victim is released as a heart attack. So begins the conspiracy. I have admitted that my writing process is that of a pantser so at the moment I haven’t decided who the Conspirator is. I have several options. For example it could be someone inside one of the Intelligence Services of MI5 or MI6 or maybe someone from a previous novel. I let the story develop as I write. I know the beginning point and the ending and let the story in the middle develop as I write. I am excited to see what tomorrow will bring.
Sam
It’s the wedding reception of Pamela Harper and Mel Doyle. It is not the happy occasion it should be. A shot is fired and someone killed. With so many high profile people present was the person killed the real target? The SF02 team don’t think so. They need time to find out. To buy time the cause of death of the victim is released as a heart attack. So begins the conspiracy. I have admitted that my writing process is that of a pantser so at the moment I haven’t decided who the Conspirator is. I have several options. For example it could be someone inside one of the Intelligence Services of MI5 or MI6 or maybe someone from a previous novel. I let the story develop as I write. I know the beginning point and the ending and let the story in the middle develop as I write. I am excited to see what tomorrow will bring.
Sam
March 12, 2019
Editing and other stuff
One of the decisions I made some time ago, was to learn to do everything related to self-publishing myself. This was after I had paid for publishing my first book Consequences. I say , I made the decision, but it was really forced upon me through lack of finances. So, now I write, self-edit, design and produce my own covers in word and convert them into jpeg files, etc etc.
This results in me regularly checking back on my work and never being satisfied with what I see. Yesterday was one of those days. After checking how my books look on Amazon I went to the look inside feature on two of my books and on the compendium set of three books. What I found was that they didn’t look good on small screen. The font wasn’t looking the same as in my manuscript. So I spent the whole day making changes. This meant not a word was written in the new novel. This year I have set myself the challenge of writing and publishing four novels. The first Immigrants is finished and published. I need to complete and finish the current book, Conspirator by the end of May. So today will have to be a double writing day. A minimum of 2000 words and closer to 3000. I like my finished novels to be around 70,000 words so I have broken my 90 day turn around into manageable sections of:
Research 8 days
Writing 50 days
Design 7 days
Editing 10 days
Beta readers 7 days
Final Edit 3 days
Publishing & promotion 5 days
I work on my books for around six hours every day and need to get to it now.
Will let you know how my day goes tomorrow.
Sam
This results in me regularly checking back on my work and never being satisfied with what I see. Yesterday was one of those days. After checking how my books look on Amazon I went to the look inside feature on two of my books and on the compendium set of three books. What I found was that they didn’t look good on small screen. The font wasn’t looking the same as in my manuscript. So I spent the whole day making changes. This meant not a word was written in the new novel. This year I have set myself the challenge of writing and publishing four novels. The first Immigrants is finished and published. I need to complete and finish the current book, Conspirator by the end of May. So today will have to be a double writing day. A minimum of 2000 words and closer to 3000. I like my finished novels to be around 70,000 words so I have broken my 90 day turn around into manageable sections of:
Research 8 days
Writing 50 days
Design 7 days
Editing 10 days
Beta readers 7 days
Final Edit 3 days
Publishing & promotion 5 days
I work on my books for around six hours every day and need to get to it now.
Will let you know how my day goes tomorrow.
Sam
March 11, 2019
In the beginning
Well here goes. This is my first blog ever. I’m not sure what I am doing or why but I am going to try and provide a diary or picture of what I do each day to put words onto a page. But first a little background of where it all started for me.
I come from a large family ten children in all which in a way shaped who I am. As a kid I grew up full of insecurities of who or what I was. We were poor and somehow this made me feel not good enough. To compensate for this I made up stories in my head that made me feel good. I am ashamed to say that sometimes I repeated these better pictures of myself out loud.
I am telling you this not to cleanse my soul but as a backdrop to what started as daydreams became the driver to becoming a writer. Although the reality was it would take many years to come to the surface. In fact it took almost the rest of my life. You see I didn’t start writing novels until after I retired from working.
Now I have written or maybe I should say started fifteen books but self published only seven. Six of which plus a compendium of three of the books in a series are on Goodreads. But I digress. The point is that it was my background, my daydreams that was the spark that ignited the fire to write. Now every day I try and write a thousand words. I have just finished and published my latest book IMMIGRANTS. It is the story of a family seeking a new life and the abuse they suffer at the hands of people traffickers and smugglers. So I am starting my new novel and my goal is to provide a fly on the wall expose of what I do to tell my story. My reason is simple. I still suffer the same insecurities I had as a kid. Not feeling good enough and hoping that telling my personal story will help me become a better writer.
Sam Boyd
I come from a large family ten children in all which in a way shaped who I am. As a kid I grew up full of insecurities of who or what I was. We were poor and somehow this made me feel not good enough. To compensate for this I made up stories in my head that made me feel good. I am ashamed to say that sometimes I repeated these better pictures of myself out loud.
I am telling you this not to cleanse my soul but as a backdrop to what started as daydreams became the driver to becoming a writer. Although the reality was it would take many years to come to the surface. In fact it took almost the rest of my life. You see I didn’t start writing novels until after I retired from working.
Now I have written or maybe I should say started fifteen books but self published only seven. Six of which plus a compendium of three of the books in a series are on Goodreads. But I digress. The point is that it was my background, my daydreams that was the spark that ignited the fire to write. Now every day I try and write a thousand words. I have just finished and published my latest book IMMIGRANTS. It is the story of a family seeking a new life and the abuse they suffer at the hands of people traffickers and smugglers. So I am starting my new novel and my goal is to provide a fly on the wall expose of what I do to tell my story. My reason is simple. I still suffer the same insecurities I had as a kid. Not feeling good enough and hoping that telling my personal story will help me become a better writer.
Sam Boyd
