Adrian Faulkner's Blog

2024 was a funny old year in many ways. I’d labelled it my Year of Business. There were a lot of positives, and indeed I end the year in an exciting position going into 2025… but the entire year has been plagued with underlying health issues.

I very much want to get back into competition. This year, more than most, I’ve missed it, and as my students have now reach a stage where they are ready to start to compete, it’s only going to get worse. I want to be ready and am trying to put in all the ri...

As part of my journey with self-publishing, I’m going to be creating a multiverse, with a number of series all linking together to tell a much bigger story.  In this article I talk about my desire to tell huge, epic stories and how I’m finally able to do so…

As you know, back at the end of last year, I decided to part ways with my agent and pursue Self-Publishing. This wasn’t born out of any frustrations about the difficulties of traditional publishing and looking for an easier ride. Instead, i...

2023 was my Year of Making. Although I’d not revealed it at the time, the reason behind this theme for the year was because I wanted it to be a year where I gathered the data needed to make a big decision. There was a big question at the heart of my 2023. Would I continue to pursue traditional publishing, or would I break free and go indy? As I revealed, I’d been very busy in late 2021 and 2022 running a number of pen names getting some real-world experience of the self-published market.

What...

After my announcement that I was going self-published, a few people thought that I’d just taken Black as Knight’s submission process badly, and that I should have just gone and written another book and moved on. What they don’t know is that I did.

Not that the Black as Knight submission process didn’t hurt. It did. After spending 8 years on that book, for it to spend another 8 months on submission, only for it to then fail at the last approval… was very tough! After that happened in March 2021,...

If you’ve not heard the news, I’ve parted ways with my agent. Many people have messaged me asking questions, so I thought I’d write a blog post to explain.

Now, when things like this happen, people often wonder if there is some drama behind it. Publishing is full of scandal and people acting inappropriately, so I understand the interest, but there’s no drama.

I’ve been with my agent for 8/9 years and she’s been amazing. I got her through sheer luck. Close to a decade ago, a group of friends and...

You’ll notice, if you’ve been following along, that I didn’t do an end-of-year review last year. There was a reason for that – and whilst I’ve now put in an update a year later, it’s worth taking the time to explain a bit of an overview of 2021 to understand my approach to 2022.

In many ways, 2021 was my annus horribilis. I started the year being dreadfully ill–something caused by the events of 2020–and the further I get away from that time and continue the long process back to full health, the ...

You’ll notice that I’m writing this a year late. . There are many reasons for that, and whilst I regret not writing one at the time so not to have the benefit of hindsight, it is helpful to me from the perspective of someone now looking at the progress made in 2022.

Going into 2021,2021, we were still very much in Lockdown Life, but despite that I felt things were I felt things were making progress. I’d just managed to deal with an issue that was affecting my health and causing me a lot of stres...

Today was another busy day. 

I’ve got a lot to write, a lot to edit and a lot to read. 

I managed to do the first two. 

My problem is that reading takes time, and I think I really need to do these outlines as I read the books I’m learning craft from.  There’s also a temptation to skip bits in order to execute fast.  I think that’s a mistake.  By all means work fast, but don’t take shortcuts. 

However, a lot of this preparatory work seems needless.  I need to write the s...

I’m feeling pretty good with myself today.  I started late today and thought I wouldn’t get many words done, but I ended up getting over 5.5k done.  And this was despite the focus of the day being on outlining the novella. 

Surrounding myself with focused, business-minded, and fast writers has really pushed me in the last couple of weeks.  I feel my process has massively improved over the last couple of months.  I was doing OK during the pandemic, but it often felt like...

I have a lot to do in the next couple of weeks.  So much so, I’m going to have to work smart.  I spent a lot of time doing research for a novella today.  This is going to be different because it uses a four act structure and I need to put a bit of time into craft. 

The idea is to use this to work on more detailed outlines.  In doing so, I’m having to fight an urge to dive straight in with just a rough outline, thinking it will do.  By investing a bit more time up fron...