Rachel Redhead's Blog

I've barely read anything for ages now, and I have a lot of catch up on, but fist I'm going to revisit The Sandman Universe, the Lucifer books were a bit of a blur to be at the time and I don't think I gave them the proper attention they deserved, then there's the Hellblazer books, The Dreaming: Waking Hours and the Locke & Key crossover to revisit, and I need to give Nightmare Country another read, as part 3 of TSU has begun and I feel the need to revisit part 2

It's that time of the year again, 50k words in a month. Last year I put together a wild section of short stories, most of them unique and stand alone, with a few little dips into my other books here and there. This year my project is a collection of short stories all set within the ongoing Twister storyline and featuring the Unruled Fleet quite heavily. The working title is Twisted Tales of the Unruled Fleet.

The Unruled Fleet is a creation that I've been working on for another project that's recycling a few unused ideas but I ran out of time editing it before NaNoWriMo started. They're a motley assembly of time pirates, they have a ragtag fleet of magically enhanced ships that can sail on the seas and also in space. The Unruled Fleet obey no laws except their own, hence their name. Even though I'm putting off other projects to write this book I'll edit the others before this one, as some events in the unnamed project I'm on editing may directly affect things that I'm writing about or planning to write about in TTOTUF.

I'm also working on a third collection of older stories for the Third Lockdown Compendium, which I once again plan to release as a free e-book, for people to read during Lockdown. Alas it needs more editing than I thought and may not be ready this side of the new year.

My intended publishing order, via Twisted Books, is therefore:
The Unnamable Project
The Third Lockdown Compendium
Twisted Tales of the Unruled Fleet

Letha is a Twister, that is to say a member of the Grand Order of Temporal Knights, a group of beings who use magic to generally keep the universe ticking over, and minimising threats across the galaxy. Letha has been something of a background character of late, an apprentice to Leona Kaizana she has learned her craft and she's now chosen how she's going to best serve within the order. I wanted to utilise her in a different way to both Judy and Hannah and to directly contract Anna, who's gargantuan volume preceded this one. Letha is something of a finder of hidden things, as well as a detective, in that her role is to seek out lost magical artefacts and investigate crimes involving magic that can't easily be solved by others. Letha really likes to commit herself to her duty, taking on deep cover roles as part of her investigations. This helps her to get to know those involved, in order to locate her goal. I also wanted to explore the elven realm a little more, it first featured in The Gods of War: Oh My Goddess!, which featured the Elven Insurrection and Vesta's original and efficient take down of their group, after falling in love with their leader and seducing him to her side. I wanted to explore the realm's backstory a little more, as it's a much wilder place than the prime realm of earth, and as revealed now it used to be under the benevolent rule of Hecate, the goddess of magic. I do want to revisit some of the plot points set up in this book again, and see just what kind of nightmarish horrors are really lurking inside of the locked and hidden Summer Palace. I also had a lot of fun developing the Fiddler, she's a wild and capricious character, a lot cleverer than many think her to be, I hope I can revisit this aspect of the character again, as I think I've written all I need to about the Hermit aspect. I also want to introduce the so-far unnamed third aspect, who remains unnamed because I haven't finalised all the details about this aspect yet. I also wanted to lighten the tone a little and add some comedy moments, again to make this volume as different to the last one as I could, plus the humour also helps to hide the seriousness of events, as it more or less runs parallel to the last one, though I'm releasing it afterwards as I needed to get Anna Sinclair: The Evil Dad all properly sorted and into a publishable shape, and it was easier to do that knowing that the first draft of this book was already written, so I could add mentions of what was in this book while writing that book. I also brought in Rache from my Vengeance Cycle books, as I've totally lost the voluminous notes I made for those stories and I could barely remember anything about how she got out of being framed for murder by one of the gods, so instead I reset her timeline and I'll go back to her being a conventional private detective later on

I'm still on editing Letha Hobbs: The Fiddler's Dance, a much shorter Twister book after the huge mammoth volume that was Anna Sinclair: The Evil Dad. Now that I've revealed the nature of the new story arc that's going to run through the next half-dozen or so Twister books, I'm excited and also terrified that using such an intriguing concept is either going to go well or fail spectacularly. The Stelline arc of the last few books kind of nearly got away from me at times, as I felt the whole concept of a reality war, where countless alternate versions of reality were enslaved/liberated or destroyed in the conflict nearly became an incomprehensible mess. That's why I kind of pushed Anna Sinclair forward as the face of the enemy, so there was a simple foe to fight and hopefully defeat. It didn't help that I decided not to write the original sequel story to Hannah & Judy: Twisted Tales, which would have seen several of the Twisters go into a higher dimension to fight a version of that war there, which would have led to a resurgence of the Stelline, before their eventual defeat. Instead I kind of pushed the arc into the background and wrote about other story ideas that involved Judy, along with her adoptive family and I left the Stelline arc all but ignored, until finally I wrote the definitive end to things with the Stelline betraying Anna and Anna siding with the Twisters, and coming to some sort of stalemate with them, before she eventually joined their ranks, because it would be less hassle to have her helping them than fighting them. This is why I like the new Twister arc more, the nature of the dangers are clearer, though there will be some complications to come, just to add intrigue. The thing I also like about Letha Hobbs: The Fiddler's Dance is that it's mostly about Letha and her new role as an investigative agent, rather than a warrior like Hannah, a political activist like Judy or a well-meaning adventurer like Anna. There's a few early scenes with Anna and Jane Kaizana that were pretty much written for the gags, but everything else is a more serious story which sees Letha exploring mysterious deaths, and adopting some rather severe methods to do so. I also like that I wrote it as one complete novella, rather than the hybrid style I usually use of writing each chapter as a short story in its own right, with a large cast of characters, styles and POV's.
Editing has always been the part of the process I've struggled the most with, which is why I always take my time and give it the respect it needs. I rushed the editing on Judy's first solo book and regretted that a lot, even going so far to issue a completely re-edited version to replace the original, with a couple of new stories in it to help justify things artistically, though editorially it was very much the best decision I could have made. So that's why I use that memory to make myself go over every word, every sentence and every plot point in the story structure to make sure I can do the best job possible.
Of course when I'm editing my anxiety often rises up, and I begin to feel like I'm wasting my time, that there's no point writing books that maybe no-one will ever read. But I have to keep writing, otherwise I'll never get better. It doesn't matter if no-one reads them, I know they're the best that I can do, and they do entertain me. Sometimes I just need to have a good cry to get all that out and then get on with things again. I have a lot of stories still to write and indulging in self-doubt isn't going to get the typing done any quicker. If I do want anything as a writer then it is for others to love my characters as much as I do, I know I'm probably not going to be famous or make any money out of it, a little of both while nice isn't why I sit myself down each night and try to encapsulate fantastic ideas and concepts into the medium of words, I write because I can't not write. If I didn't write my books then I wouldn't ever be able to all of the me that I want to be.

Ok, so this is just about lulu.com and their recent 'regeneration' into a terrible service provider. Not only have they lost half of my books, almost all of those they do have don't have their covers attached to them. I understand these things take time, and there's the law of unintended consequences, but given how much preparation time they allowed themselves, didn't they do a test run on a parallel private server first? Now on to what they do have, their new content creator, it has been scaled back so much that it's got no options for font, text size or the ability to add more than one image to a project, so I can't add the Twisted Books logo to the back as I'd planned to do so on the original version of the book, which has vanished, most likely deleted in the renewal. If it does turn up I may release it as a limited edition cover, but otherwise it looks like I'm stuck with the new house style imposed by the new awful new system, especially as I should have the next book, Letha Hobbs: The Fiddler's Dance ready to publish before May's out.

today I finally finished editing Judy Collins: Social Justice Twister, it feels like I've been on with this book forever, I'd planned out so much of it in advance, to continue on directly after the last book, and then later scrapped pretty much everything or recycled the ideas for other books, before finally getting a new assembly of story ideas together, so I could take the Twister books in a new direction. The Stelline arc was in danger of becoming a parody of itself so it needed to be wrapped up and I had ideas for the 'evil' Sinclair character that begin in this book and continue on into the next book in the series, Anna Sinclair: The Evil Dad which as the title suggests indicated that Sinclair finds a way to be herself on her own terms and yet also make amends for her poor life choices of late. Hers is a redemption arc but not overly so, she doesn't see herself as a hero so she's able to be bring the fight with her when it's needed. I want to move Judy into more cerebral sci-fi stories in future books, and I've also been developing Letha Hobbs a fair bit outside of Social Justice Twister. Indeed I've submitted an original 9k word short story to a book collection featuring Letha and sometimes Violet the robot, as well as Cru in an interesting fragment of the story. The Evil Dad will take the Twister books more into classic horror tropes, with demons, fallen-angels, the anti-christ and more appearing in what could be the largest volume of the range to date.

A new year and I'm still on editing the next Judy Collins book. I stopped while I was writing my book for NaNoWriMo and then I hit a bit of a motivational slump and didn't do much of anything creatively in December. Now I've picked Judy back up and I'm dusting her down and hoping to get this editing done so I have something to publish this year.

the final chapter of the Raithaduine saga is now out there, and its fair to say that it shows just how much I've progressed as a writer. The first two books were really just every idea and joke that I could think of hammered into some sort of vaguely coherent storyline.

This third volume is (I hope) much more constructed and deliberate, with whole sections dedicated to character development so I could focus on a specific idea or situation before moving on with the storyline. I hope the jokes are still as good as the first two volumes, I'd hate to think I've lost my ability to do some good comedy writing.

added on as a bonus story is the novella Penny Dreadful: Back to School, this story is to really just introduce you to the characters, the set up and so forth, in advance of the first book proper, with the unoriginal working title of Volume One.

It's also got the story Penny Dreadful: Christmas Ghosts, which I'll be putting online for free on Christmas morning, as a spooky little something

there's a couple of additional stories in the book, that for one reason or another didn't make it into print, The Twister & Dr Tomorrow, my homage to HG Wells, and The Finder, a modern faerie tale that was inspired by the works of Holly Black, one of my favourite writers.

So the first draft of my NaNoWriMo book has scraped across the finish line with just a few words to spare, but fear not, the editing is the real work. Enough of me telling myself the story, now I have to tell it to everyone else, though you are more forgiving of my mistakes than I am. Editing is necessary, painful and should be viewed as the real part of making a book.

Without editing there's just 50k words all fighting to go in their own direction, instead of one huge harmonious collection of words ready to run the reader over like a juggernaut of amazing story details and character moments. Without editing all those pesky misspelled words will go unnoticed, and all those words that the auto-correct changed into real words, but the wrong words will be left unchanged back to what they should be too.

I find it very hard to express myself verbally, or indeed in my own head sometimes. I wish I could come up with a witty line in a conversation I'm being forced to have, but mostly I can't think of anything even remotely pithy. Writing my ideas out in manuscript format over a few months is what works for me. Having a couple of interesting character act them out on the page while strange events occur basically gives you a window to the inside of my head, where it's like that all the time, only more so.

Anyway I'm rambling, I've got stuff going on in my life right now and writing this book has been a great help and a magnificent distraction for me. Losing myself in the crazy world of Violet, Trudiode and Alice has been very cathartic, even though Hannah and Judy threaten to take up all of the end of that story, it really is about the three robot characters, and more besides, where would we all be without Mechi Noyd the famous robot detective and her pet rhino? She walks him on a leash and feeds him fresh plants every day.

Coming up with the character Penny Dreadful has been a joy too. Her intro story, and at 10k it really is just a hello, this is happening, big ending and get out, before things get too deep. I've got plans for a proper story featuring Penny and a character from an earlier book, Lucy Perdition, who will be both an antagonist and a protagonist to Penny.

this is first draft material...

Julie 4000 liked to invent things, nice helpful devices to make everyone’s day-to-day lives that little bit easier. “At last my new satellite detection system is working, it can find any approaching asteroids or comets, as well as help guide any nice visitors safely down to the spaceship landing zone in Hull.”
“Mind if I clean in here?” Olive.386 was proud of her creative daughter-droid but worried that she never did enough tidying up after herself. “There’s a lot of dust in here too.”
“Sorry Mummy,” Julie 4000 apologized. “I never notice it when I’m working.”
“There’s a lot of dust on this screen” Olive.386 tried spraying it with her harshest cleaning product, but it didn’t shift the dots of dust.
“That’s not dust” Julie 4000 panicked “that’s an invasion fleet, and judging by the slaughter formation it’s a Raithaduine fleet, we have to alert everyone to evacuate. We should probably tell the humans something too.”
“First though I’m going to give this carpet a really good clean. Imagine if a Raithaduine murder squad came in here to kill us both and they saw this carpet? I’d die of shame before they could tear me to pieces.”
“Some perspective” Julie said to her mother-board “we’ll have sold the house to some humans by then, it’ll be their problem, and not ours.”
“I suppose you’re right” Olive.386 replied “we’d better start tidying up now, so we can get the house put on the market.”
“I’ll have a quiet word with my friend Molly’s mother-board, she works for that strange non-human guy, he can inform the humans, that way we won’t get the blame for anything.”