Edmund Lester

Anyone who has been reading my earlier postings here and on twitter knows I have been going through a difficult patch in my writing over the past few weeks and months. When my wife had her mini-stoke earlier this year writing was irrelevant. Everything was. Now she is recovered I have chance to pick it up again only I'm finding I'm a different person to this time last year. The novel I was writing back in December/January that is maybe three quarters done does not interest me . Maybe this is because that's what I was writing when... I don't know. All I know is try as I might that is not happening. So I needed something else to try. And then when that failed something else...and something else...and something else again. Being honest the only thing that has gone okay since January - at least okay enough to see my type "The End" - was another Ben Williamson novella, called Room 1B. Now this is not a bad thing as I have had the first two of these publish...

I've had two novellas released. Yay, go me. They are a Parallel Life and the Intersection and they are linked, sharing as they do the same unfortunate protagonist. Here's a couple or four links A Parallel Life Amazon UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/Parallel-Life-Ben-Williamson-ebook/dp/B07FS45J19/ Amazon US https://www.amazon.com/Parallel-Life-Ben-Williamson-ebook/dp/B07FS45J19/ The Intersection Amazon UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intersection-Ben-Williamson-Edmund-Lester-ebook/dp/B07FS5RZ8P/ Amazon US https://www.amazon.com/Intersection-Ben-Williamson-Edmund-Lester-ebook/dp/B07FS5RZ8P/ Here's a shot of the covers. Exciting eh? But it's not been all fun in Edmund Lester-land. You see in the lead up to the release of the two novellas but I was having some issues with my writing process. I enjoy creating stories, building worlds and populating these worlds with a cast of living characters to drive my story forward. But writing isn't just limite...

I have been pondering the future of this blog for some time. It's just not attracting enough of an audience for me to spend much time on it. But then again my twitter account is not giving me the return it once did. A year of more ago I had about 8000 followers. A typical day of writing and regular tweeting would see maybe 5,000 impressions. on some day I remember seeing the number into the teens (of thousands) - 13,000 or 14,000. Now after writing and tweeting for an afternoon I've had less than 700 impressions - despite now having 11,000 followers. So where does that leave me social media wise. Well, I do have a Facebook page. I post there occasionally but it's got maybe 50 followers. I could probably spend more time and get this number higher but that has its own problems. You see it's all about effort.  I have a day job. It's always going to come ahead of my writing because it pays the mortgage. This is not a complaint. I like my job. I'm fortunate th...

These past few days have seen no actual writing taking place. The reasons/excuses for this have been many. For one thing I changed day job and have needed to commit a large slice of my available energies to finding my feet there. And then there's been the fact that my spare time has been in remarkably short supply with my non-work time being consumed by a number of non-writing activities that just can't bee avoided. But in truth one of the main reasons was my head. You see it's decided to get creative in a number of bizarre, interesting, yet in the short term, unproductive ways. One idea after another for new novels/novellas and even a sort story have popped into my head and I've been spending time writing down enough notes in my various notebooks so that, should I ever have time, they will have a chance of seeing the light of day. Well now I have finished with all of that and am capable of focussing my creative energies into working on the c...

Anyone who has been reading this blog or my twitter feed or just knows me may be aware the past month has been a turbulent time. My wife had a stroke in mid January. Thankfully it was just a small one and she is recovering but it's not been an easy time for any of us. All I can say is anyone attempting to deal with a more major stroke has my utmost sympathies. It is truly frightening to see a loved one unable to control their limbs or speak. I'm just glad it was temporary and that thanks to the NHS very quickly scheduling surgery to correct the cause and prevent it causing another stroke, we have a chance of getting life back to normal. Needless to say writing has been a very low priority since it happened. As a result the initial plans to have the sequel to the Stairs Lead Down finished and ready for a release in the spring have been torn up and thrown away. I'm going to get back to finishing the novel as and when I can but it's not going to be yet. My heart is just...

Life has a habit of throwing you curve balls and recently it seems to have upped the ante. I mentioned in two of my recent blog entries that I'd been ill. This year's flu landed and decided to stay put for a while. Well if I was ever inclined to complain about the flu all such thoughts have been ripped from  me. you see earlier this month - just after my last posting here - my wife had a stroke. That kind of puts everything else into perspective in a hurry. Fortunately it was a small stroke and they quickly identified the underlying cause of the stroke and that it was fixable - the cause that is. So she has surgery this past week and now has the most impressive scar - her neck is currently held together by over 30 staples. There is still some time to go but she should make a near complete recovery. So all in all it was not as bad as it could have been. As you might imagine I have not even thought of writing even as an abstract concept in two weeks and my plans to get back ...

Just a very quick blog post to say my interview with the Dark Times fanzine has gone live. You can go read it together with a whole bunch of horror and RPG related stuff at The Dark Times Fanzine Issue 2 I think I have another interview still due to come out - I just don't know when. I will of course post detail as soon as I know anything. Managed to get a little book hunting in yesterday and found a small pile of Terry Pratchett hardcovers and one old Isaac Asimov hardcover - a Short History of Biology. I already owned a copy of that edition of the Asimov but it was in such good condition and at such a good price I couldn't resist adding a second. Of course I could say I ready had the Pratchetts too as I have the full run of Discworld in paperback but I had none of them in hardcover so I'm happy with them. Away from books I've been watching the Orville on Fox. We're a little behind the US so have only seen up to episode five but I'm very impressed. Epi...

Ever made a bunch of promises to yourself that you just couldn't keep? We all do it I guess. Well my writing targets were one of those. I wanted to get the 1st full draft of the novel I'm writing done by the end of 2017. It didn't happen. There were reasons for it - there always are. Some of them are valid reasons. As I may have mentioned back in November I was ill. Well I've been ill again. I had a bout of stomach flu in November and then just before Christmas I managed to also catch the good old regular flu - or one of this year's variants of it - possibly Aussie flu but who knows for sure. Well I managed once again to keep going as far as the day job goes only to collapse on the sofa each evening and try to recover for the next day. The day job was as much as I could manage. Put it this way, that's the part of my life that pays the mortgage; it will always come first in such considerations. The Christmas break came and I spent some time with the family...