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...

I think 2017 has to be my most unlucky year for illnesses for decades (I still put the year of three surgeries as a worse one). I seem to have picked up every bug I could during 2017 culminating with flu a month ago and (depending on opinion) a very heavy cold or different flavour of flu in the past week. All I know is it's curtailed a lot of the normal activity I would expect - i.e. writing. I did recover enough though to pop down to Torquay for the weekend just gone - although it was only barely. I really didn't do much whilst I was down there. I certainly can't say I saw all that much of Torquay beyond the inside of one hotel and two restaurants. The drive back was a bit better. We stopped at a number of seaside towns, keen to get just one more glimpse (after another) of the sea before heading back to the landlocked county of Leicestershire and home. One of the most fun and yet frustrating stops had to be Budleigh Salterton. (Yes, it's a great name.) I have no...

I think I am mostly up to date now on all the stuff that was delayed because of losing a week to the flu. Well everything except the writing that is. I had to do all that other stuff - the work stuff and house stuff,  the parts of my life that pays the bills after all - before I could dedicate some time to writing again. And then I had to try to find some momentum. I am a momentum kind of writer. I know this. And a confidence kind of writer. For some reason, despite having written eleven novels, one of which has been published and another of which is due out in 2018, I still struggle when faced with the screen/keyboard to convince myself I can do this. I manufacture reason after reason to not do any actual writing - last minute tasks that I simply must do and then I can write. It's just procrastination I know, procrastination based on fear. In some ways it's quite odd. I create computer systems during my work day that the entire business of the company I work for relies on...

I'm going to start this by mentioning my illness wasn't serious. I had the flu. I'm not dying, I was just unwell for a while. As a result my hopes for some decent writing progress in November have taken quite a blow. I was off work for a few days, totally unable to sit upright. No writing. That was the week before last. This past week I have been back at work but the day job has taken all of my energy. I've been coming home from work and just collapsing onto a sofa and that was it for the evening. No thoughts of sitting at this desk and writing more of Breath of Imagined Dead were even entertained, let alone acted upon. Is it different now? Well I'm getting my energy levels back up and I'm going to give it a little bit of a try but I'm not guaranteeing anything. It has rather impacted on the schedule I was hoping to keep. These past two weeks I had hoped to take the word count of the book from just short of 25K to more than 40K. Not one single word of t...

I had planned to do an informal NaNoWriMo for this November. For anyone who doesn't know NaNoWriMo stands for National November Writing Month (I think). It's basically a writing challenge, the idea being write 50,000 words in a month - this month. It's a kind of challenge to get you actually writing. Well I tried this a couple of years ago when I was writing my bawdy space opera detective noir novel (yes, I know it's a crazy mash-up) and fell two thousand three hundred words short. But writing 47.7K in a month was a result I will settle for. Anyway for one reason after another I have not been able to write ever night (something you need to do to have a chance of getting to 50K). And so on the 12th I find myself at a mere 8,585 words on the month - 2,306 of which were added tonight. That's an average of 715 words a day as opposed to the 1666 the schedule demands. Can I get it back? Well, maybe; but do I want to if it means not writing as well as I could....

I'm struggling to understand how another week has gone by since I last post an entry here. It feels like I've blinked just a couple of times and it's Sunday afternoon again. Still, better bet on with it. I have had a couple of writing sessions since last posting. I reported a week ago that Breath of Imagined Dead was on 18,190 words. Well It's moved on a touch since then and now has 22,016 words. Not the most productive week I know with only 3,826 words added. I've written double that in a single day before now. But it's progress so I should be grateful for that. I'm the middle of a section of being generally unkind to my main characters. I want them to be put through the wringer a little so it seems all the more miraculous when they come out of their current predicament. I just need to make sure I don't do without the proverbial pulling a rabbit out your arse trick. I think I have a believable plot so fingers crossed it all works out. Aside from ...

Had a bit of time this afternoon so I hit the keyboard (repeatedly). As a result I've taken my ya supernatural novel, Breath of Imagined Dead, up to 18,190 words, with 2,453 of them having been added today. Not a bad afternoon of writing. Unfortunately it's my first writing time this month. For all my inner promises (and I may have mentioned it here or on social media) that I was going to try a NaNoWriMo this month I was a little doomed by having some work (day job) and other functions to attend every day/evening since the start of the month. I'm not trying to make an excuse. I'm going to give catching up the day average a try this week as my wife is away on a work trip for two nights so I'll have a little time. The real aim though is not just maintaining a daily average for an arbitrary challenge. The real aim is getting the draft finished. I'd like to have this story written before Christmas which means adding a further 72K in 7 weeks if I'm going to ...

I am now a published novelist. I just wanted to type that sentence; just to see how it looked. It looks good. It makes me happy. I will now never not be a published novelist. I've entered a new phase in my life you might say. Not that I'm going to let it go to my head - for one thing my wife wouldn't let me. She's far too sensible. But for the main reason that I don't want to stop trying to be good at this. Yes, I've been published but that shouldn't be the pinnacle of it. I don't want to risk complacency in any way. I want to be published again. I want to get better at this writing stuff. I want to be as good as I can. And I want to remember always that there is always room for improvement. I want a second book to come out and have someone say it's better than the first; and a third to be better than the second and so on. Of course this does mean I have to do the writing. So I must also knuckle down and get busy. But that's not going to b...

Well okay, it's been a little more than a week. I promised myself I was going to blog more regularly when I started doing it again a little over a month ago and had been keeping to it. Until the last eleven days that is. And a few things have happened in that time. For one thing my book is now eleven days closer to being released. Here's another screen shot. Just in case you haven't seen enough of it. I know I haven't (yeah, I'm still buzzed). Last Sunday I went to Huddersfield Haunting. Here's their Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/huddersfieldhaunting/ It was Huddersfield's first horror convention and it was an enjoyable experience. Mostly for me because I got to meet my publisher at Writer's Sanctum Publishing (http://www.writerssanctumpublishing.co.uk/). I was a little nervous beforehand as we have had many great email conversations over the months and whereas I thought from them we would get along well you never know until you m...

Two weeks before your book comes out is a strange time for doubt; or perhaps it isn't. Maybe there's a natural tendency to worry about whether anyone will buy it; and then whether they'll read it. And then of course there is the worrying about whether anyone will like it. But strangely that's not the kind of doubt I'm on about. You see a couple of days ago I bought some books - not an unusual thing. Well I have started reading one of them - Robert Harris's Munich. Now I like Harris's work. I read Conclave just a few weeks ago and enjoyed it immensely. But this is something different. You see I'm reading Munich and starting to question why I am even trying to write. Now I'm not saying this is the best book in the world EVER. For one thing I'm only five chapters in so it's far too early to judge and, being honest, it's unlikely to beat the books I rate at the top of my personal list - Foucault's Pendulum, Dune and Midnight's Ch...

I may have mentioned a few days ago that I have been doing some interviews to support the now imminent release of my debut novel the Stairs Lead Down. Well these interviews are starting to appear out these in the world. The first was on Heather Weicht's Blog. Here's the link to her website Heather Weicht's Website When you're there just click on the BLOG menu item at the top and you'll see the interview The most recent is featured on Pamela Morris and you can see it at Interview on Pamela Morris's Website The fun thing with this one is it includes a 100 word drabble I wrote and sold a few years only to have the magazine fold before it could be published. It also has a brief sample from the Stairs Lead Down so you can give it a look. The final set of links I have for you are to the kindle pages for the book on Amazon UK / US / Canada / Australia. You know, just in case you fancy buying yourself (or in this case pre-ordering yourself) a copy. No pressur...

Today has turned out completely different to the way I expected. Not in any huge way admittedly. I mean I didn't swap a day at my keyboard writing for a day parachuting or paragliding or dog sledding or anything like that. I still spent most of my day in front of this computer and I still wrote. It was just what I wrote that wasn't what I expected. You see at two this morning I woke up with a story idea in my head - the complete story, everything. I had concept, plot, characters, bits of dialog, how it started, and as it is a comedic stories a number of jokes. So I grabbed a notebook, the one I keep for story openings and started scribbling. I really should have had confidence enough to grab a fresh notebook and dedicated a book to this one but I was still half asleep. You see this book has one or two page ideas for a page 1,2 of a novel that are waiting for a plot to come along and take them somewhere. This was a fully formed thing. I had the ending. But that doesn't ...

It's Friday night. The work week is over and the weekend awaits. This weekend is going to be a little different to most. My wife is a musician. As a result she is out playing quite a lot and mostly at weekends. So for her to be out is not unusual. Many weekend evenings/nights I sit at my keyboard tapping out whatever my current WiP happens to be. But this weekend it's a little more extreme than normal. She's out for most of it; playing a number of gigs up in Yorkshire. So as they are all in the same vicinity she is staying up there. My Saturday is going to be a solo venture. Now don't get feeling all sorry for me and wondering how on earth I am going to cope without her being, as I am, a mere man. I am quite capable of managing solo. And it's not as though in truth this is all that much of an unusual event. Her day job (unfortunately the music doesn't pay enough for her to not have one, much as I need to work in addition to being a writer) sees her travelli...