Forgive me, but I thought I would spend a couple of minutes thinking back over the past year. And to be honest, I’m going to try to avoid talking about politics (the UK has been riddled with it this year) but I shall stick to novel writing if I am able.
To be honest, it has been a difficult year for me. I spent several months at the start trying to write a female detective story and was forced to bow out of that only a third of a book through the tale. This meant I expended mental energy on a doomed project and consumed 3-4 months on writing something which is unlikely to ever see the light of day. That was draining.
On the plus side, the experience helped me to better understand what kind of a writer I am: noir crime fiction is my genre and it may or may not contain steamy scenes. This conclusion leads me to my second activity which was the realization that many of my current readers didn’t enjoy the Lagotti Family series enough because of the sex scenes. As I announced a month or so ago, I will be re-editing The Heist to turn the novel into having so-called closed door scenes instead. Then I’m going to look at the rest of the series and do the same. Once I have completed that task, I shall relaunch the series with fresh covers too so that everyone can see that something has changed. I’ll keep you posted on how I get on.
The next item of note is that despite spending so much time writing a dead duck, I have launched a record number of books (for me) this year. Four have hit the streets: Mama’s Gone, The Case, The Death and Life of Penny Pitstop and The Bowery Slugger. I’m excluding the Lagotti Family Complete Collection as that is an omnibus edition. While I am putting the finishing touches to a Feb/March launch of the Slugger sequel, I think I will be lucky to launch two further books next year. There should be at least one more, again in the Alex Cohen series, but I am aware of how much of my time this year has been spent focusing on marketing and sales, which are important parts of being a writer.
So, in conclusion, it has been quite an eventful year. Thank you to everyone for your support – whether that was reading one of my books, leaving a review, making a purchase or sending me an email saying something nice. Each and every one of those actions has made me smile. And given the parlous state of my country now that Boris Johnson has a sweeping majority to rip my EU citizens rights away from me, there has been precious little to smile about in 2019. Damn, I said I wasn’t going to talk about politics.
Let me be one the last, no doubt, to wish you a healthy and successful 2020.
Leo
