Hello Readers,

I don’t blog as often as I should, which means that I tend to be forgotten in the wider world. Normally, for me, that’s not a problem, but when you are trying to promote a book, it’s a pretty useless tactic.

One of the things I’ve been spending my time on in the last couple of months has been attending to the proofreads of “CJ”, my forthcoming second novel. It was professionally edited in June, has had two proofreads and is now ready for publication.

I’m excited, as now the other aspects of the publishing process are well under way. The typesetting has been done and the cover has been designed, although I don’t have a final pdf to display just yet, otherwise I would include it here. Still being new to this occupation, I’m staggered at how much there is to do prior to publication. This is stuff that is probably not appreciated by the public, and it takes such a long time!

The other thing I’ve been doing is writing my third thriller, Nature’s Justice, (I think. It may change). This has been developed from a story I first started writing over ten years ago. That forms the first part of the book, but I had to adapt it to characters I have drawn from “CJ”. In earlier blogs, I explained that CJ is a young man who reaches a decision point in his life and, because he’s undecided on which path to take, his character divides and the result is two parallel stories, one for C and one for J. Nature’s Justice is a sequel to “CJ”, involving one of these persona (I’m not going to tell you which one, because that would ruin the ending of the story). Nature’s Justice has been put to rest for a while. It’s good advice to leave a manuscript for a month at least and then go back to it; only then will you see what dreadful errors lie in it and what improvements you can make.

Once I have an Advance Review Copy (ARC) of “CJ” I shall be sending it out to volunteers to read it and asking them to leave a review on Goodreads and/or Amazon. The ARC will be free of course on the gentle understanding that a review is expected as part of the bargain. I’ll let you know a publication date as soon as I can. Those readers who are willing to leave a review and would like to receive a free advance copy of “CJ” please send your contact details to c.a.s@helifish.co.uk

You can find out more about CJ from its dedicated page on this site.