Tuesday 28 February 2017

Excited? I should coco.

After months of furtling, the 1st in the Bryant Rockwell series, New Kid In Town, is finally fit for human consumption. If you want to get in on the launch of this exciting new series, I'm always looking for new opinions to help cross t's, dot i's and iron out wrinkles. In my humble experience, no matter how good your editor and beta team are, there are always a couple of things which slip past even the most eagle of eyes.

One of my FOs (frequent offenders) is to re-name a character at the last minute and not catch every occurrence of the name (despite any number of global search and replaces.

You can find out more in the post below this one. If you are interested in helping to launch the book, click here to join the team.
Cheers
    Jacky

Thursday 9 February 2017

10 Things I Love About This

This is one of my regular watch-again movies, based on what has to be my all-time favourite Shakespeare play, "The Taming of the Shrew."
Not just because of the chance to remind myself how much I miss Heath Ledger, but because it's well written, well acted and has so many great characters/scenes.

So after an intense, full-on Christmas, I spent a lot of time just vegging out in front of Netflix, but you can't do this ALL day long, so I dug out a series of stories I started writing last millenium (blimey Jupiter, get that exaggeration hence!). I wrote the first three in two years, less than two decades ago, in 1999/2001. The last three took seven and a half years to write, because guess what, I was teaching!
I'd completely forgotten about all the Shakespeare references - the guys are studying "Twelfth Night" and even go to see it being performed in Stratford. In my head the series is a cross between "Glee" in the US and "Waterloo Road" in the UK with plenty of action, drama and teenage angst - mainly the romantic kind.

Returning to the characters, they were just as compelling to me as when I first met them:
    Liv - a witty polymath convinced she's fat and a Queen Bitch
   Jude - an all-round sporting star destined to be an ice-skating Olympian
   Kat - an ethereal Irish songbird with a dark secret

This trio are torn apart by the guys in their lives
    Ray - smart, charming, but a chip on both shoulders after a car accident curtailed his swimming career
    Luke - an angry jock who narrowly escaped juvie court after a "joy-ride" went bad
    Terry - a nervous wimp who turns into a leading man on stage or in the ice rink
    Jimmy - a motorbike-riding sixth-former leading a rough gang

So far, the feedback from my lovely editor and several Beta-readers is a big thumbs up, but I'd love to hear from you if you want to help me out with your take on the first book. Click here to join the team.