It’s edging 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) here in the south of the UK at the moment, but for the most part I’m stuck in a windowless air conditioned office, which is both a good and bad thing I guess.

When I have gone outside it’s like stepping off the plane in Spain, something I hope to be doing with my family and best friends next month!

EVENTS

Last weekend saw my attendance at RAF Halton’s families day, also called the Jubilee Jamboree. It was great to be on base again, although the stations I’d grown up on were not so open to the public. On arrival I set up my gazebo, which I haven’t had out of the shed, other than to check it wasn’t rotting away, in a couple of years. Once the tables were assembled I had tape labels and the table cloths down because of the occasionally gusting wind, before sitting back with my wife to wait.

I knew as soon as we pulled up that based on the long distance to the next stall along and the lack of a funnel sending people to look at my stall, this event wasn’t going to break any sales records.

I waited a long time before my first sale and then they came slowly throughout the day, ending up with a modest profit, but only because I hadn’t had to pay anything to be at the event. I met some lovely people, even some die hard zombie fans, one of which was friends with one of the zombie authors I know in the USA. I invited them to join the zombie Facebook I help to run and they did, there and then.

The highlights of the day were chatting with my wife, I’m so glad she came as I would have been very bored otherwise, along with a flypast by a Spitfire. They would have had more aircraft if it weren’t for the airshow at RAF Cosford.

With hindsight I probably would have still attended, but that said, I won’t attend any similar event in the future if there was a fee involved as it makes no commercial sense.

This Saturday I’m in Devizes (finally spelling this right each time now) at the Corn Exchange selling my books, and then the following Saturday I’m back to Hungerford hoping I can do better than last time.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Stopping Power – An Agent Carrie Harris Undead Series – This week has been about episode three, which had taken me almost exactly a week to get to a good draft. I have a couple more days on it and then I’ll kick off episode four (although I have written the first chapter already). Episode two now has a title (Stopping Power: Overkill), which came to me as I was writing. Let’s hope the others come so easily.

I’ve decided, literally as I wrote this, with five weeks to go until my summer holiday, I’m going to work on this project right up until I go away, when I will then send whatever I have finished off for editing, aiming to start releasing episodes in quick succession from the second Friday in September. If I keep up the current pace then I should have seven episodes completed, which will also let me take a writing break whilst abroad. Then again, knowing what I’m like, I’ll probably still want to put some words down by the pool!

MARKETING AND PROMOTION

Online sales are still trickling in, and being once again part of a newsletter building promotion, I’m getting new mailing list subscribers and I’ll be sending out another newsletter today to share promotions to the list and to give them an update on what’s going on with STOPPING POWER.

I think that’s about it for this week. Next week I’ll bring you a download of Devizes and the usual updates on what I’m working on. Comments and suggestions welcomed as always.