Welcome Ken! Thanks so much for taking the time to come and share with us today. Why don't you tell us a little about yourself.
I am a retired engineer, living in Dorset
England with my wife. I call myself an engineer but I have had a wide variety
of jobs over the years. None of which involved creative writing.
I am sure all the variety of work over the years has only added to your writing ability. The more experiences we have the more we can pull from when we write. Ken, what
got you into writing?
I suppose it started in the 80s with the
personal computer boom. There were a number of magazines around at the time,
catering for different brands of computer. The one that I subscribed to forgot
to send anyone to a show and asked readers for reviews. I wrote one and they
published it.
I continued to write for them until the
publication folded. I stopped writing then and didn’t start again until I
retired. I started reading a lot of short stories online. I found myself
looking back on the story and saying “That’s not the way I would have told it”
That is a plus when writing, you get to plan how it ends. Some books I have read have left me so frustrated by the end, but with my own, I keep writing until I feel a sense of satisfaction. Will you share
a short excerpt from your novel.
Both Mike and Becky suited up and went
inside. Brian Richards had been right; it was not a pleasant sight. In the
chair opposite, the door was a man probably in his seventies. He was tied to
the chair with a gag in his mouth. In front and to the side of him was a woman.
She was bent over with her knees up near her face. It looked like she' been
kneeling and fallen sideways. From her face, Mike estimated she was in her
sixties. The back of her head was just a mass of blood and hair. The old man's
shirt and face were spattered with blood and there were lines of blood spots up
the wall and across the ceiling. Mike turned to Becky, blocking the doorway.
'You know the drill; have a look upstairs
see if you can find any signs of a robbery. I'll look around down here.'
As soon as she left, he went back into the
parlour.
On the floor between the door and the
victims was a tea tray and around it a collection of broken crockery. He
counted three cups and saucers, a teapot, milk jug and a sugar bowl. There was
an unbroken plate and a selection of biscuits scattered across the floor. The
stain on the carpet told him the teapot had been full when it broke. He got up
and walked across the hall to the dining room. He saw no sign of a disturbance
and moved on to the kitchen. He soon found a handbag that had to belong to the
woman. In the purse, he found fifty pounds in notes, two credit cards and one
debit. In one of the cupboards, he found a tea caddy containing five hundred
pounds. The farm office also showed no sign of anything untoward. The safe was
still locked and all the computer equipment was still there.
He returned to the hall and met Becky
coming down the stairs.
'Anything up there?'
Ken, have
you been given any helpful advice that has helped you in writing?
Yes. I was at a seminar on teaching
engineering. A South African university professor was outlining his methods and
I was arguing that the British Education system would prevent me using his
methods. He said “Apply the Nike principle my friend. Just do it. If you wait
for someone to give you permission you will wait forever.”
That’s how I started writing fiction. I
didn’t study it or gain a qualification, I Just Did It. When people liked it I
did some more. I have studied some since, and that study has been useful, but
the important thing for me was actually doing it.
I think that is great advice. I have had to do that sometimes when writing scenes. I just write to get through a section. Then later I come back and clean it up. Hopefully by then inspiration has struck and I can really make a blah scene shine. Currently,
what are you working on?
Currently working on a follow up to Hammer
Blow. The first book was self-contained in that all the stories ended but it
left people wondering about the characters It was suggested that I write a
series of Inspector Deverson novels so I’m starting on Number 2. The working
title is Back from the Living.
I really like that title. Tell us a little bit about your main characters
Deverson is closing on forty. He is married
but the job causes problems in that area.
He is a seeker of justice and has a tendency care a little too much
about the victims. He is proud of being
a policeman and can’t understand why not everyone shares his passion. His
Sergeant is a Yorkshire man who says what he thinks. Sometimes he is a little
too blunt. He is very good at getting Police computer system to produce the
good. The female constable is relatively new to plain clothes and admires her
boss. She knows that he has come up through the ranks and got where he has by
being good at his job. The Chief Inspector is a woman with whom Deverson had a
relationship when he was her mentor in the Metropolitan Police (London). She is
a graduate/fast track copper and is destined for higher things.
How did you decide on what to title each book? Sometimes I think this is one of the harder parts of writing. Some readers only glance at a book for a second and if the cover and title don't grab them, they move on.
That was a tough call. I started out with something that I thought
sounded clever but people told me it was too obscure. In the end, I came up
with a number of options and I put them up as a poll on Facebook. Hammer Blow
won hands down. In the book the murder weapon is a hammer and Deverson suffers
a hammer blow in his private life so it seemed to fit.
Is
this a stand-alone novel or part of a series?
It stands alone and is part of a series. What
I mean by that is that there will be more books featuring Inspector Deverson,
but each one will stand alone. You will not have to read them in order. It is
one of my pet hates, to get to the end of a book and find there are no
conclusions, just a trail for the next book. I feel that I have been conned. I
expected to buy one book but find I have to buy two or three in order to reach
the conclusion. To me that is a serial not a series. A series is made up of
stand-alone stories with a common thread. Peter May’s Lewis trilogy is a
classic example. Each book comes to its own conclusion. They share common
characters and setting but each one has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Who
designed the artwork for your cover? Or
did you design it yourself?
Time to fess up. I created it from a free
stock image. I operate on a shoestring we don’t have the money for me to spend
on my writing. Everything must show a return. The only thing I can squander is
my time.
I think that's what a lot of author's do. We all work on a budget. My niece designed mine using a free stock image and I love it. What was your biggest challenge when writing? Did you have any writer’s block? If so, how did you work your way through it?
My biggest Challenge is dealing with the
horrible little man who sits on my shoulder whispering in my ear. Normally he
turns up after about twenty thousand words and he says things like, that’s no
good, she wouldn’t say that, give up now before you bore us all to tears. Every
time I write he shows up, urging me to scrap the story and give up writing. The
closer I get to the end the worse he gets, right up to the point that I finish
the story and relax for a while prior to trying the first edit. He doesn’t go
away until I show someone a draft of the story and start to get feedback.
I totally understand. I think I am my harshest critic. I second guess everything. It's not until several people have given me feedback that I start to relax a little. Is
there something you learned from writing your first book?
I’m sure everyone says this but it really
is a constant learning process. From the first one “Worth Fighting For” I
learned that if you write across genre it makes it almost impossible to market.
Which
do you find more challenging inventing the hero or the villain? Why?
Oh the hero every time. A villain can be
totally evil and people accept it, but a hero can never be totally good. They
become sweeter than sugar. Deverson is an example. He is the good guy but he
will stoop to a bit of bullying if it gets results.
That makes sense. Ken, since
you wrote in this genre, do you think you will ever write in other genres?
Quite probably. Crime fiction is not the
only genre that I enjoy reading so I expect to write in other genre at some
time.
Find out more about Ken at the links below. Thanks for joining us. Happy Reading!!
Links
to Books
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