A Fictional Pivot

All your life, you live so close to the truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque - Tom Stoppard

Hard Deception

I want to thank everyone who has commented on the three chapters of Hard Deception that I’ve shared on conked.io. Your response has been incredible and it is extremely gratifying to receive. I hope you don’t mind me listing some of your comments:

• I'm totally captivated. Love this!  

• The main character seems so dynamic with so many layers to reveal.

• I am completely invested in this story and can’t wait to read more.

• This is a compelling piece of storytelling.

I know many of you are eagerly awaiting the fourth chapter, but unfortunately I’m not going to share the rest of the novel here. Let me explain: I’ve oscillated between self-publishing my works and going down the traditional agent/publisher route. My gut feel is that the Maria Knight series warrants following the traditional pathway, with the right agent. I would dearly love to see her on the screen and I feel it behoves me to work with an agent who not only has access to the right publishers, but also to streaming media.

I’ve been working hard over the past fortnight honing my Query Letter and will be getting feedback from a couple of agents on it before diving head first into the query process and settling on the right agent to bring on board the Knight team.

The Query Process

Querying literary agents is somewhat of an art form, not dissimilar to entrepreneurs securing a venture capitalist. I’ve had a lot of experience both as an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist, but this hasn’t necessarily made the agent process any easier.

I’ll be sharing insights with you once I’ve brought an agent onto the team. Hopefully this will give other writers a leg up when they too decide to follow this pathway.

Writ Large

I’ve also been working with the talented Nadia Holiday on the audiobook for Writ Large. Given Australian’s don’t have access to the Amazon ACX marketplace directly to get audiobooks onto Audible, I started thinking: why don’t I share each chapter of the audiobook right here on Substack.

I’ve asked around and there don’t appear too many others doing this with fiction, but being a trailblazer has never dissuaded me in the past, so I’ve decided to go for it. So starting from this week I’ll be sharing an audio version of Writ Large at the rate of a chapter a week. I’ll share these audio chapters both here on Rand Research and on Conked. And yes, once all is said and done I do plan on loading the full audiobook onto Audible or some other suitable platform along with the full ebook and paperback.

F*CK Everything

So far I’ve shared a considerable number of the poems in this collection with you. As part of my “Fictional Pivot” I’m going to hold off sharing the rest for now. I may share the rest of the collection at some point in serialised form, but more likely I’ll release the full collection as an ebook and paperback instead.

Thank you everyone for your support.