Dead and Gone by D. L. Michaels
Published: 1st May 2018
Publisher: Aria
Pages: 648
Available in Paperback and on Kindle
Blurb
In a world bulit on lies, who can you ever trust? A
nail-biting thriller introducing DI Annie Parker. For fans of Angela Marsons
and Tess Gerritson, Dead and Gone delivers twists at every deliciously
unredictable turn.
Paula Smith could have had
it all. Hugely successful in her fashion business, she lives the kind of life
she could never have imagined. Her world should have been an idyllic one if it
weren’t for her husband Danny who is resentful of her success and increasingly
prone to alcoholic rages. Paula knows she should leave him but she if she did,
he would pick up the phone to the police and her life would come crashing down
around her.
Sarah has found the kind of
happiness with Martin she never thought possible. He is everything she could
have wished for in an man. Caring, sensitive and loving, yet he has a secret
that could threaten everything they share. But he is not the only one with a
secret….
DI Annie Parker, mother,
grandmother and widow, has plenty of baggage of her own, but she’s still
determined to be the best police officer she can be. When she and her sergeant
Nisha Patel hear about a 20-year-old murder that nobody knew about, nothing
will stop them from tracking down the killer, even if it brings them up against
one of the most dangerous crime families in the country.
The Write Stuff by D.L. Michaels
How do
you go about penning a novel of around 100,000 words if you’ve never done it
before?
There
are dozens, maybe hundreds of pieces of advice (and books) online about how to
emerge from the chrysalis of being a voracious reader into a book-writing
butterfly. For what it’s worth, here’s a snapshot of rules I followed (and
sometimes broke).
Tip 1. If
you only write 300 words a day (about a page of a published novel), you’ll
write 2,100 words a week, 8,400 a month, and will hit 100,800 over a year. Do 600 a day and you have your novel in six
months. It’s that easy. No, really, it is that easy!
Most
writers write because they have the urge to.
Like runners, they just have to get out there and do it. So, I suppose a
book is a writer’s marathon. It’s a big
haul. But anyone can do it. There’s
no magic to it. No singular style. No right or wrong way. It’s simply about
putting one word down after the other, just like one foot after the other. Your
style is your style. You might be a literary pronator or supinator. You might
roll this way or that. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong – it just means it’s you!
Tip 2.
You can write any time you feel like it, and you DO have the time.
I used
to convince myself that I didn’t have time to write. There was so much going on
in my life – full-time job, family spread across the country, friends to see,
plus an effort to stay reasonably fit. Then I realized how much travelling I
did on trains, planes and in the passenger seats of cars or back of taxis. So,
I wrote while in transit. Instead of
reading or watching movies, I flipped open the laptop and did my words. Next, I
cut down on some of the awful TV I simply vegged out in front of. Then, I found that when I woke in the middle
of the night and couldn’t sleep, I could get up and write for an hour (or so)
and afterward feel satisfied that I’d actually done something with that ‘dead’
time when I just lay there trying to get back to sleep. The hours are there.
You just have to hunt them down.
Tip 3.
You don’t need to know all your characters and all your plot before you start
writing.
One
international best-selling author told me that she only ever knows her lead
character and ‘the main twist’ when she
starts writing. The twist could be
something as simple as say a first time (serial) killer confessing a murder to
his brother who is a Catholic priest. The priest will be excommunicated if he
breaks the sanctity of the Confessional – but he fears more lives will be lost
if he doesn’t. The brother fears the priest may go to the cops and thinks about
killing him. There you have two
characters and a plot (a dose of jeopardy always helps). That would be enough
for my writer friend to start her thriller.
But not for me. I’m a major planner (it’s probably due to my years of
making TV programmes). I need the comfort of knowing my beginning, middle and
end – plus at least four characters and their roles in the action, before I
even start! I make a grid (on a whiteboard and on paper) and I split my 100,000
words into blocks – 20 x 5,000. Again,
to use the running analogy, I do this because I know I can ‘run’ 5k easily
enough, but I’m not confident of how I’d perform over 50k without lots of
supporting notes. That said, I sometimes stray up to 10k, and new characters
simply spring out of the writing and introduce themselves (one of the most
exciting parts of storytelling). By the way, there’s a lot of software packages
out there that can help with plotting and character profiles, etc.
Tip 4.
Don’t start copy editing until you’ve finished the entire story.
Let’s
say you write 300 words a day. On day 2, you’ll most likely re-read your first
page. You’ll spot spelling/grammar mistakes and possibly some phrasing you want
to improve. I suggest you don’t. Ignore them. Just plough on. Otherwise, you’ll
be stuck in a cycle of rewriting that will destroy your determination to
finish. Imagine running the 20th mile of your marathon (what runners
call The Wall) and then feeling so unhappy with your mile time, that you go
back and do that mile again. You’ll
never finish your marathon. Resist major revision until you reach the end of
your story. And even then, give yourself a break of a few days (a week or two,
if possible) then when you’ve seen everything in context, and only then, start your re-write and corrections.
Tip 5.
Get yourself an agent.
Aside
from expert advice, impartial criticism (you won’t get it and shouldn’t seek it
from family), agents understand the industry. They know where to take your book
and who is most likely to publish it. Search
the Writers and Artists Yearbook for the right agent for your genre and be
absolutely sure you’ve written the very best draft before you submit it to
them.
Oh, and
if you get this far, remember that everyone, even the JK Rowlings of this world
get rejected by publishers. Publication doesn’t matter. You’ve run your own
literary marathon in your own style and in your own time. That makes you a
champion!
About the Author
D.L. Michaels is a former award-winning TV executive,
who married in Tuscany, has one teenage son and lives on an old converted farm
in the Peak District. Favourite writers include Harlan Coben, Patricia Cornwell
and Nicci French.
Links to buy
Amazon: mybook.to/DeadandGoneMichaels
Kobo: http://bit.ly/2qtnHEX
Google Play: http://bit.ly/2JHQy0l
iBooks: https://apple.co/2qwKOh5
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