Exile: Now Available

“They found me in the Hard Rock. Thursday night, a little after ten. A good crowd for a Thursday, all things considered. Lots of girls with inscrutable, backpacker accents clustered around the bar. Plenty more heading up the stairs, attracted by the cover band’s caterwaul. Blondes, natural and peroxide; a Gold Coast epidemic. Exposed skin, despite the cool nip in the air. Twenty-dollar cocktails named after natural disasters: Typhoons; Tsunamis; rum-soaked Hurricanes…”

That’s how we first meet Keith Murphy: a hit-man who specialises in a very particular kind of target. He’s back on the Gold Coast for the first time in sixteen years, running from a cult who really want their leader back, and he’s about to negotiate with the king-shit local demon who may be holding a grudge against Murphy for things that were done in his past.

It’ll all be okay, so long as they don’t find the bullet he swallowed. The one with the soul of his last victim trapped inside it…

IF YOU WANT TO BUY IT

Exile, the first novella in the Flotsam series, came out in ebook format a few hours ago. There’s already a couple of purchase options out there, including:

• Direct from the Publisher, AIP: Buy Here
• Amazon US: Buy Here
• Amazon Australia: Buy Here
• DriveThroughFiction: Buy Here

Other sites are and sales platforms are on their way, depending on processing time.

SOME NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR

So this is novella one of the Flotsam series, with another two books yet to come. Book 2, Frost, should be coming along in the latter part of the year. Book 3, Crusade, is due in the first half of 2015. The individual novellas will be ebook releases, but there’s plans for a dead tree omnibus once all three are done if you’re the type of person that prefers to read things in hard copy.

Peeps, I am excited this book is out. Mildly terrified, as I mentioned a few days back, but excited at the same time. Somewhere back in 2012 I made the decision to cut back on writing, preferring to focus my attention on the shiny new day job and the bewildering novelty of having a steady paycheque. It was fun for a while, but I found that I missed writing.

I mean, I really missed writing.

Not just the creation of new works and having stuff out there, but the hustle that goes along with the job. All the plotting you do to get a book written. All the plotting you do to get a book sold. When 2014 started, I made the decision to get back into the game. I cut back on work hours. I shifted focus to getting stuff done. I used the Flotsam series as the linchpins to my writing year, setting the boundaries when other projects needed to start and stop.

And in the process of putting this all together, I have discovered three very important things:

1. BACK UP YOUR DAMN WORK. There is no way of maintaining a professional veneer when you drop your laptop on submission day, then have to email your publisher and tell them you’ve lost two-thirds of the novella an hour before you’re due to submit it.
2. DO NOT GO TO WORK ON THE DAY YOUR BOOK’S RELEASED. You think you can be productive and conduct business as usual. You are wrong. I received news that the book was out and on sale about three hours before the end of the work day. I was useless to the company for those three hours.
3. ITS EASY TO FORGET HOW MANY READERS YOU HAVE. ‘Cause people have already shown this book some love, even in the first few hours, which is way more than I expected given how quiet I’ve been for the past few years. 

Thanks, everyone, whose picked up a copy already or intends to grab one in a few days. Hopefully I’ll see you all in a few months time, when Frost comes out, and Keith Murphy’s life gets really complicated.

And I’ll see you all tomorrow for the Trashy Tuesday Writing School when we start having fun with the Wing Commander movie. In the mean time, I leave you with a song that could be considered an integral part of the novella’s soundtrack: