Welcome to the official blog of Paul D.E. Mitchell - Author and Publisher
january 04 2012 - The Year When it All Ends if you believe the the doom-sooth-sayers. There is now a couple of positive reviews appearing on Kindle and Smashwords at long last and some books I edited are selling well such as Living with Siamese Cats. Ka-Ching is also shifting by the shed-load after I fixed a glaring typo on the first page - D'oh! Grid-lock on Light-Father finally broken as chapter 23 explored Schimrian's increasingly paranoid relationship with the Order. It took ten rewrites to get the atmosphere in the Great abbey right. Harold is arguing with Mother Fern about taking the children to the Great Abbey and certain death while the Phoenix is made ready while the storm rages all about them. My health has not been good and it has slowed the writng rate down and I have more tests on Friday but i was still able to walk ten miles and enjoyed real ale in the City Arms in Cardiff with an old friend who had a drunk suddenly lunge for his throat outside! A real Jekyll-and-Hyde character who will end up in the Nexus at some point!
December 23 2011 - I am 180 pages into Light-Father and the story is flowing but my health has not been good lately - I get SAD and tend t o humbug and handbag Yule. On the 5th of December, I led a delegation from the charity I chair (Riverside Advice) to Cardiff Council and we made contact with the new CEO to ask that the council treat Advice providers fairly. In the UK, the Tories are about to remove all legal aid and advice from the poor and vulnerable so this was a crucial result. Afterwards we went for a drink and on the way home, I dragged a drunken bully off one of the Occupy Cardiff protestors and broke up the fight. Then the original thug jumped me from behind and being 20 stone, he broke two metacarpals in my right hand when we keeled over. I didn't feel a thing then after separating everyone someone pointed out my little and ring fingers were at right-angles to my hand! To add insult to injury, I was told that this cretin was a TEACHER. Pah - in vino veritas - the drunk face is the true face! I went to the Rockin' Chair last night and met so many friends from the 80s and 90s music scene - some like saxophonist, Pete Kelly, I haven't seen for years!
So back to the books : I am still awaiting the hard copies of Shrines from Chris who is snowed under at Wuggles. I have Fulcrum on free offer on Smashwords which you can't do on Kindle who are trying to bribe people to use them exclusively with their KDP offers - read the small print, people! I am receiving more feedback and more typos pointed out in Goddess which I need to correct - that was down to deadlines so if you have an e-copy, bear with me and download a later version. Apologies for that! Light-Father has reached the second part where the Mothers and Ferals appear and Shield takes down a helicopter with a crossbow and agonises about losing her friends once they realise she has the craft. Saul finds his two abducted cousins were taken by the Mothers because they were regressing only they are now Ferals - mutated and largely mute, they still remember him. Harold finally realises that Britannica is a sad, drowned version of the UK which I've based on a Google-Earth projection of a 60m sea-rise (i.e. Greenland and part of Antarctica melts suddenly) - check it out. With the Keep destroyed and a storm raging, the Scatterlings help Harold repair the Phoenix, the steam locomotive which is their only means of escape from the forces of the Order and Harold is shocked to learn what Mother Moss had in mind for her Scatterlings and why these Children of Exodus were such great survivors... so many twists and ideas...
December 02 2011 - Halfway through the Light-Father which will be a musch shorter book at 300 pages and aimed as a 13-18 age group. The story is basically how the world was devastated and the impact is has on children inspired by those in our blood-soaked world such as the child-soldiers in Africa. The Wiccans are fleshing out nicely and one of the Scatterlings (also known as the Children of Exodus) may be a Wiccan as well! Harold found a train virtually untouched in the railyard and plans to leave but first he has to heal the illnesses and injuries of his new family. Attacked by dogs and watched by the virus-mutated Ferals and hounded by the surgically altered Tally-Men in a world of ceaseless rain is proving a challenge for this overweight and unhealthy technician - a truly unlikely hero in all senses of the word! It has the feel of M Night Shymalan's 'Unbreakable' - it's a pity his later movies from Signs to the Happening were truly awful. I put Fulcrum for free on Smashwords until the end of the month so take advantage - a hundred downloads this week. I am also busy with my election campaign and trying to say the Cardiff charity that I chair as well as being a carer - a busy life but a rich one!
October 22 2011 -
Shrines ends on a strange confrontational note I did not expect but it
will be another month before hard copies are available so Rob, Steve, El
et Al - you will have to be patient! The Chinese who tried to kidnap
Doctor Smith try again only they bring about a confrontation with the
Child of Dark on a lonely mountain top in Wales by kidnapping Derek
Lewis. Amy comes to the fore as her translocation powers develop
and she and Gemma go on a spree, relocating officers from the ships of super-power fleets threatening the UK and dumpoing them back in their bases! The real tragic heroine in
Shrines is Siobhan O'Grady who finally embaces her full power only to see the
true natures of the terrifying creature fouling their future timelines (even I didn't see
that coming!) and realises that there is only one possible way she can
save the others in that final confrontation with the Child of Dark.
Well, phew, there we are! The Book is on Kindle and Smashwords and I'm
reducing the price of all six to boost sales. Ka-ching is selling well
in Germany for some weird reason but not here yet I've had a lot of
positive and constructive feedback from musicians. The Long Grin has
sold its first 50 copies but plateaued now and Imust do some work on the 100+
poems I have in progress. It's going to be difficult - apart from my caring for an elderly mother, I've also been
selected to stand for Cardiff Council in May 2012. Interesting times!
September 22 2011 - 530 pages are done and only another 67 to go to give 245,067 words but Shrines is an incredible journey and another character gives another memarable qoute: "There is no greater demon that a righteous soul with the wrong information." To those of you asking when the sixth book is online - I'm hoping by the end of the month! The paperbacks will take a little longer so be patient, guys! Thanks.
September 15 2011 - The Shrines edit proceeds apace with 400 pages down and some kick-ass action in the Maeth Research facilities in Oxford where Gemma, Charren and Amy are hunted by six seeker-devices out to kill them. Thanks to Google-Earth the street walk-through helps map out the action in the fictional buildings which would surprise the current residents of Becket Street and Mill Lane. I also have a minor TEFL contract to complete and another four poetry books to read (thanks to Amy Wack of Seren for that). One of the characters, Sifford, gives a qoute: "When you twist truth into a double-helix - you end up with the DNA of tyranny." I can't decide which to do next: Light-Father, Ghost Army or Mute! Oh, a big up and thanx to Jim (Jim-Jam) Nettleton for his feedback and promotion and to Mike Thomas and others for promoting my guitar book - greatly appreciated!
September 04 2011 - I am editing Shrines whilst trying to include some of the constructive feedback I've received. Some fan-mail is positive and say they enjoyed the books ('I was gutted when you killed off Thomas Lewis in Rotation but to see him reappear briefly in Changeling was a beautiful surprise' - T Dunn & 'I took the books out of the library three times - I've never done that before not even with Herbert and Heinlein' - Rob Perry) some critics suggest that such a massive project with so many ideas is beyond the capacity of many readers - basically the complex interlinking of themes; the temporal duplicity of God; a religion devouring all others; the Book of All Faith becoming sentient; the world's first cyborg; the Three Fates, ghosts and living goddesses all make perfect sense to me but may overwhelm readers new to this genre (i.e. 'This is a series that should have been separated into 20 books, my friend! Each was okay but the interwoven plots require way too much concentration fotr the 'average' reader IMHO' - M. Fenn). So there you go! Food for thought.
August 23 2011 The revamp of all my book covers on Kindle and Smashword has been a success but book revenues are slightly down - due to the special offers in July. Some feedback suggests the Nexus series may too over-ambitious (200k words per book) for the e-market (where some people consider a measly 5k words as a book) so I am considering suspending the Nexus series on Book 6 (Shrines) which Chris Thomas has kindly agreed to print that book before Wuggles Publishing is retired. The promised bursary for my novel, Ghost Army, blowing the lid off domiciliary care (I was a care worker for two years), has also not materialised yet. Once Shrines is finished, I will work on the compact standalone spin-offs Light and Mute before completing the Nexus. I will keep these to 300pp single books and focus on less characters rather than the town that came to extraordinary life in the Nexus series. The Ka-Ching guitar guide I knocked out in May of this year is selling well with sales in Germany picking up. I am pleased to say that two of the Wuggles Books (Sacred Welsh Waters and Living with Siamese Cats) I e-edited are picking up a few sales too and last but not least, I have 100 pages done on my poetry anthology The Long Grim Book of Thin which I hope to launch later this year.
July 28 2011 - I spent many weeks in April and May launching my books on Kindle and Smashwords and encouraging others. Comments via Kindle Author boards is that my covers needed an upgrade and so I spend several days redsigning them. I am also coming to the conclusion that blogging on message boards is a massive waste of time better spent writing! I also had the pleasure to edit and e-launch Sacred Welsh Waters by Chris Thomas and Living with Siamese Cats by Jenny Bass his wife and look forward to adding his huge repertoire to the e-sphere.
Mar 20 2011 - It has been a long journey so far and this page will now function more as a blog. I wrote Fulcrum in 1995-9 and it evolved as aversion therapy to an MSc Transport degree. I self-published it along with Hissing Missionaries - my first small poetry book and edited and published Spears of Clouds by Garrett John, a local Cardiff poet and friend of mine. Fulcrum was heavily criticised on a BBC Radio review program and I allowed myself to be discouraged and gave away the rest of the print run to charity. The covers were poor but as only 100 existed, I have seen them change hands for over $100 on the internet! I was a councillor until 2004 until I resigned, a single father sickened by greed in politics. When the property boom collapsed in 2006 and Bernard R, the dodgy builder, destroyed one of my two houses, it took down my second business leaving me penniless. I was looking after 4 elderly relatives at one point as well as being a domicilliary carer but to counter depression, I began to write in 2008 and realised that, after many years, that Fulcrum wasn't that bad and it expanded into the Path Transcendent Trilogy. and beyond.
Again, I self published and in hindsight, the covers were not the best I could do! Libraries took copies eagerly and the round of distribution began. I was too small for book signings and the monopoly in Wales, the publicly-funded Welsh Book Council, only services large publishers and has zero tolerance for micro-publishers. Slowly, I got to meet similar souls and Chris Thomas appeared to play the Knight and offered to publish my Shrines trilogy using his Wuggles company and connections with LightningSource - my first experience wwith Print on Demand. I was also trialling chapters on www.ukauthors.com and poems on www.poetrycritical.net and finally the much friendlier www.poetfreak.com - grateful for the feedback, guys!
Thus the Path Transcendent Trilogy (Fulcrum, Lever and Rotation) was completed and released in Feb 2009. Goddess - the first book of the Shrines Trilogy was released in Feb 2010. Changeling - the second book in the trilogy - was finally completed in Dec 2010 having driven me half-insane with proof-reads! Shrines was put on hold temporarily as I was inspired by nephew Matt to complete a guitar tutor book project I began began in 2007.
NOTE: Each Path trilogy limited run book is signed and of the highest quality. Free e-chapters are downloadable on the Samples page. Many thanks to Chris Thomas, Alison Stormwolf, Amy Wack, Jodi Showers and many others who have commented on the works and the site!
