Mark Henwick

I’ve become quite bad at updating, and I’ve added a prompt in my diary to write something at the end of every month.

This is a catchup, so what has happened this year?

The Long Way Home

The fourth book of the series, Don’t Stop Now, has been finished and edited and is sitting on the Amazon servers collecting pre-orders.

https://mybook.to/TLWH4-DSN

This takes the intrepid crew of the Dark Phoenix (formerly the Acid Penguin) into the heart of the Inner Worlds. Those star systems aren’t as rich and stable as Jan and Bjorn expected, and the best flow of commerce is all against their direction of travel.

But they find one good turn deserves…

Ah. Not quite. Well, it would be difficult to say they get an easy good turn back, but life does become very shady and interesting for a while.

And then they’re in the depths of the Inner Worlds, where evil and corruption sink into the very fabric of star systems.

Warning, this book ends on a cliffhanger. Mwah ha ha ha!

I did write half of this on the newsletter, so followers there will recognize the early episodes. I’m not using the newsletter for TLWH any more. It made great sense at the time, but I can’t juggle so much these days.

There are a couple more books in this series to complete the arc of returning to Calloway and saving their colony (and rescuing that lost colony too).

I’ve also bundled the first 3 books together into a boxset. Link below.

https://mybook.to/TLWH-Boxset1

Amber Farrell – Paranormal PI – Bite Back

Well, I’m making progress with #9, but summer is here, and the delay in completing TLWH4 means that BB9 is slipping from Q3 to Q4 this year. As ever, there are a tangle of threads to weave into order and the pace has to be kept up.

Amber and Bian have the initial meeting of the new Assembly to host in Denver, which itself is full of problems for both of them, but Amber also has to persuade the Were Confederation to attend, and she can’t simply ignore the war with Basilikos while the Assembly sits. Nor can she refuse to assist as Emergence seeps into the highest levels of government, not forgetting there’s the investigation of who exactly was behind the whole of Matlal’s undercover operation in the States … who gave the orders for her to be treated like a lab rat by the late Colonel Peterson? Who could be so high in the administration of the Department of Defence that they could authorize that?

And all the while, her friends are increasingly worried about her: her state of mind, and her soul itself.

Bite Back 9 is my highest writing priority this year. Big and twisty, folks.

In the background, I’ve also bundled all 8 books together in a boxset. There are readers out there who don’t want individual books, even long ones, they want LOTS and LOTS of words. It just so happens that the 8 major novels amount to over a million words, so that should keep them happy. If you know of any ‘whale readers’, here’s the link

https://mybook.to/BB-Boxset1-8

There are at least 2 more books in the Bite Back series.

And now to my poor orphans. Firstly, the other two series which I have promised I will get to…

Bian’s Tale

I loved writing the first book. (A good thing because my editor made me rewrite it about 3 times).

I loved the research, and it was necessary because 1890s Saigon isn’t the most accessible of eras & places. I have a huge box of books (some of them in French), videos in DVD and VHS(!) format, TV recordings, entire battered notebooks, travel guides, etc. etc.

I found the box stuffed away in the back of the attic a couple of weeks ago.

Why?

Because when I released Bian’s Tale 1, The Harvest of Lies… it disappeared with barely a ripple. I don’t think the writing is bad, or the setting is too unusual. (Although someone complained of the evidence of too much research, lol). But I think I got the marketing wrong (cover, advertising etc.).

While I was still finding that out, for a few weeks, I was running on the enthusiasm of the first book, and outlined five others, and I wrote some of book 2, The Words of the Dead. Then I put it aside because the response to book 1 was so bad, and eventually I tidied the research away into the attic.

All that said, with the resurgence of Bite Back, now people are discovering The Harvest of Lies and complaining about the non-appearance of book 2.

I will return to The Words of the Dead. I hope next year. There are 5-6 books in the series which will take Bian through to the point where she is appointed Diakon of House Altau, with maybe an epilogue that shows Bian’s point of view at that first meeting with Amber described in Sleight of Hand.

The Harvest of Lies is at:

https://mybook.to/THoL

Among the Stars

Another orphan series. The first two books were written as episodes which I posted on WordPress and made available in newsletters.

Book 1, A Name Among the Stars, was a definite success. I wrote it as a bit of an experiment, which freed me from the concept of narrow genres and writing styles. Book 1 was a deliberate attempt to write a mash-up of a Regency romance and Science Fiction adventure, in the first person, in the present tense. It was great fun to write. I thought it was going to be a stand-alone, but enough people asked for more, and so I wrote A Theat Among the Stars. The complexity of the story required the addition of multiple PoV characters, with Zara remaining in the first person and other PoV characters speaking in the third person. All fun to write as well.

Readers liked A Threat Among the Stars, but not in the numbers to make book 3, A Ship Among the Stars, a high enough priority.

I have written some short stories which form part of book 3, and I do want to finish this series, but it’s definitely a ‘next year’ thing.

There are a couple more books in this series.

The first two are at:

https://mybook.to/Among_the_Stars

Other Orphans

Stand Up

An unnamed sequel to Change of Regime

Newsletter stories (monthly)

A host of others.

Yes. I know. I hate not finishing things. I will get through everything, but I started a slow writer and I haven’t got any faster!