I’m taking a quick break from writing the seventh novel in the Mac Maguire series in order to write this post. In the next few weeks I’ll be handing over the first draft to my partner for its first read through. I’m planning on publishing the novel, as yet unnamed, late April or early May and hopefully by then I’ll have come up with a title.
Among the myriad of things I often get wrong in any first draft is the plot line. There are either some obvious holes or, one of my partner’s pet gripes, some events are just too implausible. When these implausibilities are pointed out I usually groan silently and wonder how I could have written something that was so unlikely to happen in real life. Continue reading
This thought came about because of a recent review of 
I’ve just published my latest book The Black Vaults Experiment.
I recently posted about 
If you’ve spent even a few minutes looking at the Amazon KDP Writers Forum then you will know how exercised authors can be on the subject of book reviews. If they don’t get any then they are sad but if they get reviews and they are somewhat negative then they’re even sadder. Some old hands have pointed out that amassing loads of good reviews doesn’t always mean increased sales. So why are reviews so important to authors?
I’ll be publishing a new Mac Maguire mystery in October called Two Dogs. In the book Mac tells his new colleague Kate Grimsson how he got his nickname ‘Mac’ (his real first name is Dennis). I’ll not tell you here as that would be a spoiler so you’ll need to read the book to find out. Over the series of books I’ll be letting readers know a little more about his past, however, this isn’t something I’ve had to think up as I already knew his back story long before I wrote the first book in the series The Body in the Boot. 
I’ve only started writing crime novels with any seriousness in the last three years or so and in that time I’ve never attended any sort of literary festival. So when I heard about the line-up for this year’s 
Throughout most of my latest book 23 Cold Cases the main character, retired murder specialist Mac Maguire, spends virtually all of his time in bed. Why did I write a crime book with this in the plot and what were the challenges?
The next Mac Maguire book, the fifth, is nearly there and after some three years or so of seriously struggling to put the right words in the right order this has given me some pause for thought. Looking back I’ve learnt so much from the writing process and I’ve no plans for stopping anytime soon. So what’s changed with me since I started out on my writer’s journey?
Patrick C. Walsh Author 