A fair while back, I reported on what a common word ‘Falling’ is in literature and entertainment. Even back then there were several high profile examples. In fact, you might recall I actually bought a police procedural/crime thriller from the UK called Falling as a kind of kindred gesture with the author. And now, a romantic drama’s coming up. It looks like a small indie or VOD release, and is described thusly; What if the woman of your dreams was also dreamt by your best friend? FALLING introduces us to the anti-fairytale romance of an impossible love triangle between lovers

I’m Australian, and – quite obviously, since it’s set on and around the Sydney Harbour Bridge – Falling is set in Australia. The characters work and go about their business in real places which are very identifiable in our world, from the Royal North Shore Hospital to the block of flats on the corner of Chuter Ave and Ramsgate Road where Dale lives and which I’ve written about before. Many of the other novels I’ve written have been written about and set in or around Australia too – not out of patriotism, simply by virtue of the each book’s premise.

As Bowie so eloquently put it… Ch- ch- changes! As a self publisher, one has to be on Amazon’s Kindle store, and for the more discerning, Apple’s Bookstore as well. Another one that was kind of a given for small, indie and self publishers was Smashwords, started in 2008 by a guy called Mark Coker, who seemed like a thoroughly upstanding gent (I interviewed him years ago for a story on self publishing in my day job as a reporter). The site seemed like a bit of a labour of love. It was never as slick or corporate as the

Another marketing drive coming up soon to try and get Falling some attention. Two different efforts, in fact, and they’re shots as long as it’s possible to take, but after all this time there’s no reason not to aim high. They can only – like almost everyone else I’ve ever tried – say no. I’ve got two copies of the novel printed using Amazon’s publisher copies service (which in fact makes me Falling’s most prolific customer; they’re the second and third printed copies I’ve bought). The first copy will go off direct to a publisher, something that’s incredibly hard to

It’s the morning after the first night Dale has slept over at Vicki’s place. She’d asked him over for dinner to tell him how unforgivably unprofessional it was to sleep with him a few nights before in her surgery when the emotions overcame them both. She intended to apologise and tell him his rights, including reporting her conduct to the appropriate board and having her disbarred from practising as a psychiatrist if he wished. Instead, they spend a magical evening together flirting, talking, eating and drinking. As consenting and single adults she unconsciously expects them to end up sleeping together

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it on this blog, but part of the package if you self publish on Amazon, as I have with Falling, is a (somewhat) special price on a printed copy. Kindle Direct Publishing wants you to think it’s easy to set up the file to offer your book in print rather than just an ebook, but the vagaries of applying ink to paper and binding leaves of it together has a raft of inherent knowledge not a lot of people know, and not a lot of it’s easy to grasp. Thankfully, after a long career

I love science. In case you hadn’t realised after reading Falling (because of course everyone who reads this blog has, including me… actually, limited to me), it started out as a scary ghost story, and as it evolved it also became an investigation into exactly why and how ghosts can exist according to scientific disciplines from psychology to electromagnetism and everything in between. I’m actually in the midst of writing a new novel at the moment, which will no doubt rise to and meet the acclaim Falling has enjoyed (ie none). It’s about a young woman who stumbles on a

I’m sure I’ve talked about this on this blog before (in fact it’s mentioned in the endmatter/extras/bonus material that comes at the end of Falling), but something that became a big deal to me at some point when I was rewriting was a reason for the supernatural phenomena depicted to exist. When we watch horror movies or read horror stories, the reason scary stuff happens is for us, not the characters. The author/screenwriter/director wants to scare us, because that’s what we expect from the genre. But who decided ghosts or the paranormal had to be scary, other than the artists

** SPOILERS ** Did you know Falling, after all the decades of work, already has a sequel? Not written, of course, just in planning. I’ll write it when the original becomes a global entertainment phenomenon. I actually thought I’d written some of it, but having just had a quick look on my system, I can’t find it. Maybe I only dreamed I did but I’ve been thinking about it so long I’ve come to believe I did. As you’ll know from reading the novel, the final scene sees Tim Hacker walk back into downtown Sydney as the original Sydney Harbour

Well, I’m well on my way to bestsellerdom…