My ninth book: Raymond's Secret

Raymond's Secret is now released! 

 

Cover by the splendid DrRiptide. 

You can read a short blurb at my blog post here, or go straight to the book's page at Smashwords here. You can also find it at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iBooks.
In a couple of days, the price of the book will be raised to US$2.99, but if you have pre-ordered the book or if you purchase it before the price rise you'll get it for US$0.99.
Thank you to those who pre-ordered the book, and thank you to everyone who buys and reads it.
For the past three years, at the end of December, I have published a Raymond book. I have really enjoyed this tradition, and I hope my readers have too. However, Raymond's Secret is the last Raymond book for the time being – at this point I have no idea if there will be a fourth in the series.

2019 was a bumpy year for this author, with a handful of joys and triumphs and a handful of heartbreaks and miseries. Whatever it was like for you, I wish you a happy transition to the new year, and, in 2020, more joys and triumphs than heartbreaks and miseries.

Peace to you.

The cover for Raymond's Secret

Behold: the cover for Raymond's Secret.

Cover by the splendid DrRiptide. 

I continue to be in awe of the beauty of the covers that DrRiptide makes for me.

Raymond's Secret will be released on 31 December 2018 – though if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, that will be the 30th for you, and websites that are based in the Northern Hemisphere will show the release date as the 30th. 
Pre-orders for Raymond's Secret are now open at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iBooks. You can also view the book's page at Smashwords, though pre-orders won't be available there (but you will be able to buy the book there when it is released). The pre-order price is US$0.99, which is about $1.57 in New Zealand dollars as I type this. However, a couple of days after the book is released the price will go up to US$2.99, so it's worth pre-ordering! 

Some Raymond trivia

The third book in the Raymond series, Raymond's Secret, is scheduled for release at the end of December. If you have been following the series, you might be interested in some trivia pertaining to it. These are details that have not been mentioned in any of the books so far, plus some 'behind the scenes' minutiae.

• Raymond signs himself 'R.D.V.S.': 'Raymond Dimitry Van Stelte'.  

• Raymond speaks three languages: Romanian is his first language, English his second, and he also speaks Italian. 

• Wilson has mentioned that he doesn't know why people call him 'Wilson' instead of 'Toby'. You may notice that the adults in his life — his parents, Sandra, teachers — call him 'Toby', but his peers, enemies, classmates and friends all call him 'Wilson'. The extradiegetic or 'out of universe' reason — also called, fittingly, the Doylist reason! — for this is that I chose the name 'Wilson' for its similarity to 'Watson': Toby Wilson is to Raymond Van Stelte what John Watson is to Sherlock Holmes. As for the intradiegetic, or Watsonian, reason, it is as much a mystery to me as it is to Wilson!

• The first Raymond book was inspired by a wikiHow article titled something like 'How To Act Like A Modern-Day Vampire'. The article itself no longer seems to exist in the form it had when I read it, but this article is close to it. I stumbled across the article late one night, was intrigued that someone would write such an article and that people might be interested in its content; and then started wondering how such a pretence would play out in real life, and why someone would choose to engage in it long-term. Within days, I was writing Raymond. Raymond cites this article as the inspiration for his game; Doylistically, it is the inspiration for Raymond's existence.

• In Raymond, Wilson thinks to himself that vampires are based on the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler (Vlad III of Wallachia) — "that gross guy in Transylvania". This is, in fact, a fallacy: we now know that Bram Stoker, the writer of the seminal novel Dracula, knew very little about Vlad the Impaler: he borrowed his appellation, 'Dracula', which meant 'son of the dragon', and that is quite possibly the only genuine link between Vlad the Impaler and Dracula the vampire. I don't generally like to include misinformation in my stories, but it is a very widespread misconception and I believe that Wilson, not having personally done any research into vampires, would believe it.

• In all the Raymond books, many of the details of school years and classes have been glossed over, for the sake of not bogging down the story or burdening the poor beleaguered author with yet more research into nitty-gritty worldbuilding. I nearly put a disclaimer at the front of the books: something like, The author frankly admits that while some research has been done into certain details contained in this story, very little research into school terms, classes, et cetera, has been done for the purposes of this book, the author deeming it simply too complicated and largely irrelevant for a short novella such as this. The author begs the reader’s indulgence and understanding.  

• As recounted in this blog post, Raymond was written at lightning speed by my usual standards: twenty-one pages in three days. It also preferred to be written in darkness: when I tried to write in daylight, the words would not come.  

• I did not intend to write a sequel to Raymond; I thought it would be a single story. However, less than two weeks after finishing it, I found myself writing Raymond's Nemesis. It took a few weeks to complete, and after it was finished, I was sure that there would be no further Raymond stories ... but, a few months later, I was writing Raymond's Secret. The latter is the longest and most complex of the Raymond stories thus far, and it took two years to finish.

Pre-orders for Raymond's Secret are now open at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iBooks. You can also view the book's page at Smashwords, though pre-orders won't be available there (but you will be able to buy the book there when it is released). The pre-order price is US$0.99, which is about $1.57 in New Zealand dollars as I type this. However, a couple of days after the book is released the price will go up to US$2.99, so it's worth pre-ordering!

Pre-order for Raymond's Secret

Raymond's Secret, the third book in the Raymond series, is now available for pre-order!
Here is a blurb.

–––––

Toby Wilson’s best friends from school, Callum and George, are starting to become more and more worried about Wilson’s other friend and fellow student: the polite, mysterious Raymond. Is Raymond just foreign and a bit weird, or is he genuinely dangerous? If he is genuinely dangerous, would knowing the reason why be more dangerous than not knowing it? Wilson struggles to allay his friends’ fears without lying to them or betraying Raymond; and then another problem appears: Raymond has a stalker. And she even knows the contents of his lunchbox. Wilson finds that he needs to learn to emulate Raymond’s poise and acting ability very quickly – preferably without going mad, hurting any of his friends, or getting into huge amounts of trouble that would be extremely difficult to explain to adults.
Raymond’s secret threatens to explode in his face – and take Wilson, Callum, and George with it – in this story, the third in the ‘Raymond’ series, about the ‘sort-of vampire’ and his long-suffering friend Wilson.

–––––

For the past two years I have published a Raymond book at the end of December, as an end-of-year treat for my readers. Raymond's Secret is scheduled for publication on the same date this year: 31 December 2019 – though if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, that will be the 30th for you, and websites that are based in the Northern Hemisphere will show the release date as the 30th.

I invite you to pre-order Raymond's Secret so that you can get it the moment it is released, and at a special pre-order price.
If you're not familiar with pre-orders, they are quite simple: you can order the book in advance, but you will not be charged until the day the book is released.
Pre-orders are open now at Barnes & Noble and Kobo, and should soon be available at iBooks. You can also view the book's page at Smashwords, though pre-orders won't be available there (but you will be able to buy the book there when it is released). The pre-order price is US$0.99, which is about $1.57 in New Zealand dollars as I type this. However, a couple of days after the book is released the price will go up to US$2.99, so it's worth pre-ordering!

The cover is to be revealed in November.

My eighth book: Raymond's Nemesis

Raymond's Nemesis is now released. Huzzah!

Cover by the superlative DrRiptide.

You can see a short blurb and read an extract from the book at my blog post here, or go straight to the book's page at Smashwords here.
Thank you to those who preordered the book, and thank you to everyone who buys and reads it.
Raymond's Nemesis was 'the strawberry Oreo book', and while I was preparing it for publication I bought a packet of strawberry Oreos and ate them, for old time's sake.

The cover for Raymond's Nemesis

The cover for the sequel to Raymond is finished.

Cover by the longsuffering DrRiptide.

As you can see, DrRiptide and I designed it to be similar to the cover of Raymond, which you can see here.
My previous blog post here contains an extract from Raymond's Nemesis. The silver wolf statue on the cover comes later in the book, and once again, Raymond's special graveyard is featured in the story. Threats are made, Wilson has a moment – or two – of awesome, Raymond uses vocabulary that only he would use and comes up with a cunning plan, and we see more of Callum and George.

Raymond's Nemesis will be released on 31 December 2018 – though if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, that will be the 30th for you, and websites that are based in the Northern Hemisphere will show the release date as the 30th.
Preorders of Raymond's Nemesis are available at iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. You can view the book's page here at Smashwords, but Smashwords does not have the capacity for preorders.

Pre-order for Raymond's Nemesis

If you enjoyed Raymond, you may wish to know that there is a sequel: Raymond's Nemesis.

–––––

Toby Wilson's enigmatic friend from school, Raymond, has a secret, and Wilson is determined to help him keep it. So far, he has managed to keep the fact that Raymond is a 'sort-of vampire' hidden even from his best mates, Callum and George. As far as they are concerned, Raymond is just 'unusual', or 'eccentric'; after all, so long as he can play basketball with them and Wilson, what do a strange accent, a curious eye-colour, and an extraordinary amount of poise, matter?
But then a new student arrives at their school and starts to show a discomforting amount of interest in Raymond. The new student has a bullying streak, and seems to suspect that Raymond is … different. If he figures out what Raymond is hiding, Raymond and Wilson will be in the biggest trouble of their young lives: blackmail, lies, and difficult questions from parents and teachers could be just the beginning. Once again, Wilson finds himself in a graveyard at midnight with questionable company, and, suddenly, keeping Raymond and his dangerous secret safe becomes far more difficult and frightening than either Wilson or Raymond had imagined it could.
‘Raymond’s Nemesis’ is the second story in the ‘Raymond’ series.

–––––

Raymond was published on 31 December 2017, as an end-of-year surprise for my readers. Raymond's Nemesis is scheduled for publication on the same date this year: 31 December 2018 – though if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, that will be the 30th for you, and websites that are based in the Northern Hemisphere will show the release date as the 30th.

If you want to receive Raymond's Nemesis the moment it is released, you can pre-order it.
If you're not familiar with pre-orders, they are quite simple: you can order the book in advance, but you will not be charged until the day the book is released.
Pre-orders are open now at Barnes & Noble, and should soon be available at Kobo and iBooks. You can also view the book's page at Smashwords, though pre-orders won't be available there (but you will be able to buy the book there when it is released). The price is US$0.99, which is about $1.55 in New Zealand dollars as I type this.

The cover is to be revealed in November.
Here is an extract from the story.

–––––

A couple of weeks later, Raymond e-mailed me to ask if we could meet at the graveyard again after school someday that week. I replied that I had agreed to meet with Callum and George that afternoon, but the following afternoon, which was Thursday, I would be available.

As always, he was at the graveyard before me. I usually chatted with George and Callum for a few minutes after school, and that pause gave Raymond time to get a head start, so that we wouldn’t be seen walking together.

We dumped our backpacks in the shade of the great oak tree, and Raymond sat cross-legged in the short grass.

“What’s up?” I asked, flopping down beside him.

“Do you recall Logan Graves, the student who joined our school at the beginning of this term?”

I pondered. “The tall guy with dark hair?”

“Indeed. He has been displaying an interest in me.”

I looked at him uneasily. Raymond had such an unusual way of putting things. “What sort of … ‘interest’?”

“It is difficult to say. On numerous occasions I have seen him observing me with definite interest, perhaps curiosity. Generally I try not to be obvious, but this Logan seems to have noticed me. He seems to have perceived that I am … different.”

I frowned. We were silent for a moment.

“I suppose … it was bound to happen eventually,” I mused heavily.

“Of course,” Raymond agreed, “and I must admit that I never had a completely satisfactory plan as to what to do when it did.”

I looked at him. “Oh.

“… I sort of hoped that you did.”

“Most of what I do can be explained,” Raymond said. “I have an unusual eye colour; that is remarkable, but not abnormal. I seldom blink –”

“You never blink,” I interjected. “Not when anyone’s looking, anyway.”

“That is true,” Raymond conceded. “I could invent a medical condition to explain that, and also to explain why I stay out of the sun and wear sunglasses when outside.”

“You’re pale, but lots of people are pale, and you would be if you stay out of the sun all the time,” I supplied. “And you have an accent because you come from Romania.”

“Just so,” agreed Raymond.

I grinned. “Your dress sense is a little harder to explain.”

Raymond looked at me. “What is wrong with my dress sense?”

“Nothing. That’s the whole point. You dress better than anyone I’ve met. Certainly better than anyone else at school.”

“Ah, I see. Thank you.”

“But then most of the time we’re wearing uniforms at school anyway. And the reason you speak like that – all politely and properly – is that English is your second language.”

Raymond looked at me appreciatively. “Precisely.”

“So if we can explain everything about you, what’s the problem?”

Raymond inhaled deeply. “When you first began to notice me, did you not say all these things to yourself in your mind?”

“Um … I suppose so.”

“And yet you still found yourself wondering whether or not I was a vampire.”

“Well … yeah. But there was the blood thing. That was what really made me wonder. You could have been just a really unusual guy, except that you couldn’t keep your eyes off other people’s blood.”

“Indeed.”

“So … all you have to do is disguise your –” I shrugged, not knowing what to call it. “Your blood obsession.”

Raymond was silent.

“It’s not that hard, is it?” I asked.

Raymond sighed. “It should not be.”

“Just stay away from anyone who bleeds,” I told him. “You managed when Bertha threw that basketball at me. My nose was bleeding, but you didn’t even look at me.”

“I was focussed on preventing Bertha from harming you further.”

“Right. So … focus on something else. Distract yourself. Just don’t let Logan see you staring.”

Raymond nodded. “You are right. It should be easy.”

I hesitated. “Then why don’t you sound convinced?” I pressed him. “Come on, you’re the guy with the amazing self-control. The guy who never blinks or raises his voice. You can make yourself look away if you have to.”

The corners of Raymond’s mouth quirked in the merest of smiles. “You flatter me.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes, as you know,” Raymond said slowly, “there are moments when I am more vampiric than even I intend to be.” 

–––––

In which I talk about books that are nocturnal and require sugar

Some of my books refuse to be written in daylight. They are nocturnal.
It's quite bizarre. Raymond, for example, was written very quickly: 21 pages in 3 days, and most of it written between 15:00 and 03:00 (3 p.m. and 3 a.m.). It was written in Winter, and where I live, the Winter dusk starts to fall at about 16:00–17:00. So the vast majority of the story was written during the hours of darkness. If I tried to make progress during daylight, the ideas would not flow. As soon as the sun went down, the muse awoke, and the story unfolded itself in my head. I did not try to fight this phenomenon: it very quickly became apparent that this story had its own way of doing things, and I was not about to argue so long as the ideas kept flowing.
Seven years later, when I wanted to edit Raymond for publication, it refused to be edited in daylight. I spent hours staring at the manuscript on my computer monitor, but could not make any progress on editing it, no matter how I tried. And then, inexplicably, as soon as the sun went down, I could.
After the editing was complete, I needed to format the text for publication, and this the story allowed me to do during daylight. Formatting requires little creativity, so perhaps that is why I could format in daylight; although, in theory, editing doesn't require a lot of creativity either. Editing does, however, require lots of decisions to be made – lots and lots of tiny decisions – and apparently I couldn't make them while the sun was up.
The sequel, Raymond's Nemesis (due to be published in December 2018) was the same: in daylight, nothing; at night, the inspiration flowed. It was harder to write than Raymond was, and took much longer, so there were more sleepless nights and more sugar was consumed.
Incidentally, some stories require certain sorts of sugary treats – in addition to my usual hot chocolate, masala chai lattes, or mochaccinos – to be consumed whilst writing them. Raymond's Nemesis, which was also written in Winter, was – if I recall correctly – the strawberry Oreo book: I had access to a large box of those biscuits, packaged in threes, and every hour or two would leave my computer to make another hot drink in the benighted kitchen and retrieve another packet of Oreo biscuits, to be eaten at my desk while the heater blasted warm air into the room. Another nocturnal book, The Vine, required a large box of Turkish Delight, which I already had in my possession (I love Turkish Delight), and which I started eating so that I could describe the taste of it really well for the story, then kept eating because I was writing at night and wanted the sugar to keep my physical brain awake and functional while the muse fed ideas into it.
To anyone who does not believe in muses, or who is not possessed of an artistic temperament, or whose muse is less capricious, this must seem ridiculous. Surely, one can set a time for writing, then sit down and write. How hard can it be to put words on paper, or on a screen?
Certainly, that is what one tries to do. But there is a thing called 'inspiration'; one cannot wait around for it, else nothing will get finished: one must write regardless of how uninspired one feels; but at the same time, inspiration is the magic without which stories simply cannot exist. One cannot force it; one cannot wait for it; and when it does arrive, one must allow it to seize and drive one's imagination for as long as it will do so, because the result of such possession is always wonderful and beautiful and far better than anything one can produce without it.
So if inspiration descends upon me late at night when I am tired and want to sleep, I have a choice: tell it to come back another day, and risk it not doing so, or stay up and write for as long as I can, until either I or the inspiration is exhausted. This is why I call the particular type of inspiration that comes to me my 'muse': she seems almost like a person, with whims and moods, sulks and passions. Sometimes she ignores me; sometimes she pesters. Sometimes I can almost see her in my mind's eye. And the magic – the inspiration – that she causes to flow through me is worth losing sleep over.
These nocturnal, sugar-laden writing processes are neither healthy nor sustainable, occasionally frustrating, and certainly not my preference; but when that is how the story insists on being written – or how the muse insists I write the story – that is what I must do, and a series of nights of sleep-deprivation and sugar highs is worth it in the end when I have a complete, or near-complete, story before me.

My seventh book: Raymond

As a special post-Christmas surprise, I have just published another book!

Cover by the inimitable DrRiptide.

A short blurb:
Toby Wilson’s considered opinion is that his classmate Raymond is weird. Intelligent, poised, and strangely sophisticated for a teenage schoolboy, Raymond seems decent enough: he did save Wilson’s life, after all; but is he really just a weird teenager with unusual eyes and a foreign accent or is he far older than he looks? And does he keep staring at people’s blood, or is it Wilson’s imagination?

It is currently available, free, on Smashwords. Here's the link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/773774.
You might also find it at your preferred e-book retailer. 

This fulfills my goal of publishing three books this year. It was a battle, but I did it.

Have a peaceful end of 2017, and may 2018 bring more joy and peace than this year, and its predecessor, have.
Either way, keep fighting. Keep hoping. Keep surviving. Outlast and outshine the darkness.
Breathe deep. Seek peace.

Peace to all of you.