Read Online Shot Through The Heart (Supernature Book 1) by Edwin James - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Edwin James
Ads: Link
stop breastfeeding." She yawned.
Mark smiled. "Have a nice sleep," he said.
"You too."
Sitting on the bed, Mark ended the call and looked across his lonely hotel room. The desk was already a pigsty, full of his papers and other odds and sods, including the sheets from Kay's room that he'd managed to acquire.
The biggest weight on the desk was the unwritten words, the tens of thousands that he hadn't committed to his word processor yet. It was all sculpted out but, if his PhD had taught him anything, it was that he just could not stick to a structure, finding the tangents and divergences far too tempting, like a magpie heading after something shiny.
It had taken eighteen drafts of the thesis to get something that at least hung together from start to finish and then another five drafts to bash that into a readable shape. He'd left it for a month or so while he sat and played a computer game called Starcraft , pretending to the rest of the world that he was working hard.
Sarah's PhD had been much easier - she'd structured it out, tweaked and played with that for a few weeks while Mark racked up word count down at the granular level. She'd finished two years ahead of Mark, and she'd been the breadwinner for those two years while he mucked about with his word count. And Starcraft .
When he went back to his own final draft, he discovered that what he'd ended up with was surprisingly good. It just took some minor corrections and then he was finished - that month of hiding away had helped his brain reconfigure itself to acknowledge that he was actually pretty good at this stuff. His tutor had loved it - it had been peer-reviewed and then posted in countless online resources.
Usually, most PhDs would largely be ignored - like Sarah's had been - but Mark's quickly became the vanguard of a new wave of popular history books, itself a solid history of the Clan McLeod. The offer to publish it came through pretty quickly - extend it, refine it, but keep the essence. He managed to keep to the extended outline, just, but mainly through a punitive risk/reward system on the contract.
It sold well.
Then the second one came along, the expansion of a tertiary hypothesis of the PhD into a full-length book about the Highland Clearances, something that he figured would be easy to fix and get out there. Having two books published would be good - if not for his bookshelf, then for his bank balance.
He was drowning.
He had learned a big lesson, though - do your research in advance, and get the structure nailed down. He had now spent two years on research and structure, and the money was running out as quickly as the pages in his notebook, and nowhere near being adequately replaced by the trickle of royalties from the first book.
The laptop looked up at him, its blank screen making him feel guilty - he needed to get the word count racked up. He was just about there with the structure, but he needed to get the words done. Writing a book like this was a marathon - he needed stamina.
He shut the laptop and tidied up his notes into piles. Most of them he'd now processed, typing them up or transcribing the interviews into his laptop, but there was still a lot of admin to get through.
He picked up the bag of comics from Buffy's shop and went back to lie on the bed. He looked at the Blade trade paperbacks and just didn't feel ready for a punk vampire killer. The local one that Buffy had pushed on him was all that remained - that or a Norwegian crime thriller he was wading through.
The story sprawled across forty-two pages, with a text section at the back - unlike American comics, there were mercifully few adverts, especially for products that you couldn't even import to the UK.
The story fascinated him from the outset - it was about Elizabeth Bathory, the so-called Blood Countess. Bathory was a daughter of Hungarian nobility in the 1500s - there was a cute touch near the start which showed one of her ancestors fighting alongside Vlad the
Mark smiled. "Have a nice sleep," he said.
"You too."
Sitting on the bed, Mark ended the call and looked across his lonely hotel room. The desk was already a pigsty, full of his papers and other odds and sods, including the sheets from Kay's room that he'd managed to acquire.
The biggest weight on the desk was the unwritten words, the tens of thousands that he hadn't committed to his word processor yet. It was all sculpted out but, if his PhD had taught him anything, it was that he just could not stick to a structure, finding the tangents and divergences far too tempting, like a magpie heading after something shiny.
It had taken eighteen drafts of the thesis to get something that at least hung together from start to finish and then another five drafts to bash that into a readable shape. He'd left it for a month or so while he sat and played a computer game called Starcraft , pretending to the rest of the world that he was working hard.
Sarah's PhD had been much easier - she'd structured it out, tweaked and played with that for a few weeks while Mark racked up word count down at the granular level. She'd finished two years ahead of Mark, and she'd been the breadwinner for those two years while he mucked about with his word count. And Starcraft .
When he went back to his own final draft, he discovered that what he'd ended up with was surprisingly good. It just took some minor corrections and then he was finished - that month of hiding away had helped his brain reconfigure itself to acknowledge that he was actually pretty good at this stuff. His tutor had loved it - it had been peer-reviewed and then posted in countless online resources.
Usually, most PhDs would largely be ignored - like Sarah's had been - but Mark's quickly became the vanguard of a new wave of popular history books, itself a solid history of the Clan McLeod. The offer to publish it came through pretty quickly - extend it, refine it, but keep the essence. He managed to keep to the extended outline, just, but mainly through a punitive risk/reward system on the contract.
It sold well.
Then the second one came along, the expansion of a tertiary hypothesis of the PhD into a full-length book about the Highland Clearances, something that he figured would be easy to fix and get out there. Having two books published would be good - if not for his bookshelf, then for his bank balance.
He was drowning.
He had learned a big lesson, though - do your research in advance, and get the structure nailed down. He had now spent two years on research and structure, and the money was running out as quickly as the pages in his notebook, and nowhere near being adequately replaced by the trickle of royalties from the first book.
The laptop looked up at him, its blank screen making him feel guilty - he needed to get the word count racked up. He was just about there with the structure, but he needed to get the words done. Writing a book like this was a marathon - he needed stamina.
He shut the laptop and tidied up his notes into piles. Most of them he'd now processed, typing them up or transcribing the interviews into his laptop, but there was still a lot of admin to get through.
He picked up the bag of comics from Buffy's shop and went back to lie on the bed. He looked at the Blade trade paperbacks and just didn't feel ready for a punk vampire killer. The local one that Buffy had pushed on him was all that remained - that or a Norwegian crime thriller he was wading through.
The story sprawled across forty-two pages, with a text section at the back - unlike American comics, there were mercifully few adverts, especially for products that you couldn't even import to the UK.
The story fascinated him from the outset - it was about Elizabeth Bathory, the so-called Blood Countess. Bathory was a daughter of Hungarian nobility in the 1500s - there was a cute touch near the start which showed one of her ancestors fighting alongside Vlad the
Similar Books
