This afternoon I published the latest of my Pitkirtly Mysteries to Amazon and Smashwords. As I write this, it should already be visible on the Smashwords site, which happens almost instantly, but the time it takes to appear on other sites always varies depending on the review process of the various online bookshops. It’s entitled ‘The Christmas Catastrophe’ and the story begins during the run-up to Christmas, when Christopher is worrying about whether he’s fully up to speed with festive plans at the Cultural Centre, Amaryllis has to drive up to Aberdeen for some mysterious purpose and Giancarlo has his hands full with a family emergency.
I hope my readers will enjoy this latest effort. Although it is fairly light-hearted as usual, I found myself uncertain about how some of the plot threads should be resolved, which distracted me from the actual murder mystery.
One of my main activities during the past few weeks has been changing my mind, so the cover design shown here is not the same as the one I unveiled in my previous post, which suddenly looked too dark once we went into November. I had to abandon my attempt to rewrite my epic novel of the English Civil War for National Novel Writing Month, for much the same reason. The middle of the seventeenth century is quite a dark time in British and indeed in European history, so unless I can find a way of lightening it up considerably, I think the typescript will have to stay on the shelf in the conservatory!
Because I love the challenge of National Novel Writing Month, no sooner had I decided to give up on the English Civil War than I started a new document and have currently written about 30,000 words of a new Max Falconer mystery, mostly set in Inverness. The title of this one has already changed once and could well change again before the end, the way things are going. However I am glad of the chance to use Inverness as a setting as there is quite a bit of scope for action and it was my father’s home town.
Cecilia Peartree - woman of mystery 