Nick Bryan

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Thinkin’ About Social Media – Two guest posts elsewhere!

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Hello!A rare bit of blog content between podcasts now, as I’ve been doing some more guest posts to drum up more interest in my Hobson & Choi self-published crime series. On this occasion, whether by coincidence or because it’s a cunning PR strategy (I don’t actually know), they are both about the demon Social Media.

First to go up was “The Benefits and Disadvantages of Social Media to an Author” on Linda’s Bookbag. In this post, I attempt to distill everything I have learnt and observed about using social media over the years – mostly as an author, but sometimes just as a human being.

Second, I try to explain “How Do You End Up Writing A Book About Social Media?” on Emma’s Bookery. It’s a good question – I sometimes wonder myself – and I know some people act like it’s the death of dramatic tension, but I think I can justify its appeal to me. You’ll have to read it yourself to see how I did.

And those are my guest posts! Hopefully a few more of these popping up in the coming weeks as we start ramping up for the H&C4 launch – I’ve got a cover completion date in early August confirmed, so hopefully we should get the book out before the third quarter of 2016 is over. I can but dream.

And in the spirit of Social Media Strategy, obviously do not forget to follow me on Twitter. My friend Ross also has a post about essential blogging tools if you want to see someone else type about the internet.

How To Write A Hobson & Choi Book In 50 Easy Steps – GUEST POST ELSEWHERE

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Because I am the best at internet, I’ve only just realised that a guest post I wrote a while back has been on the internet since December! It’s a choose-your-own-adventure style list post on how to write your own Hobson & Choi book in 50 easy steps, and it’s hosted on the Music, Books & Tea blog! Click on this paragraph to activate it!

This only came to light when I was emailed by Faye Rogers (the nice PR person who gets me these guest post gigs) to talk about future commitments and I realised I’d never actually promoted this one.

Whoops. Still, I think it’s pretty funny and deserving of attention. More stuff like this probably coming up as we move ever closer to the release of H&C4!

Hobson & Choi quiz! Poem! Guest posts a go-go!

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Hi!

After producing a slightly loose post last week, I was perhaps considering writing a real one this time, but I became unexpectedly busy and the remaining time had to be given over to the important tasks of actually writing and watching TV shows based on comics.

But as luck would have it, I’ve written some proper structured Hobson & Choi related bits for other blogs that have gone up this week, so at least I can link to those.

They’re a little more esoteric than some of the guest posts I’ve done in my time, as there’s only so much I can say about my Amazing Writing Process.

Firstly, there’s the “Which Hobson & Choi Character Are You?” quiz, which is perhaps the most important personality test of our generation. Yes, even though it contains an arguable factual error re: whether Breaking Bad is a “current” TV show. Ahem.

Thanks to the always-excellent Chelley of Tales of Yesterday for hosting that one, including doing all the actual set-up for the quiz – I just sent over a set of questions and answers. Much obliged.

Second, and even more in-jokey than the first one, it’s Gentrificapocalypse Now, a poem by Sad Receptionist. This is an actual creative work by a character from the H&C books, who you can follow on Twitter if you want. His backstory is (partially) unveiled in the second book, but the actual Twitter account is just stupid rhyming jokes really. More details in the actual blog post, kindly hosted by Andrew of The Pewter Wolf.

And that is it for now. Next week, if I’m not unexpectedly busy, maybe a real blog post here?

Writing challenge update! Guest post! GollanczFest! ADMINARAMA!

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This is going to be another post which mish-mashes together some smaller points rather than having an amazing structure of its own, I’m afraid, as I’ve been writing a lot of guest-posts for other people’s blogs, so haven’t got a huge amount of fuel left in the Blog-Engine (or spare time left in the day) to produce a properly-structured masterpiece for my own.

However, I want to do some kind of update on my ongoing thousand-words-a-day writing challenge and I’ve got a few other bits and bobs too, so here’s another disjointed general summary!

NickNoWriQuart – OOH WE’RE HALFWAY THERE

The big news (for me anyway) is that I’ve made it over the halfway mark of the daily writing challenge I outlined on this blog a month ago. My day job got quite busy for a while and then I had to publish the third Hobson & Choi book and write all those guest posts and I really thought one of those things would smash it to bits, but no, I’m still on track. In fact, I’m a few days over quota, as I’m busy most of the weekend – for reasons I’ll outline a little further down – and wanted to make sure I didn’t drop the challenge.

So, the good news is that I’ve done nearly 50k and, if this were NaNoWriMo rather than NickNoWriQuart, would have won by now. But NickNoWriQuart is both more hardcore (longer total!) and less (smaller daily wordcount!) than NaNo.

The bad news is, as with nearly all my first drafts, decent-sized chunks of the plan haven’t really survived contact with reality and various changes became necessary as I went along. This is something I’ve blogged about a fair bit – here I am talking about making less mistakes and here I am talking about plans going awry – and yet still it happens.

But I’ve got my notes, the broad plot remains in place, so I’m going to try and swoop onwards for now. Mostly because I think it would be useful to have taken a swing at the ending – more infuriating to go back now and make a huge amount of substantial change, then discover this new version doesn’t work for my ending and have to change everything again.

So, in short, everything continues as normal. I still want a full first draft by the end of November (or possibly the end of the year if I need to write a final couple of chapters in Dec) and I’ll do another update at some point.

Guest Post – Five High Street Institutions I Could Turn Evil in Future H&C Books

If you want something that more closely resembles a structured blog post, I’ve written this one for Jim over at YA Yeah Yeah in which I talk about five fixtures of the British high street that I could theoretically turn all crimey for a future Hobson & Choi novel.

Do give it a look for some fun. Even if you’ve no interest in hearing about my writing process (in which case the previous section of this post must’ve just killed you), this really is all silly jokes.

Oh, and as this is the only H&C-relevant section of this post – yes, the book 3 launch went fine, thanks for asking. Sold a decent amount of book three, gave away a huge amount of the newly-free-on-ebook book one.

Coming up next: some promotion, including a few more guest posts (I’ll try and list them here in some kind of link compilation) and maybe even some Multimedia Content. We’ll see if that works out.

GollanczFest – Will it be GollanczBest?

This weekend, I am going to GollanczFest in London, in which a bunch of sci-fi/fantasy authors (who happen to all be published by Gollancz) will be talking in general about their work on Saturday and in a more advice-to-writers way on Sunday. I hope it’ll be interesting, there are some great authors in attendance (including Joe Abercrombie, Ben Aaronovitch, Paul Cornell, loads of others) and after the excellent fun of Nine Worlds in August, I’m up for more of this kinda thing.

Linking back up to the first part, GollanczFest is why I’ve written a short way ahead on the NickNoWriQuart challenge. It may also be the topic of its own blog next week, if I can think of much to say beyond “Yeah, it was good.” If you want that level of analysis, follow me on Twitter and it’s a safe bet you’ll get some over the weekend.

Okay, that turned out a decent length (if still quite bitty) post in the end. Cool cool.

Hobson & Choi Blog Tour – WEEK ONE

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The first week of the Hobson & Choi Blog Tour has more or less happened! The good word of H&C spreads far and wide across half a dozen sites, with many more still to come!

In case you haven’t had time to keep track of the latest tweets and so on, I thought I’d come back with a quick summary of what’s happened in the last week. Not to mention, I wrote a few fun posts for this tour myself, and since subscribers to this website are meant to like that sort of thing, I figured it was worth calling attention to them.

Me Me Me

First up in the posts-by-me section, then, we had a good-length interview with fellow indie author and JukePop graduate Virginia McClain. Some good introductory questions about the series, plus a few more in-depth moments about process, serials and whether I would be willing to eat a guinea pig. Virginia’s own post-Jukepop action-fantasy novel Blade’s Edge just came out too, which I thoroughly recommend. More details on Goodreads, including a longer review by me.

I also had a guest post on Music, Books & Tea about how to use the internet in fiction without killing the drama, which might be of use to other writers and funny to everyone else. It’s kinda a jokey post, but I means my jokes.

Last in the all-me section, I also wrote a fairly comprehensive piece of My Influences for YA Yeah Yeah. If you ever want to know what turned me into the writer I am today, or just want some recommendations, I stand by all of those. Although some might be aimed at a quite young demographic.

The Thoughts Of Others

Even more excitingly, some other folk were kind enough to read the H&C books and offer up some thoughts for the blog tour. Writer/craft blogger and long-time friend of both me and whole H&C project Claire Rousseau wrote a review of both books on her site.

If you prefer lists (like they do on the internet, I hear), Faye of A Daydreamer’s Thoughts produced a list of ten reasons why you should read the Hobson & Choi series, and they’re all worth taking heed of, I feel. But I would say that.

Lastly for now, we have another review of both books by Chelley of Tales of Yesterday! Not only are there kind words said about the books, Chelley may also win for tour dedication with her H&C-styled site banner created for her tour date, which I’m reproducing below for posterity.

Excellent. If anyone in the second week of the tour wants to repaint their house in the style of the Hobson & Choi covers, that might be the only way to beat that.

Prizes Prizes Prizes!

I will just mention that if you want a free copy of the first H&C book, I have recently sent five copies to the Books On The Underground scheme, which leaves copies of books around the London Underground – it seemed apt considering our cover. So if you follow me on Twitter, I’ll try and post whenever I hear the location of a copy.

Round table interview plugging A Chimerical World! Contains brief snatches of me!

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This is probably one for the Nick Bryan completists (who I still hope exist), but I participated in a round-table interview to promote the A Chimerical World: Tales of the Unseelie Court anthology, in which one of my stories appears.

And if you just want the hard facts about the actual story, here are the details of those particular anthology appearances. The Unseelie Court story is probably the strongest of the two, if you want to check one of them out – although the other one is much longer.