2023-10-07 - Nancy and Holmes any day now

📆 Post date: 2023-10-14 My new book, ‘Nancy & Holmes’ is finished. I am just waiting on Amazon to do some checks, then I will press the “Release” button.

Nancy and Holmes is something I have been working on for most of 2023, it started as a short story and then ended up as a 435 page novel. It ties into my first book ‘Hunters Garden’ (though you do not at all need to read that to enjoy this, its something of a soft reboot, if calling it that doesn’t make me sound like an arse… I am an arse… It is that… sorry.)

It takes place in the south of England and follows the accidental adventures of Nancy McQueen, who has an unexpected lodger appear in her head. The brain ghost is Detective Steven Holmes and he promises to help Nancy investigate a body found outside her home. He also wants to look into her dads murder, her moms suicide and whatever else he can get his teeth into.

There are monsters, monster hunters, corpses, a vicar, and at least one quote from Ghostbusters. I think you may enjoy it.

I wrote a ‘blurb,’ made a cover, exported a PDF and an ePub. I even recoded audio for YouTube. Actually let’s do a Cover reveal! There you go! it went through a stark change from the original “beach tentacle” cover that I had settled on.

The ‘beach tentacle’ cover will be posted on Patreon later this week - I also provide my Patreon supporters with ePubs and PDFs of all my novels.

Here’s the back of the paperback if you want to know more. The paperback, for those who are interested, will only be available from Amazon, and that’s not because I love them. I don’t. It’s because print-to-order is simply too hard to do anywhere else! (This option for purchase will show up a week or so after the ebook goes live.)

A YouTube reading.

As an experiment of sorts, I have recorded a reading of the entire book for YouTube. This is something I am very bad at and my mic is a bit ‘breathy,’ the first two chapters are too softly spoken and over all its a bad performance. That’s why I’m calling it a “reading” not an “audiobook.” Honestly I am very apprehensive about how it came out and how it will be received.

It took a little while

Also, the amount of work it took to get it to this point is a bit mad. Now, I don’t for a moment think that it will be worth the effort, and I am not confident that people really want it anyway. Here’s how long I sat in Audacity, recording all the chapters: Then, when it came time to combine, and ‘fix’ the files I realised why everyone had moved to Tenacity and I followed them (Audacity is a bit wobbly at times.) There was another 6 hours of work there.

Then there is the exporting of the video (because you can’t just upload an audio file with a thumbnail to YouTube… for some reason!) which took 5 hour (but I was asleep so it doesn’t count as work, I don’t think)

Basically, while flawed, the reading is as good as I can make it without taking what I learned and just doing it again. Given that I don’t even know if people are interested, I chose to call it “done” and get on with life.

The video will be free and contain the entire book, word for word. I don’t think for a moment that this is an exceptional reading. The book, the words, however, I am very excited about and believe them to be pretty darn great!

Support.

If you are wondering how to support my writing then please don’t buy it on Amazon thinking it helps me in any way. The only reason it’s on there is so people can get it on Kindle or a print copy. If you want to financially support my work there are 4 ways. Any one of which is AMAZING and would make me supremely happy.

1. Make an purchase of the book on Itch - HexDSL - itch.io
2. Support me on Patreon - Patreon
3. Send me a gift from my Amazon wish list Amazon.co.uk
4. Tell all your pals about how great my books are, and instruct them to do any of the above! 😆

Though, you are under no obligation or expectation to support my work financially. If you want to read my work and would rather not pay for it (for any reason,) you can email me (below) and ask. I will reply with an ePUB and a PDF, no questions asked. I really am more interested in people reading it than I am making money. Thought, as a human, on Earth, I do enjoy having money (I need a Macbook air! Yeah, NEED)

Thank you for reading this and please look out for the released video and purchase links over the next few days.

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Note

This Was written by HexDSL, if this was liked by you, you can email him at Hexdsl@gmail.com or use this link to join Discord