Marc Nobbs: Blog

The "retcon" in chapter 15 of "A Tortured Soul" - which feeds into a major plot point in "A Wounded Heart", is now posted to SOL.

I'd be interested to see how many people can see what it is. (It's not exactly subtle, but you will need to have read the original to see it)

Over the next few days, I'll post updated chapters to both of the above stories. All of these updates have multiple minor corrections, but there is also a significant "recon" to chapter 15 of "A Tortured Soul" ahead of the release of the third book in the series, "A Wounded Heart". I would hope to have gotten that far with posting the updates by the end of the weekend.

All of these updates are already available in the Bookapy & rainforest retailer editions of the books.

Speaking of "A Wounded Heart" I have two chapters to complete, then I'll set it aside for a couple of weeks before beginning a line-by-line edit. I'd hope to have the book up for sale on Bookapy (and the rainforest retailer) by the end of the year or January. I'll leave it as a "for sale" exclusive for a month or so before I being posting it here on SOL.

It’s been eight years since I published the second book in the Paul Robertson Saga, “A Tortured Soul.” Eight very long years that has seen a lot of changes in my life, in me personally, and in the world at large.

I began writing the third, and what I had hoped would be the final book, immediately after finishing ATS. And I’ve been working on it ever since. I’ve been distracted by other projects. I’ve hit roadblocks in the story. I’ve found time to write to be difficult to come by.

GTA online and Red Dead Redemption II didn’t exactly help.

The first draft of the “A Wounded Heart” manuscript is currently about 80,000 words long—about 10,000 words for every year I’ve been working on it. I had originally anticipated the full text would be in the order of 150,000 words long, but if I’m honest with myself, in the 80,000 words I’ve written, I’ve told about a third of the story I want to tell.

But…

I am almost at what would seem like a natural “break” point in the overall story. I have therefore decided that when I get to that break point, I will consider “A Wounded Heart” completed, and set about editing the first draft into a state that can be released.

I’m aiming to do that by the end of this year—although, as always, this self-imposed deadline is less of a deadline and more of an ambition.

I will then extend the series to a fourth and maybe even fifth book. I had always wanted this to be a trilogy. I like trilogies. They are neat. But if Star Wars can be stretched to nine films and Toy Story to four, I no longer see the point of trying to shoehorn Paul’s story into three books. And once the mental hurdle of it no longer being a trilogy is overcome, then really it’s just a case of taking as many books as is needed to tell the story properly.

This does mean I will need to come up with more titles though—God help me.

Chloë Goodman is a significant character in the Westmouthshire Universe. She is the female lead in Kissed by a Rose, she is mentioned a few times in Eternally & Evermore, makes a fleeting cameo appearance in A Good Man when Paul & Clarissa visit the university campus and a longer, more significant appearance in A Tortured Soul—a pivotal appearance, actually.

She is mentioned in both The Lies We Lead and The Truths We Live for reasons that should be obvious if you’ve read both of those books and Kissed by a Rose.

And she features heavily in the forthcoming A Wounded Heart. (More on AWH later in the week).

But… Did you trust her when you first met her in Kissed by a Rose?

I make no secret of the fact that my intention when I wrote Kissed was for the reader to not be completely sure if they could trust Chloë or not. So, if you don’t trust her, then that’s “Job Done”, wouldn’t you say? And even her appearance in ATS leaves you not completely trusting her—at least, that was the intention.

But as I near the end of the first draft of A Wounded Heart, Chloë is very clearly a young woman who is comfortable and at ease with her position in life and the world. Finally, I can say that by now, the reader should trust that Chloë’s intentions come from the heart and that her heart really is in the right place.

"Kissed by a Rose" was the novel that created my Westmouthshire Universe - by which I mean it was the first novel written to be set there. I suppose, technically, "Eternally & Evermore", the second novel to be set there, turned it into a "Universe". But I digress.

"Kissed" was originally published by Phaze Books, an imprint of Mundania, and its publishing rights reverted to me a couple of years ago when Mundania folded. I republished it through KDP last year, and now it's available on Bookapy too.

As with the last few novels I've bought over to SOL, I have some HTML work to do on the files extracted from the ePub, but once I've done that I can start to submit it here. We're probably looking at this weekend before it starts to post.

As with "Eternally & Evermore", there are a lot of chapters, 52 including a prologue & epilogue, but they are quite short, most of them less than 2000 words. The novel is about 91,500 words in total. So I'll probably post 2 - 3 chapters a day over the next couple of weeks.

I've mentioned it before, but "Kissed" was inspired by Don Lockwood's story, "Transcending the Role", although, the word count is almost 3 times that of Don's story so there should still be some surprises in there for those of you that have read "TtR". And if you haven't read "TtR", then give it a go. It's a really good story in Don's distinctive Romantic style.

You can already buy "Kissed by a Rose" from Bookapy here