Broken Sky Ebux Redux!!!

Wow, it’s been a while, huh? Sorry about that. A veritable Sahara of news since May, really. But now I have something to announce, so gather close, you lot!

First order of business is The Ace Of Skulls. I’m a quarter way through and it’s all going very nicely, thank you. However, I think it’s probably now time to let you know that this will be the last of the Tales Of The Ketty Jay. No, put down your knives/poison canisters/thermite detonators, this is for your own good, you know! I always intended that the KJ series was going to be a series of standalones with an overarching story that I could draw to a close in one book. In the planning of this book I came to realise that I’ve just about reached the limit in that sense. There’s already so much stuff to tie up after three books. Either this series was going to metamorphosise into a much more sprawling tale, and risk rambling off into infinity, or I could close it down while I still have it under control and while I can still deliver a book with the necessary pace and verve to keep all you hungry KJ fans happy right till the final page. So I plumped for the latter. I’d rather leave you with four good books than three good, three medium and one that leaves you with a nasty taste in your mouth like you just chewed on a piece of rancid biltong. At least this way you’ll get a proper ending and you won’t go all Mass Effect 3 on my ass (incidentally, the ending to that series was fine, don’t know what all the fuss was about…)

Secondly, some crazy exciting weird news. Broken Sky is coming to ebook! And I’m doing it myself! Eep.

So here’s the story. Scholastic didn’t want to republish Broken Sky so they weren’t willing to put it out in ebook form, and therefore the rights for the books came back to me. However, Broken Sky was written so long ago that I didn’t even have Word at the time and I lost all the original files. Scholastic rather kindly provided me the pdfs of the books to work off, and I converted them to ebook formats and then started going through them to sort out the inevitable formatting errors that arose.

However…

Well, I’d gone about half a paragraph before I was like ‘Ooh, that’s not a very clever sentence. Would make more sense if I just changed it around a bit. There.’ And then three lines on I was like ‘Wait a minute, I just used that word. Better change it.’ And then a bit further and I was like ‘Man, this bit doesn’t even make sense’ and… well, you see what’s happened. Thirteen years on, I like to think I’m a bit of a better writer than I was back then, and I just couldn’t resist the urge to start editing them. And like Ripley with Newt, now I’ve made a clean spot, I have to do the rest.

Now don’t worry, I’m not going all George Lucas on ‘em. The story, characters, all of that are just where you left ‘em. All I’m doing is tidying up the grammar, making sentences clearer, getting rid of repetition and redundant parts, all that boring stuff. It is taking me ages, but I think it’s worth it, as I still have a warm glowy place in my heart for Broken Sky. Think of this as Broken Sky Remastered rather than a director’s cut.

Anyway, I am now entering the strange world of self-publishing, where few published authors have bothered  dared to tread. I’m still a bit hazy as to what I’ll do with it once I’ve finished polishing it up, and it is gonna take a good while to go through all the books since I’m busy working on The Ace Of Skulls, but eventually I plan to release them in Kindle format and ePub for all other e-readers. Really, my primary concern is that I don’t want these books to go out of print. Because they’re ace. And that’s final

Watch this space, as ever…