More and more writers are doing it. Putting their work directly out there, without the intervention of the middleman. Self-publishing through kindle.

I imagine that most of the writers who choose this route are ones who have been unsuccessful in getting a conventional publisher to take them on. They’ve grown tired of waiting for the Man from Del Monte to say “Yes!” (seventies advertising reference) and have decided to take matters into their own hands. A few have found phenomenal success this way. Many more, I suspect, have not.

But good luck to them all, I say.

But it’s not just those who haven’t broken through the normal way who are deciding to self-publish. Many writers who have been published are either self-publishing additional books alongside their “legacy-published” work, or ditching the conventional model entirely and turning themselves into their own publisher.

Michael Gregorio is a successful crime-writer (actually a husband and wife crime-writing duo, Michael Jacob and Dani de Gregorio, he English, she Italian), the author of a wonderful series of historical crime novels featuring Hanno Stiffeniis, a magistrate in Napoleonic-era Prussia.

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"I didn't fall asleep - I just started to think about death."

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Perhaps I shouldn�t admit this, being a crime writer. But I think I am actually enjoying Borgen even more than The Killing. And I loved The Killing. (Just to be clear, it�s the Danish The Killing I�m talking about here, not the American; I didn�t watch that, so I can�t comment.)

The real heresy for me, as a crime writer, is that what I admire about Borgen is that it doesn�t rely on an ever-increasing body count to keep the viewer�s interest. In fact, so far, there have been no murders in it all. Just one death by natural causes.

Now such an admission may end up getting me thrown out of the CWA. And it�s not to say that I don�t still enjoy a good, twisty, grisly serial killer thriller. But it is interesting to see how the writers have managed to maintain the drama and tension without recourse to gore. The political shenanigans are of course fascinating. But more than anything it�s the fantastically well-written and superbly performed characters that keep us hooked.

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When I asked Twitter last night what I should blog about, one suggestion was "How do you know when to give up on a work-in-progress? Or when to stop and come back? Or when to re-conceptualise the project?". It was a good question, so thank you Damon Young, although I'm absolutely sure there isn't a clear-cut answer, because it's always going to depend on you and the night and the music.... Sorry, you and the write(ing) and the novel. So, I think the best I can do is suggest some things to ask yourself and the novel, in the hope that things get a bit clearer.

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After a well earned break of sorts, one that saw me restless and writing both a short story, and trying to tackle something of a plan for the rest of the Delve series, I�ve started to get down words for the second book in the series, aptly named Evolve. I always think of a tag line for each of my novels, something to capture the essence of the book, and to keep me on the straight and narrow as I write it. This one is simple � Rowan�s powers begin to evolve, but she soon learns that she can�t save everyone, not even those close to her heart.

Having said that, it�s my first time tackling a sequel and whilst I have a rough outline in mind which no doubt will develop along the way, I�m pondering over the whole area of sequels and the temptation to �tell� i.e. to reveal backstory from Delve so that anyone picking up the second book without reading the first will have some idea of how Rowan, my main character, and the rest of the crew got to the point that they�re now at

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So it recently hit me that my novel will be published on (don�t snigger) April 1st and that the file labelled Marketing, which has hitherto sat on a shelf above my desk in a floaty, non-threatening, futuristic kind of way, has begun to jump up and down and beckon me � or whatever a marketing file without hands or feet does to signal Urgency.


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It’s possible that every now and then someone stumbles on this blog entirely by accident. Looking for something else – I can’t begin to guess what – you find this. Me. I can only apologise.

In all likelihood, you will speed-click back to google. Get the hell out of there! It’s some writer’s blog! If that’s the case, you won’t be reading this now. So if you are reading this, the chances are you decided to spend a moment or two exploring. Trying to find out who the hell this R.N. Morris guy is.

So maybe, every now and then, I should take a little time to say a bit about myself and what I’m doing here. On the internet. With a website and blog. And everything.

So yes. I’m a writer. Of fiction. Crime. Mostly. Murder stories. Set in the past. In Russia. Sorry, I tend to come over all inarticulate when I try to talk about myself and my writing. Awkward. Especially when every writer these days has to be his or her own publicist.

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My blog is on my website. www.deborahfreeman.co.uk



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Finally I can say that I've actually to stuck to one my New Year's resolution. On 2nd January, I set myself the challenge of finishing the first draft of 'The Curse' (working title). I'd already pushed my way through December to 40k words, but the challenge was to finish the rest of the manuscript in 9 days. At an average of 5,000 words per day, I saw it as a tough but achievable challenge. After all, I have a demanding full time job as well as a family. Of course, I could have used that as an excuse, but I didn't.


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In the days when I had au pairs, they would often ask me for help with their English homework. Most of them were doing pretty advanced work, so I'd have to deal with things like, "Emma, when do you say, try to light the fire, and when try lighting the fire?" As so often with the idioms of your mother tongue, I could usually only work it out by demonstration, and it was all good for the writerly brain. But the thing which they struggled with most is what are usually called phrasal verbs.

Phrasal verbs, according to [my slightly-edited version of] David Crystal in Rediscover Grammar, are

full verbs which consist of more than one word. The most common type consists of a verb followed by one or two particles. come in - sit down - drink up - get off - put up with - look forward to - look down on. A few multi-word verbs have a less predicable structure, and thus have to be taken as idioms: take pride in - break even - lie low - put paid to. What can be a particle? Some spatial adverbs such as aback - ahead - aside - away - back - home - in front. Some prepositions, such as against - at - for - from - into - like - of - onto - with. Some words which can act as either adverbs or prepositions, such as by - down - in - on - over.

All Indo-European languages, at least, work like this but English is particularly rich in them. On a family holiday in Greece my teenaged sisters and I spent a long, hot drive from Nafplion to Sparta working out that the verb which shape-changed most, depending on which particle it was teamed up with, was put. Put off alone can mean discourage, postpone, or remove, while put up can mean raise, accommodate or dare and put on can mean dress, fake or ignite. And then there's put over, put upon, put by, put through, and the relatively recent sexual meaning of put out, to go with disconcert, extinguish, display and eject.

Now the great joy of phrasal verbs for a writer is that even though the two (or three) parts belong together grammatically, they don't have to be kept together syntactically: there's huge flexibility available to you.

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