Please bear with me while I moan for a couple of paragraphs before I get to the good stuff. If you want skip the next two paragraphs and go straight to the good stuff. :-p

The truth is I’m a bit downhearted at the moment. I’m in the process of preparing episode five of Shattered to go up on Gumroad. It’s a little late but I don’t think it matters since I only have two subscribers. I need to think about marketing strategies or a different delivery method but I have nowhere to turn to for advice. I don’t mind not having paying readers but not having readers at all makes it hard to keep momentum. I’m going to continue posting at Gumroad for the subscribers there but from here on in I’ll also be posting the files in an open Patreon posts so people don’t have to subscribe to a site to download them. Would people prefer that? Would you want me to do catch up posts or would you be happy for Patreon to run 4 months behind Gumroad?

But worse is the fact the website is currently a mess and I have no idea how to fix it. If you don’t know what I mean go and look at the title page for Dragon Wars. It’s not just that page (in fact that’s not even the worst page) it’s everything posted before wordpress last updated. I found some simple fixes online but they didn’t work and my only other options are apparently to mess with the database (I’d break things worse if I tried) or manually correct every post by hand (that’s a lot of posts). I really don’t know what to do. (Except as @tlavely just suggested on Twitter maybe I should raise a ticket with my webhost and see what they can do. So now I do know what to do).

This is why I needed to moan – it helps me think things through.

I don’t want this post to be a complete downer, so on the upside Tales of the First isn’t doing too badly for such a young story and being off site it isn’t affected by the coding glitch. It’s also October’s Serial Bookclub serial which is part of #webfictionchat on Twitter. You can read about it on the founders site. I hope some of you will come along to the chat.

And, saving the best new until last, it’s October, which means Halloween is coming! It’s the perfect time to read about Vampires and Werewolves and such like. In my writing world that means Haventon. So to celebrate I’m doing a Halloween special offer on the ebook version of Haventon Born.

From now until Halloween you can get ?1 (currently around $1.30 US) off the ebook version of Haventon Born on Gumroad (usual price ?2.99). It’s the fully edited version and also doesn’t have any weird encoding errors, so if you were thinking of rereading it to celebrate the season it’s absolutely a better choice than the website. (If you’re wondering – at current exchange rates ?1.99 is approximately $2.58 in US money).

How do you claim this offer? Simply go to the Gumroad page via this link, or enter the code Halloween16 at check out if you get there via the books page.

So that’s a big writing update. More soon.