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Pressure

One of the things common to us all is that at some point in our life we will have been under pressure. Be it a moment that jumped up in front of us, say a bank robbery or seeing someone about to be hit by a car. Or whether it’s the slow build up of a situation which requires us to endure some sort of pain to see it through. Whatever it is, we all experience pressure.

How do you convey pressure in fiction?

When writing, especially action and adventure, or dark fantasy, there are situations where the characters are in wild moments I have never faced. One wonders how they would react. Personally, I have never looked a demon from the deep in the eye, swung from a hangman’s noose or faced strange creatures intent on taking my head off. The only way I know to generate these feelings is to drift into the characters shoes, drawing on my own reactions to horrors I have had in my own life. Not that my life has been a rollercoaster of disaster, it’s been bloomin’ good to be honest. But we all have the well of dark moments to draw from.

Sometimes people say my books would make a great movie, or that they could see it as a TV drama. I think I know why. When I write, I write describing the movie in my head. The creatures move for me, I hear the drop in the noose, I look into those demon eyes. And I then feel what comes. I don’t see words, I see pictures and then the job is to put that picture into words. The further distillation by the reader reversing the process hopefully brings the movie back to life.

Character development, making the unreal seem real

It begs the question, are my characters real to me? Only in my head, only in the movie. And that’s a good thing. I wouldn’t want a mad cap professor summoning up who knows what, an emotional father pulled from his family by every woman that walks past, or an ice cold winged femme fatale. Life is weird enough. When you put these people under pressure the real emotions come out. Hopefully then the real life heroic decisions we make or fail to make surface.

If you haven’t got it already, then you can purchase the first Austerley & Kirkgordon novel “Crescendo!”. The follow up “The Darkness at Dillingham” has just been released.

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The printing Frenzy

Well it’s all go, and not least with the printers. With my Kickstarter funded and complete, I have been putting into action the plans for acquiring the rewards for my backers. T-shirts, bookmarks, prints and of course the all-important books themselves. And I have now reached a stage where just about everything is being printed. Whether it is proofs or the real thing, everything is on the go, except me in some ways.

I’ve been working on another island fantasy book about a recycling manager and some strange spirits and also have begun to create a small backstory for Calandra, one of the main characters in Crescendo! It is good to be back at the start of things again and I now have several books and novelettes in various stages of dress so to speak. And then of course there’s the marketing. Time for reviews and giveaways in the coming weeks. So keep a look out on my website. In the meantime here’s a preview of the bookmark the backers will be getting with their reward.

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G R Jordan author, poet, and top Dad apparently!

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Kickstarter for “Crescendo!” is underway

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Just a quick update. My Kickstarter for “Crescendo!”, my first novel about misfit investigators of the mysterious, is underway and I have some backers already. Yee-Haa! Take a look and get involved yourself at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grjordan/crescendo-do-you-embrace-the-dark-or-run-from-it The clock’s ticking get involved.

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G R Jordan author, poet, and top Dad apparently!