“If we get 400 followers, John Hobson will solve that nasty wolf-murder case for free! Fight the thing himself if he has to! #HobsonVsWolf!”
Angelina Choi was only trying to drum up some Twitter followers and make a good impression on her first day interning at John Hobson’s one-man detective agency.
But the campaign went viral and now they have a murder to solve, no money coming in, and an unwilling Hobson faced with battling some enormous beast.
With both follower and body counts rising, can they crack the case without offending everyone or being eaten by a huge dog?
The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is the first case starring Hobson & Choi, a bickering, mismatched detective duo for 21st century London. This book collects the debut storyline of the hit darkly comic crime web serial, extensively rewritten and improved for this definitive edition.
My second featured author today is Nick Bryan: his novel The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is published in e-book and paperback, a darkly comic crime novel with YA crossover potential, and is free for kindle at time of writing. There are two further books in the series, Rush Jobs and Trapped In The Bargain Basement, with a fourth to follow soon.
I’m delighted to welcome author Nick Bryan to Being Anne with a great guest post on why he enjoys writing…
When asked to write a guest post about why I enjoy writing, I had to stop and think about it for a while. You’d think it would come fairly naturally after four books, but it’s been a regular part of my routine for so long, I honestly haven’t had to consider exactly why I do it.
I mean, that’s good in terms of getting my books finished – successfully forming a regular writing habit rather than needing a Special Effort is half the battle. Still, troubling when it comes to writing this blog post. Nonetheless, I’ll give it a go.
REASON ONE – The Money
You can’t begin to conceive of the money. And believe me, I’ve tried.
REASON TWO – The Escapism
Whenever the world gets me down, whenever I start to feel that I’m living in an unfair, squalid London where every business is corrupt, every victory is pyrrhic and terrible things happen to people constantly whether they deserve it or not, I know there’s always an escape.
No matter how bad things get, there’s always that reassurance: whenever I have an hour or two free, I can stroll across the road to my local coffee shop, crack open my tiny laptop and escape to an unfair, squalid London where every business is corrupt, every victory is pyrrhic and ter…
Wait, I’m doing it wrong.
REASON THREE – The Power
Particularly in recent days, as the Brexit vote sweeps over me like an angry spiked broom, there’s something pleasant about knowing I have this small imaginary world where I’m in total control. Yes, it might be sometimes horrendous, but very rarely without me wanting it to happen. If anything too awful threatens, I can stop it. Or think of a way to make it worse. Depends.
And jokes (briefly) aside, there is something gloriously satisfying about feeling your fictional world functioning and coming together, stray story threads from previous books actually helping to tie off loose ends from the current one. Sometimes I even plan it in advance. It works. It’s fun.
Admittedly, took a couple of books to get enough balls in the air for them to start falling favourably, but it’s pretty great now.
REASON FOUR – The Great Convergence
My biggest real reason though, really, is the sheer joy of taking an idea and turning it into an full, living, breathing thing. It doesn’t always work out, and that’s one of the main reasons it’s the Big One – there’s no guarantee the moment will come. I’ve had (embarrassingly recently) story ideas that just didn’t survive contact with reality, I’ve had stories that didn’t become what I wanted even after I got a few finished drafts down.
Hell, put a gun to my head, I’ll admit that I’m not sure the Hobson & Choi series fully hit its final form until the second book or so.
But it’s great when it happens, though. And that’s always what I’m working toward. (Although the power, escapism and money are good too.)
(My thanks to Faye Rogers PR for organising the guest post.)
Nick Bryan is a London-based writer of genre fiction, usually with some blackly comic twist. As well as the ongoing self-published detective saga Hobson & Choi, he is also working on a novel about the real implications of deals with the devil and has stories in several anthologies.
He can primarily be found on his own website and on Twitter, both of which are updated with perfect and reasonable regularity.
When not reading or writing books, Nick Bryan enjoys racquet sports, comics and a nice white beer.