Topp Family Secrets FREE

If you're interested in a free Kindle ebook, this is just let you know that for the next four days my novel Topp Family Secrets is available as a free download. You can find it on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, or, for that matter, on the French and other versions of Amazon. If the book doesn't appeal to you, you might be able to pass on the news to someone who would enjoy it.

The history of this book might interest the handful of you who are writing your own novels.  From about 1982 until the early nineties, I was too busy with the main job to consider writing novels, but I did write a few plays. Then, when I could finally see some time clear to do a novel, I had a think about what to do. I wanted to do (a) a novel that I would enjoy writing, and (b) something commercial. So, working on the general principle that there are more women readers of fiction than men, I decided that I would write a longish family saga, with lots of complications about who gets the money and who marries who.

So far so good. I worked out a long and suitably complicated plot, did a fairly detailed outline, wrote 10,000 words or so, and my then agent shopped it around. Some firms liked it, but the one who liked it most (Macmillan) decided that the proposed book would be too long for the economics to work. Or so they said.

At some point I decided to write the damn thing anyway, since I at least thought it would be fun to do.

What I had forgotten was that I was ten years out of practice at the job. In particular, I had misjudged the length. What I had anticipated would be 120,000 to 150,000 words turned out to be, as it went along, somewhere between two and three times that length.

So I decided, very sensibly, to split it into three volumes. And I finished the first, published it myself in trade paperback (the way to go when it was done), and then moved on.

As is the way of things, parts two and three of the proposed saga never did get started, let alone finished. Given my age and energy levels, they probably never will see the light of day.

Never mind. Topp Family Secrets stands alone. Some of the characters and settings overlap with Daphne before She Died, and I am fond of the whole thing. I feel as if these people are my old friends, and that's why I've Kindled it.