Now they tell me!

120m bloggers a month are competing for your attention

The consumer research people at Kantar have just told me that more than four million blogposts and newsletters like this are published every day. That’s 28 million a week and 120 million blogposts every month. ‘It’s no wonder,’ they say, ‘it can sometimes feel impossible to stand out from the crowd and get in front of your audience.’

This bloggy thing you’re reading is called Not In The Script – NITS for short. If I was writing this purely to pump up sales for my historical fiction, then I would appear to be the biggest NIT of them all.

But I’m not that pushy, I hope. I just like sharing my research and the exhilaration of writing novels, which, by the way, has hit a couple of speed bumps of late while I adjust brain between finishing Sea of Flames (set around the Battle of Actium 31BC) and finding the next story in a completely different location and era.

However, while lurching between blind panic and peaceful contemplation, I have thought back upon my writing pattern of the last decade or so. And look what I’ve dug up…

Keep reading, because I’m going to give away this astonishing, cutting edge, ground-breaking short novel absolutely FREE OF CHARGE to everyone who has subscribed to my newsletter, NITS.

Just not yet.

Would both of you be so good as to tell your friends (and enemies) to sign up pronto so they’re ready to receive this amazing once-in-a-lifetime offer just as soon as I’ve worked out how to give the damn thing away!

Naturally, you’ll want to know more about this life-changing novella. Here goes.

Firstly, the author Adam Fox is me. I just wasn’t sure I was ready for the critical acclaim as Alistair Forrest, or the writs and terrifying trolling, when I downed a stiff whisky and wrote those immortal words, CHAPTER ONE.

Secondly, Cell Wars contains the C-word. Cancer. Not a subject that mixes well with my weird and upbeat sense of humour.

Thirdly, although anyone under the age of 45 will believe this to be truly original and wonderfully imaginative, original it ain’t. Oldies may remember The Beano’s Numskulls or the science fiction films Fantastic Voyage and Inner Space. You don’t? Oh well, you won’t forget Cell Wars in a hurry.

It’s all about a chap called Brian Davis of The Poplars, Watford, who has a problem. He’s been eating junk food and drinking home brew. Like everyone else on the planet, he has a team of minuscule protectors inside him, most of them devoted to keeping him well. Except that in Brian’s case, they don’t know what to do when they find a nest of terrorist cancer cells. There’s only one small hope. Send Bill, the Head of the Immigration and Foreign Object Office (IFOO, which of course inevitably brings the retort ‘bless you’) on a dangerous mission to find the answer.

A bit of Terry Pratchett meets Lewis Carroll – hence the remarkable cover image by Lynda Adlington who is a true believer in angels and the miracles the human body can work in its mission of self-healing.

So please share this far and wide and let your chums know that very soon they will receive this free offer saving them a staggering two quid. And I’ll love you for ever.

Meanwhile, while you await your free gift with breath bated, here’s another image from Lynda Adlington who sure as eggs are eggs is going to find an astonishing career as a book cover designer on the back of this:

Ceridwen © Lynda Adlington 2022