Janet Edwards's Blog

I’m happy to report that the person I mentioned in my New Year post has finally responded to my contacts. The problem with them trying to make money from my name and my books has hopefully now been resolved so we can all forget about it.

I am now moving on to the horrors of some essential home repair work that will take an unpredictable amount of time. My apologies that I’ll probably be slower than usual replying to comments due to headaches from pneumatic drills and the time I spend weeping in corners.

My previous New Year posts have been focussed on happy things like the new book/books I’d published during the past year. Sadly, this one isn’t. There is no way for me to avoid mentioning the obvious elephant in the room. I didn’t publish a new book during 2024. There should have been a book, there would have been a book, but my writing time has been hit hard during 2024.

I’ve explained before that I’ve had to make a lot of changes to my writing process and my website because of AI harvesting. Something I haven’t explained before is that concerned readers have alerted me to a human being trying to make money from my name and my books. I thought that person would soon give up, but they are still continuing after six months despite multiple warnings from others. This situation could threaten my own ability to make money from my writing, so I’ve decided I have to get involved myself.

I’m explaining this now because the person hasn’t responded to contacts from me. That means you may see something online about me moving on to take legal action. I don’t want any innocent parties getting worried by this, so I want to make it clear that this is only about the one person persistently trying to make money from my name and my books. If that one person is reading this, please reply to my email of 9 Dec or use the contact form on my website to talk to me and solve this. Everyone else, please help me out by ignoring the whole thing.

Moving rapidly on to more cheerful subjects, I started a Patreon in the summer. Subscribers are able to sign up to support my writing, and have the fun of getting advance views of short stories and chapters of longer pieces to brighten the long gaps between published books. This is going much better than I expected, and my subscribers are hopefully enjoying it as much as I am.

It’s now time for my traditional New Year Story. I don’t dare to post unpublished stories on my website any longer because of AI harvesting, so I did posts and sent out a newsletter saying that I’d be using the free tier of Patreon to make the New Year story available for you all to read.

If you were hiding down in a cellar somewhere and missed that information, then the New Year story for 2025 is set in the Hive Future. My current Patreon subscribers will get access automatically. Everyone else just needs to go to my Patreon at www.patreon.com/JanetEdwards and click on the Join For Free button. Once you’ve joined as a free member, you should be able to see a post giving you a link and password to read the New Year story.

I posted a general writing update on both Patreon and the Coming Next page of my website on 3rd December. The only new thing to add is that I expect to be suffering from building work during January. Please be patient if I’m slow responding to comments, or screaming about pneumatic drills and holes in the floor.

Happy New Year!

Janet Edwards

Sadly, there’s an increasing problem with AI harvesting of copyright website content. This means  I’ve had to take some stories down from my story page. Basically, I can no longer risk having stories there before I’ve published them on places like Amazon.

My apologies for this.  I’m extremely annoyed about it.

I really don’t want this to mess up the New Year story tradition. I’ve recently started a Patreon that gives subscribers advance views of stories on a password protected website. I’m hoping to use the same system for the next New Year story, and make it available to Patreon members on the free tier. I’ll have to make a decision nearer the time though, because the situation is changing shockingly fast.

I’ve just set up a Patreon where you can support my writing and get advance views of some of my works in progress. These stories are obviously only in draft stage at the moment, so please excuse occasional typos and continuity errors.

The Patreon stories will work in a similar way to my traditional Year Day stories, which appear on my website for a while before eventually vanishing to be published.

Silver tier subscribers will get advance views of short stories, with a new short story appearing on the second Sunday of each month.

Gold tier subscribers will get advance views of the same silver short stories, and also advance views of longer serial stories, with a new part of the current serial story appearing on the fourth Sunday of each month. When there’s a fifth Sunday in a month, there may be a bonus part appearing.

The first silver short story is available now, and the first part of a new gold serial story will appear on Sunday 28th July.

If Patreon isn’t for you, then there’s no need to worry. The advance view stories are intended to eventually be included in published books that you’ll be able to buy in the normal way.

If you are interested in getting advance views through my Patreon, then you can find it here.

At the moment, the Patreon stories are all set in the Portal Future, simply because I’ve been doing more short story writing in that universe. If you like the sound of the Patreon approach, but are only interested in stories in the Hive Future, then please use the contact form here to let me know and I’ll try and work out a way around the problem.

At the New Year, I’ve a tradition of putting a story on my website. The story for 2024 is one of those that turned into a serial, but it’s now complete. The Fourth Sister of Fate is set in year 2771 of the Portal Future. You can read it here.

When I was deciding what to work on next, I asked the people on my newsletter list to tell me their wishlist of possible books. I got a lot more responses than I expected and greatly enjoyed reading them all.  The most popular choices were Hive Mind 6, the third book in the Scavenger Exodus series, and the second Earth Girl Aftermath collection or something else Jarra related.

After writing one extra long Hive Mind book, I needed a break before writing another, so I’m now working on Scavenger Exodus 3. If all goes to plan, I’ll write Hive Mind 6 after that, and then the second Earth Girl Aftermath collection.

While that means quite a wait for the second Earth Girl Aftermath collection, The Fourth Sister of Fate gjves a bit of a preview, since it is one of a core sequence of stories intended for the collection.

If you aren’t on my newsletter list yet, you can sign up here to get email alerts whenever I have a new release.

If you want to know the latest news on Scavenger Exodus 3, I’ll be putting progress reports on the Coming Next page of my website.

My first book, Earth Girl, was published in 2012. I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has supported my writing since then in so many ways. You’ve bought my books, borrowed them from libraries, rated them, reviewed them, and recommended them to your friends. The especial heroes are those who’ve Beta read my stories over the years.

Now it’s the start of 2024, I’ve  got twenty-one publications out in the world. That’s fourteen novels, four novellas, one novelette, and two short story collections. Well over two million words.

I only published one book in 2023, but it was a very long one. The 484 page Adversary, Hive Mind 5, is now available in ebook, paperback, and hardback.

I’m now switching focus to my Portal Future of Earth Girl for a while. At the New Year, I’ve a tradition of putting a story on my website. The story for 2024 is The Fourth Sister of Fate, set in year 2771 of the Portal Future.

The first part of The Fourth Sister of Fate is  on my website now, and the next part should appear on 7th January 2024. You can read it here.

Happy Year Day 2024!

Janet Edwards

At long last, the fifth book in the Hive Mind series, where Amber is faced with two very different adversaries,  is out in the world as an ebook.

I expected to publish Adversary back in the spring, but the long length of the book, two unexpected operations, and moving house delayed things.

For those who love physical books, I’m aiming to release Adversary in both paperback and hardback in time for Christmas.

You can see full details of Adversary here.

Given recent problems with social media outlets, please remember that you can check the Coming Next page on my website for the latest news of my writing.

You can also sign up here  to get email alerts whenever I have a new release, and be included in my current consultation with my readers about future books.

I’ve now had my second operation, and I’m back to working on the copyedit stage of Hive Mind 5  – Adversary. I’ve also modified the ending of the book to include the links into Hive Mind 6!

I am now aiming to publish Hive Mind 5 – Adversary in October. I don’t have an exact date yet, but I’ll be keeping the Coming Next page updated with Adversary’s progress through the final stages to publication.

Given recent problems with social media outlets , please remember that you can check the Coming Next page on my website for news of my next book.

You can also  sign up here  to get email alerts whenever I have a new release.

I know some people have been hunting for physical copies of the Earth Girl trilogy. Earth Girl, Earth Star, and Earth Flight have been out of print for some time now, but the UK paperbacks from Harper Voyager seem to now be available again from Amazon in the UK and Germany.  These appear to be a print on demand paperbacks, hence a bit expensive. If anyone spots these paperbacks appearing on Amazon in other regions, then please comment here to keep other people informed.

Please also comment here if you’re interested in signed copies of the books. If there’s sufficient interest, then I’ll try to get hold of some myself and work out what I’d need to charge to cover the cost of books and postage and packaging sending them to assorted countries. I’m in the UK, so the increasingly expensive international postage means this option would be vastly cheaper for sending books to readers here than countries like the USA and Australia.

I’ve now completed the final revisions on Adversary, and it has moved into the copyedit stage. My apologies that I still can’t give a release date. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been dealing with some medical stuff that makes everything unpredictable.

This medical stuff is actually a repeat of something that happened a decade ago. That time it didn’t delay anything, because it hit me at the point when Earth Star was actually publishing and Earth Flight’s release date was a year away. In about fifty per cent of cases though, there’s a recurrence of the problem.

Eighteen releases later, the problem has recurred. This time it chose the worst possible moment to hit me, when the long awaited Hive Mind 5 – Adversary was about to head into the complex revision stage.  I’ve been going through the old routine of appointments, scans, and procedures, I had a minor operation last week,  and there’s a second operation to come.

Please bear with me when I’m slow to reply to messages, and keep checking the Coming Next page for updates on Adversary’s progress through the final stages to publication.

You can sign up here  to get email alerts whenever there’s a new release by Janet Edwards.