Jennie Ensor's Author Website

Book Launch / Pre-launch Event

This is planned to be a celebratory book reading. It may also be the ‘launch’ of Ghosts of Chechnya if the book is actually ready for publication by then (the date is a bit elastic and may not happen till later in June or early July – if so and I have any energy left I may organise something else for then too).

Location: Crouch End, north London (N8) – the café-bar at the top of the Crouch End Picturehouse 165 Tottenham Lane, London N8 9BY. This is a lovely new venue in Crouch End, bright and airy with good vibes and a pleasant outlook. Interesting sounding hot and cold snacks available.

Date: Evening of 16th June 2016, 7pm for 7.30pm

More information to follow. The event is part of the Crouch End Festival http://www.crouchendfestival.org.

Another Rewrite

After much agonising, mental exertion, domestic unrest, sleep loss and the occasional sprinkling of inspiration, I’ve managed to practically rewrite my novel. This was as a result of the comprehensive structural edit report received from Rachel Rayner. Her many insights and suggestions have been invaluable – once again I have had to bite the bullet and accept that no, Ghosts of Chechnya is Not Yet Finished after all. I’ve rejigged the plot, cut stuff, added stuff…  In part this is to make my book fit more closely the domestic noir psychological thriller genre conventions, while not detracting from the romance/love story.

The most challenging aspect of the edit has probably been to find a way to balance the ‘page-turning’ with the ‘relationship-building’ elements. I’ve added another voice to  help to do this – hopefully Rachel will agree (she will report back on the revised version).

The next most difficult aspect was replotting – effectively bringing the ‘terrorism strand’ of the plot forward and beefing it up somewhat. My constraint was that certain news reports and incidents referred to are not fictional (7/7 and events in Russia and Chechnya that year). I didn’t want to alter dates just to fit events better into the story.

Then there was changing all the past tense to present tense, all the way through… The less said about this, the better. Why is the English language so mortifyingly irregular? Though  a lot of the task was repetitive, frustratingly it proved difficult to automate using Word’s search and replace tool (and too risky – after a few mistakes I decided to keep on using the good old manual method).

Anyway, finally a few days ago I was more or less happy with the end result and sent it off. Will let you know how the next phase goes, hopefully.

If anyone has any tips on the editing process, they will be gratefully received.