I don’t know if it’s a lockdown thing, or if I’m always like this (I suspect the latter), but I’m struggling to focus on writing at the moment, which is not good news for BAD DAY IN MINSK. However, it may be good news for other stuff…
Once upon a time, I put together a thing called Wickhampedia. I did it for two reasons: firstly, to see if I could, and secondly to create a tool for advertising MRS DARCY VERSUS THE ALIENS, which was coming out soon after. Well, it turned out that I could (although the MediaWiki software does tend to throw some unusual curveballs at you from time to time) and the end result was a lot of fun and it attracted quite a lot of attention at the time.
It struck me a couple of weeks ago that now that I have a series of books on the go, it might be a good time to revisit the concept, for the benefit of three different groups of people:
- For people who have never read the books, it would act as a introduction to the strange and unusual world of Archie and Pye, possibly even making them keen to read the real thing. Even better, it turned out that I could protect the pages against spoilers.
- For people who have joined the series part way through, it would give them the opportunity to quickly catch up on what happened before.
- For people who have read all the books, it would be a easy way of reminding themselves of stuff that had happened several episodes ago, as well as going off into the hinterland on some totally unexpected tangents. It’s also something they can enjoy as part of a shared community, which is apparently A VERY GOOD THING from the marketing point of view.
So that’s what I’ve started to do, and here it is: Archiepyedia. There’s not an enormous amount of content on there at the moment, but there’s enough to be going on with for now and there’ll be more added as the days and weeks go by. You might, for example, like to take a look at the page for our hero Tom Winscombe and see where that takes you.
Let me know what you’d like to see added next…