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Ray Celestin

Ray Celestin Author Website

  • The City Blues Quartet
    • The Axeman’s Jazz
    • Dead Man’s Blues
    • The Mobster’s Lament
  • Galleries
    • The Axeman’s Jazz
    • Dead Man’s Blues
    • The Mobster’s Lament
    • Book Covers
    • Instagram
  • Posts
  • Further Reading
  • Press

Posts

Plotting…

I use Excel to plot my stories (something my mates all make fun of me for). In each draft of each book I mess about with the order of chapters and scenes, add and delete whole sections. ‘Dead Man’s Blues’ had seven drafts. I took screenshots of each draft’s plot as I worked it in Excel and stuck them together here to show the evolution of a plot. Each cell is a chapter and each cell is coloured according to its POV character. Not sure what happened with the 2nd draft.

Editing…

What editing looks like… I think this is from a round of edits on the 6th or 7th draft of the new book. The published version will be the 9th draft. Much of the stuff I’m cleaning up on this page ended up getting cut from the final version anyway. My process is massively inefficient.

The Mobster’s Lament Bubble Map

I opened up my sketchpad to start making a bubble map for book 4 of the quartet and found the one I did for book 3…

What research looks like

New project, new folder. Cloudland.

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Recent Posts

  • Newsletter – February 2021
  • ‘The Mobster’s Lament’ is one of The i Newspaper’s Books of the Year.
  • The Mobster’s Lament Shortlisted for Crime Novel of the Year
  • Bird and Chet
  • 52nd Street

Pages

  • Instagram
  • Posts
  • The City Blues Quartet
    • The Axeman’s Jazz
      • Gallery
      • Preface
      • Afterword
      • Reading Group Guide
      • Bibliography
    • Dead Man’s Blues
      • Gallery
      • Playlist
      • Book Notes
      • Reading Group Guide
      • Bibliography
      • Map
    • The Mobster’s Lament
      • Gallery
      • Book Notes
      • Reading Group Guide
      • Bibliography
      • Map
  • Book Covers
  • Press kit
Dead Man's Blues Review 1
Dead Man's Blues Review 4

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