Today I put notional pen to paper for the first time in eleven days. Yes, it had been eleven days since I lost wrote some fiction, what with preparing for Nine Worlds, attending Nine Worlds and then recovering from the virus(es?) I was doomed to catch having spent three days in a crowded hotel that uses air conditioning. And I didn’t exactly get very far today, either, as I only wrote about a hundred words on my Feathers WIP. Still, it’s a start.
(Round-up of Feathers: The working title is “A Fistful of Feathers”, which tells you a bit about the starting situation but not a lot, and I’m about two fifths of the way through of a projected 100,000 words. The intended ending is still on course.)
I’m also now into my third month of Otherworld Gazetteer [External Link]. As a quick recap of what’s going on, the Gazetteer is a combination of notes for a short story I did and then further expansion as I map out the world further (no actual maps are involved). The original story was “Hunting Unicorns”, which was published by The Future Fire [External Link] (and you can find the actual story here: [External Link]). The reason I started the Gazetteer is because TFF editor, Djibril al-Ayad, approached me along with other TFF authors to write flash fiction set ten years after our TFF stories as part of TFF’s tenth birthday celbrations, about which you can find more on the Indiegogo campaign here: [External Link]
While I couldn’t come up with anything from the Otherworld for him and went with another story for my flash piece, I realised I wouldn’t mind practising my world building skills. So far, I’ve had to do a couple of minor tweaks – only one of which, on Sir Theodore William Mortimer-Warren’s entry, has had to be made on the live web-site – to keep the world consistent but I’m actually trying to keep it as parallel to our own history as possible. Well, with a few points of exception in order to force the fantasy into it! So, how’s it shaping up for you? Daft project of no interest to anyone but myself or entertaining?
Obligatory Book Plug
I have a couple of books out: 25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf and A Pack of Lies. If you’ve read them, feedback and/or reviews would be gratefully received, thank you. If you haven’t read them and want to know if they’re for you, you can find some background information to the world on this site (titles, genre, location, characters), along with the opening prologue and first chapter of 25 Ways.