Sunday 16th August, 2015

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.

Sunday 24th May, 2015

Sorry, everyone. I basically didn’t have anything to say last week, so I didn’t say anything at all. Not that I’m doing much better this week! That said, things are going on behind the scenes. The things I [think I] can mention are:

  • I’m now six chapters in to my latest long work in progress, A Fistful of Feathers. As the working title suggests, this involves some rivalries like Yojimbo / A Fistful of Dollars / name a remake. However, it’s not actually all that similar. For a start, it involves griffins – and a crazy griffin lady. It’s more that the name sounded good than I decided to run off with the plot.
  • I’m also playing around with a piece of flash fiction intended for The Future Fire [External Link] as part of their tenth birthday. The Future Fire have been kind enough to rehome three of my stories in the past and, if you’re interested, you can find them here (along with lots of other free fiction): [External Link]
  • I’ve drafted my next blog post for The Finishing School [External Link] and need to polish things up to get it sorted for publishing. I’m aiming for the first week in June.
  • This is the moment where I confess that I also produce some copy for the UK Magnetics Society’s MagNews [External Link], specifically a few stories under “Industry News”. I only started in March and it’s a quarterly publication with the next round due in June. Which means I shall be spending my Bank Holiday tomorrow checking out some magnet related news and producing some copy. Along with dog walking of course. I’m not allowed to forget the dog walking.

Sunday 12th April, 2015

Welp, here we are on the weekend after Dysprosium / EasterCon 2015. The short short version is it went very well. Fran Terminiello [External Link] and I even got name dropped by Adrian Tchaikovsky in his write up (see here: [External Link])

The slightly longer version. I drove down to Surrey to stay with Fran and her kids on Friday. Her husband, Pim, basically swapped places with me to attend a fencing thing in York over the same weekend. I came over to the convention on Saturday, wound up the kids on Sunday, then came back to the convention for swordy stuff on Monday. I drove back up to Yorkshire on Monday evening. I even had time to sell a few copies of European Monsters and 25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf.

(Followed by an appointment at the hospital on Tuesday morning for unrelated dental stuff – I’ll be having my wisdom teeth out later in the year.)

Based on last weekend’s performance, I’m a little bit happier about attending the bigger cons and I’m looking forward to the Nine Worlds in August, although my swordy bit is not yet confirmed and I’ll be in need of a sidekick as Fran is going to FightCamp [External Link]. I’m already booked in to Satellite 5 (May next year) and eyeing up EasterCon 2016 (MancuniCon) and EasterCon 2017 (Pasgon in Cardiff).

And, on a not really related note, I’m now up to chapter 3 in the next book, working title A Fistful Of Feathers, to be known as Feathers in the tags. The core storyline is from the TVTropes story generator [External Link] but it’s already starting to look at my outline sideways and laugh. All I can say is, this one doesn’t involve werewolves. That I know of.