The Dead Place – and My Good Place

I've been so busy the last couple of weeks working on the new novel that I've totally forgotten to keep you all up to date with a few other things that have been going on. Talk about one track mind! When I'm writing, that's all I really think about – the book in progress. I wish I could multi-task a lot better than I can; it would be terrific to work on the novel in the morning and a short story or something in the afternoon, but I can't work like that. The most I can manage is formatting work, a bit of blogging, and that's about it.

But the new book is coming along well. I'm 20k words into it now, after two weeks work, which means I'm about a quarter done. It feels like the story is going to be good – I won't know until it's done and I've read it over, but it feels like everything's falling into place. I was wishing yesterday that the act of writing didn't take so long. I've had a rummage around in the old noggin, and the story for this new book is more or less complete – it's all there, everything that's going to happen. I just have to write it down. And even though I've become a pretty speedy typist, that writing down bit and filling in the details doesn't seem like a job I can rush.

I know there are writers out there that can produce thousands of words a day. I'm happy with getting 2000-3000 down five or six days a week. Anything more and I just get too tired.

Why on earth am I grumbling? Everything is going swimmingly.

I was reading something, somewhere, earlier today, about what sort of books the people in that particular group enjoyed. The response was overwhelmingly ROMANCE. Oh dear. I've never been much of a reader of romance and I feel like I'm moving further and further away from being anything resembling a writer of it. But as we writers always say – gotta write what we gotta write. That's why it is so wonderful to me to think of you readers out there who have discovered my stories, given them a try and enjoyed them. It's terrific that the genre of lesbian fiction is now getting big enough that someone like me can squeeze a bit of supernatural horror in there too.

Taking a leap sideways from the subject of romance, and I'm astonished to find myself writing a book at the moment that has well, um err, a lot of sex in it. My only excuse is that's where the storyline has taken me! I'm finding it all very interesting, and the cast of characters are too. The secondary character I thought had headed for the hills is back, and she's not at all happy about being sidelined. I think she has stalker tendencies actually.

Anyway, oh yes, the whole point of this post – my short story THE DEAD PLACE has been published and is available at all the usual places, although it might not have gone through to B&N yet (I can't publish with Barnes & Noble except through Smashwords, I'm afraid as that requires being in the U.S).

The Dead Place was first published in The Venus Magazine last year, and I've been meaning ever since to make it available with the rest of my work. I've also (finally) uploaded SILENT LIGHT to Amazon, after waiting months for Kobo to update the pricing. I've also noticed that another of my short stories SILENCE isn't up on Amazon yet, so I'll spend a bit of time fixing that next week.

You all will remember that I was adapting the blog post FAT PAT AND THE ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF MARYANNE into a proper short story – well, that's done and sitting here waiting for me to give it a read-over to decide if it's good enough to show it's face outside the door. I'm thinking that once I, you know, spit in a hankie and wipe its face a bit, it will be presentable enough.

So, there you go. Consider yourselves all updated.

Filed under: Writing Journal