What Am I Doing? October 2022 Edition
Figured I’d do a general update as to where my various projects are at. TL;DR: ticking over, big news to come.
Short fiction: I’ve got 7 in the running for something or other at the moment, which feels good! I say ‘short fiction’ rather than ‘short stories’, because 2 of the short stories are 10,000 words or more, and one of them’s a full-on novella. As ever, I am great at coming up with cool short story ideas and very bad at keeping them to short story length. Hopefully I’m getting better… we’ll see when I get around to editing the couple of other shorts I’ve got sitting in the to-do pile. And finishing the one I’m currently working on, of course. It’s a fun one. Sci-fi, with steam trains, but not steampunk.
Long fiction: well. I’ve said before that I’m going to try and get a book out for Christmas, and that remains true. It’s just that it’s probably not going to be the same book as I originally intended it to be. No firm announcements yet, as I’m waiting for a few moving parts to come together, but I hope to have a nice big fanfare coming very soon.
Boiling Seas #3 also remains very much high on the to-do list. I have a little bit written and most of a plan in my head, and as soon as the next Big Thing is ready to go, I’m getting stuck in in earnest. I miss Tal, Max and Lily as much as some of you do. But the first priority has to be the aforementioned Semi-Mystery Book.
The other long fiction news is that Ad Luna is (at the time of writing) still in SPSFC #2. It’s still very early days for the competition (so not surprising that I haven’t been eliminated yet), but still nice to be still in the running. I’m making an effort to read a lot more of the other entrants this year, starting with the rest of my group in GSV Galactic Beards’ intake, and I’m having a great time. The Pono Way was a nice bit of near-future allegory, and The Engineer was an absolute brick of an epic set in a really cool world. I’m making sure to do reviews for everything I’m reading, too (on Goodreads, etc.). They’re important.
As for what I’ve been reading, I’ve been taking a Riftwar break while I catch up on the review series – just the Conclave of Shadows trilogy review to go now, which I’ll likely do next week, and then I’m up to date and I can get stuck into the Darkwar. I’m looking forward to that one. I’ve reached the point in the series where, because I didn’t have all the pieces of the various trilogies and because they were published later, I haven’t re-read every one multiple times – which is nice for a bit of novelty.
Most recently I dipped back into The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, because I’ve been singing ‘So Long and Thanks For All The Fish’ with the lovely choir I’m part of, Ready Singer One. (We’re on at the Science Museum on October the 26th for their SF Lates event. That’ll be fun.) I’d forgotten how good the books are – and how bold a decision it was to open a comedy SF movie with a full-blown West End musical number.
So that’s where I’m at, basically. Stay tuned for more news, hopefully very soon, of the Next Book – whichever one it ends up being – and of the SPSFC, whatever happens with that.
