Where the inspiration takes me

(Nimue)

One of the things I’ve learned in the last year or so is that I’m much happier when I have multiple projects on the go at the same time and when those projects are at different stages. This is an update about what I’ve got going on at the moment.

On the non-fiction side, I’m writing a book about Spirits of Place. I’m doing a chapter a month and this is available to read on Patreon as I go along. At this rate it will take me a year to get the first draft, and then I will decide how best to get it out into the world.

Also on Patreon, I’m sharing a hope-punk novel in progress. It also has some steampunk elements (well, it has a steam engine and a lot of humour.) Again I’m doing about a chapter a month, although I’m trying to get ahead of that with the writing part. Writing non-fic works fine undertaken in sporadic chunks, fiction not so much, but I’m getting away with it. 

I’ve been working on someone else’s project in recent weeks and I hope to be able to talk about that more, soon. It’s a book in translation where the English language aspect needs working on for clarity and coherence. This is very much a steampunk project, and more action oriented than my own stuff tends to be,

I have a novel I started some fifteen years ago and only managed to finish this autumn! I need to do a second draft of that, but I’m hoping to bring it out in February. I will be self publishing that, and free ebooks will be available in my ko-fi store. This is very much tied up with how I use Patreon. Support there makes it feasible for me to keep writing books and making some of them freely available. Ko-fi donations also help with this, as do people who are able to pay for ebooks. I’m a big fan of gift economy and trusting people to do what works for them.

I’m going to be looking at how to get existing Hopeless, Maine novellas out into the world, and I am in conversations with people about how to take that project forward.

I’m also brewing a folk horror novel. This is very early days, and I’m currently reading academic material about the genre – not least because I have a friend who has written a quantity of academic material about the genre! I’ve got a village to design and a vague sense of the key issues and some of the characters. I like to get my set-up figured out before I start and leave myself some room to explore the plot as I go along. I’ll be talking about this as I go because the genre itself has issues that I want to challenge in how I approach the story.