What Have I Been Doing: August 2024 Edition

Hello again. Got married, had a lovely time, now I’m back.

Yes, it was a fantastic wedding; we are now extremely broke and extremely happy, and our house is full of decorations, cards and lawn games that we haven’t figured out what to do with yet. An extraordinarily nerdy affair all round. I’ve been wearing my ring on a cord around my neck while at work so I don’t scratch it to death on LEGO, and every time I do so the Black Riders’ theme begins to play in my head.

So now that’s all finished, what have I missed – and what’s next? Creatively, I mean. You don’t need to hear about all the admin we’ve still got to polish off.

In the middle of what were, until the excellent wedding bit, some of the most stressful few weeks of my life, a few things happened, and I shall go through them now.

Ad Luna did very well indeed in the latest Narratess sale – more than 300 copies, which is mad and fantastic. If you were one of those 300 people, hello! Hope you enjoy the book. Sales like these are incredibly important for indie authors everywhere just for getting more books in more people’s hands and more reviews on people’s back covers. (So please drop a review or a rating if you have the time!)

Nextly, a competition occurred. The second SFINCS – the Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Contest – has begun, and I’ve thrown my hat into the ring with The Singer. I’m up against some stiff competition… by which I mean my reading list has grown dramatically with a bunch of my rival entrants, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens. If nothing else I’m in very good company.

I have also been sending a manuscript or two around various agents, and for the first time ever I actually had a response that wasn’t a form rejection. It was, in fact, a request to read the whole book! Before you get too excited the agent then rejected the book, but having actually read it they were able to give me some comprehensive feedback and suggestions for improvement, and an open invitation to resubmit an updated version of the manuscript. So overall, almost as good as I could have hoped for.

I’m going to do that rewrite, I think. I’ve got a lot more material for an unfinished part 2 that could be worked in and ideas on how to address some of the other problems. But I’m not going to do that just yet, because I’ve got something else that demands my attention.

WHAT ABOUT THE OWL IN THE BLOODY LABYRINTH?

I haven’t done much on the second draft/edit/rewrite/wrangling of Boiling Seas 3 in recent weeks, because I have, in fairness, been quite busy. But now I am in fact married, it’s back to the grindstone. I have a lighter workload for the next few weeks so I’m going to use that time to knuckle down and make some proper progress if I can. There’s still a lot to do to get this book in fully readable shape. Am I certain it’ll be done by the end of the year? No. Am I confident that it’ll at least be nearly done? Sure! I intend to take a week off work completely at some point in the next couple of months and do nothing but write, if needs be.

So it’s back to work on that edit this week, and we’ll see where we go from there.

WHAT ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE?

Short stories are also on my mind, as I’m coming to the end of one which I’ve quite enjoyed. It’s sort of a sequel to another one that’s going round magazine submissions at the moment, and if and when one of them ever comes out I’ll do a post here explaining where what is actually a very old idea of mine came from. But I’m trying in general to keep an eye on submission windows and get things rolling on the short front. As I mentioned earlier, I’m broke, and both my creative heart and empty wallet would be delighted to see some more of my shorter works in print.

And speaking of that, to round things off, you can read one of my previously published stories for free, right now! Because I got distracted by wedding stuff I completely missed that this had actually come out a month or two ago, but: Grimdark Magazine have created a sampler issue, packed with stories they think they best represent their delightfully gritty publication. To my surprise, they thought my The Only Cure was one of those stories – and so it’s in there. If you didn’t catch it the first time around in Grimdark Magazine #25, you can sign up to their mailing list (free) and you’ll be sent the (also free) sampler magazine!

So there we are. Lots to do and increasingly little time to do it in; isn’t that always the way? Let’s see how I go, shall we?