November Update

It's been a while since I posted an update about my writing. I finished my last short story collection Splendour of Shadows a few months ago and self published it on Lulu and Amazon Kindle. Since then I've been working on new material. I've finished the first draft of a new novel, Staccato House, which I have been working on for some time. The first part of this novel was shortlisted in the novella writing competition held by Contact Publishing earlier this year (see previous posts). Now the entire novel has reached some kind of completion, but it needs a bit more work, editing and polish.

I'm also working on a science fiction novel that was originally conceived some time ago, but was put on hold while I completed other work. I have a number of novels that have been started, and are in varying stages of completion, and I plan to spend the next few months working on them as well. I was also planning a collection of plays, but I have since decided against that idea, and instead the plots I was crafting for those plays will become short stories instead, as they fit that format better. So while I'm working on the novels I'll probably complete another collection of short stories. I still haven't decided what I will do with that work, but hopefully some of it will be good enough to publish somewhere, before I rush to self-publish it. I'm also hopeful that I can get an agent or publisher interested in at least one of the novels I'm writing.

I want to do something different with this blog- I have put free examples of my writing on here before, most notably 'The Baron's Cheesecake' which you'll find posted a while before. However, I'm not happy with just displaying that as it was written a long time ago- 2001- it was written for children, and it's not really representative of what I do. My novel The Pirate Princess is also available to read for free on the web at the Authonomy website, but that also is a story for young adults. Instead, I've decided to serialise three of my stories from my self-published books: 'Red' from Beyond Twilight and two stories from the new book Splendour of Shadows 'The Silent Path' and 'Bloodlines'. You'll be able to read them over the coming months. If you're discovering this blog for the first time or you haven't bought any of my books, reading them might help you decide if you like my writing and if those books are worth buying. 'Red' will be the first story to appear and I will post them in installments.

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