Writing Update

Apologies for my blog posts and journal entries being so infrequent of late. Over the past year or so I've been exceptionally busy with the process of writing fiction rather than updating social media. I've completed a host of new short stories over the past twelve months. Hopefully all of them will be appearing in some kind of published format in the near future, and beyond into the New Year. I might make a new collection available on Amazon at some point, which is provisionally titled Echoes and Exiles.  I'm holding back on making these stories available for the moment while I wait for publishing outcomes.

I've also finished an entire draft of my second full length novel, Staccato House. Regular readers of my blog, and Twitter/Facebook followers, will know that I originally submitted this work in the form of a novella to Contact Publishing's thriller-writing novella competition, and it was shortlisted in the final ten.  The 40,000 words that I wrote then has since evolved into a 110,000+ word novel- give or take a few extra final tweaks eventually.

I'm attempting to juggle several ongoing writing projects at the moment. I've also been wrestling with my third novel, A Riverside Tale- a book that I have been working on since the latter part of 2011. This one is a little different from what I normally write, at least in terms of theme and genre. It doesn't fall into any of the categories of fantasy, horror, SF or thriller. It's probably more accurately described as a romance/mystery novel, and is set in England during the period of the 1940s-1970s. It needed some research rather than pure invention. I'll be sharing more information about this novel and my other works in progress in due course.

In addition to all of this- see, I told you I was busy, and this isn't even the day job!- I've been re-writing my first novel Copper Moon Rising. Some of you might already know that I self-published this novel, an epic fantasy/SF crossover tale, in 2010. I also created a second edition in 2011 to make a few corrections. This year I've been working on a revised version as it may still have a publication future, and have noticed a few more necessary alterations and edits that needed to be made. I have added to the mid-section of the novel, Moloch's tale in particular- which in hindsight I thought was slightly under-written. However, if you have already bought it or own a copy, I would assure you that I have done very little in terms of substantially changing the narrative and basic plot structure. It's generally  been a case of adding some necessary final polish- clarifying some aspects of the story, expanding particular sections, and filling out one or two of the characters and settings. In some places I felt that the narrative's prose style was uneven, due to earlier drastic rewrites and my own impatience at the time - carelessly rushing ahead with the plot. I'll probably make the new amended version available on Amazon at least, sometime in the near future- unless I can make strides with it elsewhere.