And back again...

October 29, 2023

Yes, I went to ground for almost three months. I meant to write my blogs, but…
 
Life.
 
So what has transpired? Apart from the inevitable wars all over the world, and bureaucracies justifying their existence while wealth-hungry people keep jacking up prices and gouging to become millionaires and billionaires at the expense of billions of poor people, life has continued to evolve.
 
Seen some fascinating movies – Poor Things, Living, finally saw Tar, Barbie, Asteroid City, Oppenheimer and some lame ones I won’t list – read books and played volleyball. Did lots of house-related things. You don’t need to know all this.
 
Writing-wise, in summary the three months have been a productive period and that’s partly why the blog was consigned to the sidelines.
 
A target was to complete a draft of the second fantasy novel, War, in the Clan Chronicles by December. It was around 60,000 words beginning of August. Well, the first draft is now done, sitting at 120,000 words. I’ve set it aside with the first draft novel and the plan is to read and first edit the two books beginning in November.
 
After that, I dusted off a scifi project not previously mentioned which I first initiated way back in 1998. Over the years, I revisited the concept, pencilled out ideas, even worked with local artist Tim Ide on the idea of making the work into a graphic novel, until it was pushed aside for fantasy projects with HarperCollins. Anyway, I’ve been plotting and drafting the novel version and it has expanded to 15,000 words with a target of maybe 60,000 when done??? I’ll focus the next blog on it.
 
The teacher guide project described in my last blog in July is close to finished at first draft, around 50,000 words, which is plenty long enough. Like the Clan Chronicles, it is now a November edit task. I’m hoping it will be in full first draft by the end of December.

And speaking of November, I’m going to take on the NaMoWriMo challenge to write a novel draft in the month of November. The target work will be a novel I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that focuses on a group of men spending a houseboat weekend together, unfolding a range of men’s issues and attitudes with a twist in the plot. It has always had the title Comes the Moment from the idiom ‘Comes the moment, comes the man,’ which itself has no definitive origin but seems to have passed into usage. The novel length I’ve targeted is approx. 60,000 words which translates to me producing around 2000 words a day – a possible target, given that some days in the past three months I’ve managed 4-5000 words. Anyway, even if I don’t finish the project in November, I should have made significant progress.

So, back to blogs again.