I've been a little quiet here for a while, as I try to decide what to do with my blogging, really. But there's stuff on the horizon, and stuff that I've already done.
First, Story of My Escape and Something Nice both have fantastic new covers, courtesy of Lawston Design. If you're putting together a book, you should totally get in touch with my sister-in-law Rachel and see what she can offer.
I've continued to post drabbles sporadically at Drablr. They've been good to me this year, and there are a few really good writers producing quiet little gems on that site.
The Costa Short Story Award is probably the biggest contest I've ever entered. I shouldn't think for a moment I'll get anywhere with it, but the deadline spurred me to complete a short story that had been hanging around for months. I now have enough short stories to produce a follow-up to Something Nice, but the timing of that depends on a few other bits and pieces.
A Goodreads group I frequent is putting together a collection of children's stories, so I submitted a story about my cat, Buscemi (or Bushimi, as I renamed her for the story). I feel this means I've become everything I've ever hated, but never mind. Readers so far have enjoyed the tale, and I look forward to the anthology's publication. At some point.
I'm also awaiting the publication of one of my short stories in Sanity Clause is Coming! This follow-up to 2012's Ain't No Sanity Clause was due last year, but was postponed quite late in the day. All being well, this should hit shelves in September 2014.
On a similar note, I'm hoping that Grimm & Grimmer: 4, which includes a science-fiction fairytale from me, will be coming out in early 2015.
I'm also about halfway through an exciting translation project for somebody. It's about as far from Casanova as you can possibly hope to get, but as far as I can tell it will again be the first time the book has been published in English.
On top of that, I'm also tinkering around with a zombie tale, of which I have about 5,000 words written. It started as a short story, but a lengthy action sequence dominates the story so much that it's going to need to be novella length at least. Which starts to make you wonder, how long could we go?
The conclusion was the first bit I wrote, but the nature of the zombie threat, and its setting, have got me thinking that it could be possible to have two or three narrative strands, if only to break up the exposition a bit.
Oh yes, and I got engaged and I moved house and I'm directing a panto.
It's good to keep busy.
How are you?