Another month, another dollar

I’ve been a busy bee this last month. Not my BEST month by any means, but hey, I was starting a new novel. You expect that to be easy? Huh? Huh?

Blue is daily, Red is cumulate

A neat 33k over 29 days. Where’d it all go? Well, mostly into my new novel, Century of Sand (which is 1/3rd done – I’m taking a quick break). The rest went into my Titanic short story, which is also on hiatus, just because I don’t know what I’m doing with it.

Taking a break from Century of Sand on the 24th allowed me some mind-breathing room, and in the one week since I’ve knocked out a new short story and re-drafted two more, so they’ll be going up soon. More content is good, right? Right?

I really need to get around to posting the new draft of the Ant Tower short. But reader impressions of Weathermen should be in soon, which means the final draft is in sight…

Too much! Always too much to do! What do you fine fellows and ladies have in the works at the moment?

Book Review: Nova Swing by M John Harrison

This review took a long time to get to because my reading time has pretty much been eclipsed by writing time, but the end result is no less sweet for having been stretched out. Marcher was almost bad enough to turn me off the written word forever, but Nova Swing has restored my faith.

Yeah. That cover pretty much sums it up. But I’ll elaborate past the cut.

Shave for a Cure

Well, I took all the hair off to raise money for the World’s Greatest Shave, which is a worthy charity if ever I saw one. There’s a less altruistic reason for it though – in these grim economic times, we need to save money any way we can. Haircuts are not a necessity! I recommend the Kambrook 10 Piece Hair Grooming Kit – it’s reliable, comes with a lot of attachments for different lengths, and cost me $12.40 at Big W. That’s less than my average haircut!

Writing update coming soon. The Ant Tower novel is coming along slowly but surely. I’m close to the 1/4 mark after a month, which isn’t my best pace but isn’t too bad either. I’m thinking of pausing it a while and getting back to some short stories.

How’s everybody else going? Got any good projects on the boil?

ABNA fail :(

If anyone here has been following the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA), then you’ll know the basics – 10,000 entries, one winner, the prize being a $20,000 publishing deal.

Well, I didn’t win. Found out yesterday that I made it through the first round and into the top 2000 (which means my pitch was more interesting than 80% of the other people’s pitches) but my excerpt (the first two chapters of Weathermen) weren’t interesting enough to get me into the top 500.

That’s life!

My printed Weathermen paperbacks have arrived!

Hell yes!

Weathermen Cover

A stack of paperback Weathermen test copies

So what are these for, then? Self publishing?

No, I’m not trying self publishing. These printed copies of Weathermen are for distributing to friends and family so they can give me some serious, critical, uncompromising feedback on the story. I’ll collate that feedback and use it to do one last draft/cleanup and then start sending the manuscript out to agents before the end of the year.

Can I get one?

Nope. I only printed 8 copies and it cost me close to $300 Australian. I don’t have enough to give to all the people I want to give it to. $300 is about as much as it costs to get a manuscript evaluation from a professional organisation and this way I get 20 different evaluations instead, but that’s all I can afford. I’m not rolling in cash these days.

I’ve gotta say though… it feels incredible to hold it in a proper bound form. It has weight and size and presence. 406 pages feels really nice. Feels like the last five years have had real purpose. And even if I never get the book published, I can keep one of these on my shelf and be proud.

Book Review – Marcher by Chris Beckett

We only ordered ten copies of Marcher for the bookstore but the supplier sent us twenty (and charged us double, just for kicks) so I thought I should give it a read so I could recommend it better and clear out some shelf space.

This was a mistake.

(Warning: Massive spoilers follow)