Quick Update 15/02/16

Hi there my solitary reader friend, how are you doing? Hope 2016 is bringing you plenty of the good stuff (whatever your personal preferences).

For me the year has been a slow writing time. Too many other things have got in the way; such as, the move to the new hosting and new url, no sooner was that completed than the hosting service I was with were targeted by a bunch of internet black hats and by accident my site spent the weekend behind a Denial of Service attack, that wasn’t directed at me or my books.

But I didn’t want to talk about that,  I’m more interested in telling you about my writing (it being the thing I do when the kids are in school — which they aren’t this week).

I’ve tried to get some chapters of “Cyberpixies” in the bag, on the grounds that a rough 1st draft is better than no draft at all… But, have hardly written a word in the last week, and with the kids off, I’m not too likely to get much done on it during the day. Although, with the wife busy with Minecraft (she’s found an ocean monument and is in the process of draining it) and the newly acquired Sims 4 (my eldest son brought it with his birthday money and since then his Mum’s logged more hours than he has) I can probably find time to write in the evenings.

Moving on to my other WIP,  book #1 of the “With Strange Aeons” series, my Beta readers were not impressed. While my Alpha reader loved the characters and story, the Beta readers did not like the plot, they did like the characters, but felt the story went too far too quickly (and contained far too much Cthulhu mythos and not enough thriller). So I’m doing the only thing I can, and starting over on it.

I have a reworked plot that is utterly different to the previous one and so I’m working that out in detail before writing. I might reuse elements of the old plot in one of the later books in the series, but first I should knock out another attempt at a 1st draft (putting me back to square one). So I’m currently replotting that (and trying to still come up with a strong title (that doesn’t have the words ‘code’, ‘secret’ or ‘conspiracy’ in it anywhere). So far I think the working title for the new draft might be “The First Seal” for reasons that will become clear later…  

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe infected by a Daemonic virus (that I still call “The Adaption Files” despite that being the best name my 15 year old self could manage), we continued to world-build towards a future YA dystopian series that will blur the lines between science-fiction, horror, and fantasy to the point it will have to be called SF. We spent Friday visiting with a Nomad Circus who boarded an old aircraft carrier (converted as a mobile city) heading out of Shanghai and bound for Singapore, only to have the ship encounter a new weather phenomenon (a Morphoon – where infected and possessed flesh rains down out of a storm and the Circus had to fight the Morphs off the decks of the ship) and then had part of a Sky-hook beanstalk collapse almost on top of the ship.

The PCs have a long way to go before they reach Singapore however and the world is getting harder to survive. I’m hoping to write them some more traditional adventures to ground their characters a little, while we look around the Nomad societies of that world.

I’ve also got another science-in-science-fiction post coming soon and have been doing some research for that. I’ll try and post that this week. 

So there we go, one project stalled briefly, one rebooting to improve the series before its begun, and one very much in development. Meanwhile, I’m still having ideas for a “Paradox Warriors” series and sequels to “Ironmaster & Other Tales” that follow Hoxton or The Magpie and their adventures after the Magpie leaves. Which is causing me writing jams as well (usually though,  a quite note on the idea will clear the jam and let me get back working on the stuff I want to write at the moment). Too many ideas, too little time again…