They always do, in summer. For a few days I got a decent boost from AltFiction (authorised geekiness! I was almost literally bouncing off the walls! And excellent to meet some Chronites at last!) and I veered back to the Curse, hoping to make some serious headway on that for the first time this year. But, two weeks and barely two thousand words later, I'm remembering why it was such hard work in the first place.

It's the Voice. Not quite as flowery as Janny Wurts, but still waxing...

Vol.2 of the Empire Dance is proceeding apace - but I've had to make the decision (not easy) that after this I will need to put the project on the back-burner for a while so that the Curse does not suffer. Getting my head out of space-opera mode and back into epic fantasyland will be a bit of a wrench.

But, on the plus side, I'm rather happy with the way ED has been developing, both in my head and on (virtual) paper. When I first resurrected the idea and decided to break it into manageable,...

there's a brilliant little page i found this morning (via a link from Facebook) that allows you to design your own Little Black Books. Awesome.

for anybody not sure what i mean, the role-playing game Traveller originally came as a series of A5-sized books. Little Black Books, as they came to be known. each book expanded a character career, and gave additional world-building rules, or else set you up to build vast interstellar navies, or even just presented you with random NPCs for...

...now Empire Dance is on Lulu's search engines. Unfortunately I'm not even on the first page of the "Poore" name search. Who'd have thought there'd be so many of us??

Meanwhile I've ordered a preview copy so that I can enable the distribution side of the affair. And a relaxing afternoon at the library yesterday added another 2.5k to the total for Volume 2. The only problem now is that, with 30k still to write, I've started to wonder if my cliffhangers are in the right places.......

And so it begins...

I uploaded the finished ms of Echoes of War just before the weekend and, having surfed and scurfed for a suitable cover image, mocked up a draft cover. Actually, I liked that cover so much I kept it.

An anticlimactic halfhour later, the book was live on Lulu and i had a storefront page to sell the book from.

Oddly it doesn't turn up in the product searches straightaway - that apparently takes a few days for Lulu to reorganise and reindex...