oooo! look! a five-star review of Midwinter Fury on amazon.com! this calls for a celebratory Marmite sandwich!

hmmm. this means i should probably try to complete the third book very soon...

Phoo. Been a while since I posted here. Getting geared up for AltFiction - and hopefully seeing good people like MGIR, SJAB and I Brian again. Meanwhile, I'd wanted to go with a completed first draft of Malessar's Curse, just to prove that I could finish something (and, in my dreams, to hawk around....), but that looks like it ain't gonna happen. Not this year, anyway. There's about 15k left to write, and less than four weeks till AltFiction.

Blame the stress. Work hasn't been great...

Just to prove how totally relaxed I've been over the last week (shame I have to go back to work tomorrow, but those dodgy refunders won't throw themselves out...), I managed to write the whole first draft of a new short story last night. All 3000 words. Woo! Go Me!

All it took was a couple of lines from a Columbo episode that I couldn't be bothered to not watch (in other words, i was stuck on the bean bag with tea and a double choc muffin), and by bedtime i had the whole story kicked...

Or, rather, a nice few days with good friends, down in the vale of Evesham. The weather's been mostly cack, and i haven't done half as much writing as i really wanted to, but on the other hand i got to see my niece and nephew and - more importantly - Mrs C was calm, relaxed, slept well, and went to meet the young charmers for the first time since heaven knows when.

One creative positive as well: I'm up to 70% completion on the first draft, and i've finally figured out a way to finish...

My god! I've just written three hundred words of Malessar's Curse! That's the first 300 words this year! And it didn't feel strained, stilted, or painful in any way at all!

Right. There's hope yet. Time to get down to business.