First post of 2013. And about time.

Oh, dear, this weekly blog really has taken a bit of a tumble, eh? The last post was more than a month ago. To my regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers of Penge), my apologies. Gearing up for Christmas was largely to blame but also, as I recall, I was concentrating my efforts on the storyboard for the book I've been working on.

What's happened since that last post: quite a lot, actually. Christmas, of course, for which son #1 came up from Texas to stay for a while, and son #2 and family came down from where they live which is much closer (about half an hour drive from here). A good time was had by all.

Sometime around New Year I noticed that our cat - a 14-year old tomcat named Ginger - was off his food and didn't seem to be as active as usual. Then a little while after that I saw him staggering. I took him to the vet, who found that he was badly dehydrated and that his electrolytes were all over the place. It turns out that he's developed serious kidney disease, and it must have happened quite suddenly. He's been on medications since, which we've been giving him at home, and he seems to be feeling better but he's still not his old self. From what the vets told us his kidneys will probably improve but they'll never recover completely. In the nicest possible way, they told us to prepare for the worst. That's something I don't like to think about.

On the writing front I've been working on my fourth full-length work, which is a SciFi/steampunk story tentatively titled Smoke & Mirrors. I polished the storyboard a few times, then the first actual words were written on New Year's Day. Just one scene, and only 650 words, but a good start. Writing has been going on apace since then, and the 'script is up to 29,000 words. My thumbnail estimate puts the first draft in the neighbourhood of 105,000, which is more than respectable. I'm hoping to have that first draft completed by the end of February.

As for the earlier books, well, I have some news there too.

First, as has been mentioned, I submitted two 'scripts to Harper Voyager last October when they had an open submission period; a week or so ago I got a rejection email for one of them - but they didn't say which one. I've emailed the question, but so far I've had no reply. (They had more than 4,500 submissions, which I think was probably far more than they expected, so I know they must be busy going through them all. I can wait.) No word yet about the other one that I sent in, either. Given that many people expect them to reject 95% of the submissions, at this moment I'm really just waiting as fast as I can.

In November I finished the second draft (or perhaps it was third, or even fourth) of my steampunk action/adventure story Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia, and after talking it over with Kate I decided to submit to another publisher (the original plan had been to wait to see if HV were interested in one or both of the ones I'd sent them, and if so send the new one to them too). I sent the query, and three weeks later I received an email asking for the full manuscript. I was hyped. Last week, big big news: I was offered a contract. I asked a couple of questions to clarify a couple of points, then sent the signed paperwork in just yesterday. I am now very, very hyped indeed. To the point where I've had trouble thinking about anything else.

So while I'm still working on Smoke & Mirrors at the moment, I expect that in the next handful of days I'll be putting that on the back burner while I work with the publisher to knock the rough edges off Gunn & Bohemia and give it a good polishing.

It's Saturday morning; I have about an hour free, so I'm about to grab a coffee and get back to working on Smoke & Mirrors. So I'd better get to it. And going forward I'll be trying hard to get back to a weekly Wednesday/Thursday schedule for doing these blog posts.

Until next week...