Sunday 14 August 2011

The Sound of Something Almost Silent

That gentle whispering you hear in the leaves. That gentle cry from a robin's nest. That sonorous hint from a distant road.

This is not the sound of me doing nothing.

Honest!

I'm getting into the planning and worldbuilding for the next novel. I've got a reasonably solid outline now and I'm figuring out how the seven worlds we visit in the story all work. It's all terribly complicated. I feel like I'm building humans from scratch, which requires some pretty amazing chemistry to avoid them all coming out like gloop.

So I'm just going to work quietly by myself for a while. I've got too much history to write. And it's far too much fun.

Saturday 6 August 2011

Ardourish Racket

Hm. Might need to rethink that title. It sounds... wrong.

But anyway: the endlessly generous Nick Spalding has listed my little book on his wildly wonderful blog, Spalding's Racket. You should go and look at his books at Amazon UK or Amazon US or Smashwords, because they're really rather good. His basic idea for Life... With No Breaks is demented and insanely difficult to achieve with the quality he managed.

Also, I want his sales, dammit!

In other news, Bonnie of Bookish Ardour has allowed me to grace her writing blog with a guest post about  planning stories. You may recall Bonnie saying nice things about my book and letting me be very silly in an interview; she's looking to do lots more good things with more contributors, so anyone who's interested should head over there and drop her a line.

I'm knee deep in plotting my next novel. Just for fun, I threw away the second half and started again. But at least it's starting to make sense now. Next up: research! Lots of research. Vast amounts of research. And worldbuilding. I've gone and made another seven worlds or so again. It took me six months to figure out the worlds for Last Man on Earth Club; I wonder how long it'll take this time?