Once More Into the Breach!

Where to begin?

Firstly, apologies for not doing a blog post for so many months. I've had a real time at work recently and, unfortunately, I had to put all of my author bits on hold for a while. The company I was working for was making me work fifty hours every week, sometimes more (ah, Zero Hour Contracts, where would we be without you?), which didn't leave me a huge amount of time for writing. I brought this up with them and they made no effort to help me, so I told them to shove their job. I'm now working in a lovely cafe for twenty four hours a week and I get paid more per hour. This is perfect; I've already gotten so much writing done, it's unbelievable.

So, what am I working on? Well, I'm still writing my third fantasy novel 'Lay Me Restless'. It's set in the same nameless world as 'Endless Tides' and 'In the Footsteps of the Behemoth'. It's going really well. I'm really happy with the story and characters so far and I feel like my prose has improved too. It's a really exciting time for me. I've also resolved to write a short story every week too! This could be interesting, I haven't done many before, but it's something I definitely want to get in to more solidly.

I'm also editing a musical for a friend of mine. I'm not really sure how to attack it just yet as it's so different from what I usually do, but we'll see what I manage to come up with.

At the moment I'm reading 'Fury of the Sword' the third book in the 'Chronicles of Arkadia' series by the brilliant Jeff Jones. I highly recommend this entire series of books. The scale of them is breath-taking. 'Epic' Fantasy doesn't begin to describe them. I'm particularly impressed by how well Jones manages to infuse really personal human stories into his books too. It's not all the numbers of war, these are genuinely well-drawn characters and easy to get invested in. I'm really looking forward to finishing it. I wouldn't put it down if I didn't have my own writing to do!

So that's about it really. I'm going to try and start doing a blog once a week, if I can, so keep your eyes peeled.

Sam