Alright everyone, it’s time for me to set some targets and for you to hold me accountable for them.

I’m off work this coming week, and so, as is tradition, I must Get Some Writing Done. Or at least some writing-related things, for not all my tasks directly require me to sit down at my keyboard. (I must also get a bunch of other stuff done, largely to do with houses and whatnot, but that’s neither interesting nor relevant to you.) In the interest of actually getting that done properly, I voice these tasks to you, dear reader, so that when I sit down this time next week to report on my progress you can appropriately lambast or congratulate me depending on what actually happens in the week.

Largely, these tasks have been waiting for a while. They don’t have actual deadlines, but if they did, they’d be so very overdue. So I really do need to get on with the following:

I started a short story when I did my author interview for Indiosyncrasy back in…  well, bloody ages ago. April, maybe? I have been working on it off and on ever since, and while there’s a nice tight 3000 words up on the Indiosyncrasy website… there are about 25,000 more now in my own version. I should finish that story. I’m almost at the end, in fairness, but I should wrap things up. And I should take a look at the previous 3 stories in that world – because yes, this has secretly been a sequel the whole time. Not that anyone reading it would know because nobody has read those stories but me, because I wrote them about 15 years ago and while the ideas are good, the prose is… not. But once I’ve wrapped that one up I can actually get on with other stories. This will be important later in this post.

Earlier this year, I was chatting with an actor friend at a party. They mentioned that they’d been trying to get into voice acting and narration and that sort of thing; I mentioned that I wanted to do some audiobooks, they mentioned that they were house-sitting for a friend with a recording studio, and a few pints later I’d sent them a manuscript. And a few weeks later, they sent me a full recording of the book. And several months later… I still haven’t listened to the whole thing.

Now this is not, as I have since mentioned to the friend in question, because it’s not a good recording: it is, so far, excellent, they’re a great narrator with some inspired voices. I haven’t listened to it not because of the narration but because of the words – my words, which, it turns out, feel very uncomfortable to listen to. Listening back to your own work is very different to reading it back (and I don’t even do that in full most of the time). Especially when said work is already published, which means that no matter how much I dislike the construction of a sentence I can’t really change it now, can I.

But it is a good recording, and I need to finish listening to it so I can give my narrator notes, and we can actually get on with the process of uploading and releasing it. Ideally this year. It’d be nice to have Two Big Things in the same year, especially after having last year off for all that editing.

Oh, it’s The Fire Within, by the way. Should have mentioned that at the top, probably.

Last year was a really busy year. I mostly just got editing and getting married done. It pushed some stuff back. And for most of this year I was also busy editing, and also being on my honeymoon, and generally getting ready to release – and releasing – The Owl in the Labyrinth. Which pushed back one fairly significant thing that’s been on my back burner for a long time now, and that is Salvage 7. I’ve been sending that book around various agents for a couple of years now, and many months ago I actually got a response, from an agent who read the whole manuscript. And didn’t take it, sure, but did tell me exactly what I should do to make it a hell of a lot better and more sellable, and told me to send it back to them for another read when I’d done so.

I have thought about this feedback. I have made some plans. I have not, however, made much progress. That changes this week. Because now I am entirely married, and I’ve been away, and I’ve finished Owl, and I’ve finished a very busy summer of work, and I am out of excuses and possessed, this week, of time. I’m not going to get an entire novel rewritten in a week, but I am going to get properly started. After all, I have most of the original Part/Book 2 already written, and the whole first one to tinker with and combine and generally turn into something better.

It’s been a long time coming. I think it’ll be worth the wait and the work, though. I hope all of these tasks will be.

See you in a week for a progress report.