All That News I Don't Have

I said when I put up my last post that I didn't have any writing news, and then realised straight away that I actually have loads of writing news.  It's just that none of it is really the kind of stuff that I'd normally blog about.  Still, saying I have no news implies I haven't been up to much, and that's the exact opposite of the truth.  So I thought I might as well set the record straight, even if I was the one who unstraightened it in the first place.

First up, there's the novella that I've been working on since around the start of June, and hope to finish soon.  I've never had much desire to write a novella before, but I had an idea that was too small for a novel and way too big for a short story, and I needed a project to sink my teeth into for a few months, to keep myself busy until ... well, until the massive thing that's happening next month, that I should probably keep quiet about until then, in case I jinx it or something.  Anyway, the novella's currently called Patchwerk, and its best described as ... um ... kind of a Moorcockian multidimensional science-fiction / fantasy thing.  Well, maybe that's not how it's best described, but put it this way, the fact that it has about twenty-five people in it but they're all the same five characters should give you a fair idea of what it's like (and what a gigantic headache it's been to write in places!)

So there's that. And there's the second, as-yet-untitled volume of Endangered Weapon B, which I finished a few days ago and now just need to format ready for winging over to Bob.  It's fun stuff, if I do say so; we find out just why the Professor's been so interested in resurrecting the dead, just about everyone from volume 1 returns, mostly in the most absurd ways possible, and - at the risk of giving away crucial plot points - there's a bloody great, ridiculous fight at the end. Oh, and I get to parody a load more stuff, from John Carter to Bride of Frankenstein to Endangered Weapon itself.  (Thinking about it. mainly that last one.)

Then there's the planning.  Oh so much planning!  I just recently wrapped up a synopsis of what I fervently hope will be my next novel, and that's with my agent John Berlyne right now, waiting on his feedback.  There's my ongoing figuring-out of how to nail down War For Funland, the book I wrote a first draft of between Giant Thief and Crown Thief and would really like to write a second draft of one of these days.  There's the third novel that's at the mostly-in-my-head stage.  There's the new comic series that Bob Molesworth and I are hoping to put together, which I'm sketching out bit by bit, with a view to getting a synopsis together in the next month or two.  There are short story ideas piling up, there's the film script I've been plotting for a couple of years now...

That might sound like a lot, and it probably is, but from my point of view this is no bad thing. For all the love I have for Damasco and his world, one of the hardest aspects of writing Crown Thief and Prince Thief was how much they dominated my writing time, to the exclusion of all else.  I'm always happier with a few different projects on the go, and I'm happiest when those projects are as different from each other as realistically possible.  So, right now, when I have a dozen things in the pipeline and none of them are the least bit similar to each other ... well, that's an okay place to be in.