Announcing a Savage Generation

It always seems like the really big news you have to sit on forever and a day!  But okay, the cat's now out of the bag: The Bad Neighbour wasn't the only novel I sold to Flame Tree Press last year.  There was a second, and now it has a cover and it's up on their website, so I reckon I'm okay for me to announce it.

The book now known as A Savage Generation has been through rather a lot of titles and iterations since I wrote the first draft the better part of a decade ago.  For a long while it was just Funland, the first novel I wrote full time and the only one I've ever blogged regular progress reports on, what feels like half a lifetime ago.  Then it became War For Funland and sat on the metaphorical shelf for a long time, as the sale of Giant Thief and the need to write its sequels absorbed all my attention.  When I returned to it soon after I packed in the day job for good, it was with another new title, Degenerates, and a good deal more experience.  I wasn't wholly happy with what I found, but there was a ton of stuff that worked - so the only way forward was to tear what I had down to its foundations and build it up again.

Under any other circumstances, I'd feel wary about a novel that had gone through such tumultuous growing pains.  In this case, I genuinely think the result is something I couldn't possibly have written in any other way.  it's a sprawling, complex novel, stuffed with characters and ideas and plot threads, some of which belong to a much younger me, some of which came in later.  Perhaps it's not the most cohesive thing I've ever written, but it has an energy and sprawling ambition that I'm not convinced I could replicate if I just sat down and tried.  Possibly it's even two books by two different versions of me mashed together, but if so, I spent many a month neatening the seams until I was certain the results stayed glued!  In short, it's a crazy goddamn thing, but I'm proud of it, and I've glad it's found the home it has.

And here we are and I haven't said one word on what it's about, so here's the blurb:

Sickness is ravaging America, driving the infected to savagery.

Petty criminal Ben Silensky is determined to get his girlfriend Carlita and son Kyle free of the quarantined city they live in - determined enough to risk a foolhardy crime and then to team up with Carlita's equally desperate cop cousin Nando.  Once they're out, Nando is certain they'll find a safe haven in the prison, White Cliff, where his uncle works.  But unbeknownst to him, White Cliff has already become a survivalist colony named Funland under the management of entrepreneurial convict Plan John.

In Funland itself, guard Doyle Johnson is shocked when his ex-wife abandons his son Austin into his care.  Fearing the vulnerable position he's been placed in, he recruits the help of Katherine Aaronovich, the prison's doctor.  However, Aaronovich's traumatic past has left her with vulnerabilities of her own, along with a radical theory on the nature of the epidemic that will place all their lives in jeopardy.

As the last vestiges of civilisation crumble, Funland may prove to be the safest or the most dangerous of places, depending on who comes out on top - and what can't be held together will inevitably be torn apart.

Oh, and the fact that it ended up under yet another new title?  That's just because Flame Tree weren't thrilled with the previous one.  But hey, I'm happy with what we settled on, and it surely does look cool in bright blood red, smeared across that image, doesn't it?

2015: Lukewarm Catastrophe, Moderate Triumph

Well, I've left this rather late, haven't I?  But part of the reason for that, I think, is that I hate being vague and there's a disproportionate amount of news this year that I can't, for one reason and another, share here.

So, for example, all I can say about the beginning of the year is that something very bad indeed happened, something that threw all of my plans into chaos and had (has) the potential to end my writing career for good.  Many of those reading this, I imagine, will already know what I'm talking about, but my instinct is to not discuss a problem of such magnitude until I've managed to solve it once and for all - as, frustratingly, I still haven't almost a year later.

It seems like the rest of 2015 has been a struggle to crawl out from the shadow of that one event - if only due to the vast amount of extra work it's generated.  Nor did it help that the two projects I'd hoped to have out this year, my debut collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories and C21st Gods, both ran into problems outside of my control that left them drastically delayed.   Things even dried up on the short fiction sales front for a long spell in the first half of the year, and by the summer the situation was looking bleak indeed.

Which is about all of the bad news, because since then things have picked up dramatically.  Certainly those short story sales finally materialized, and in a veritable flood; 2015 turned out to be my most profitable year for short fiction yet, and by quite a margin.  There were return sales to Nightmare and Beneath Ceaseless Skies (A Killer of Dead Men, out now!), a couple of Digital Science Fiction anthologies, and that gorgeous collection from Flame Tree Publishing, amongst numerous other highlights.

As for work done, I'm about on schedule, and although it doesn't feel like it somehow, I've definitely produced more than in 2014 by quite some margin.  My medieval detective fantasy White Thorne is finished in first draft, and post-apocalyptic superhero noir The Uplifted is a couple of weeks off being at the same stage.  Between those two I managed to wedge in another sci-fi novella, Graveyard of Titans, and a handful of short stories, to a total count of somewhere around 300'000 words.  I also did considerably more editing, with the final draft of To End All Wars completed way back in January, and Degenerates and my first attempt at a crime novel The Bad Neighbour both going through their second and third drafts.

Now here we are and it's a whole new year.  Looking back, I enjoyed 2015 rather a lot; it may have seen only mixed success on the writing front, but in general my life got substantively better, as I settled into my new existence back in the north of England and starting putting down some roots.  Which, ugh, sounds kind of weird now that I read over it ... but what I mean to say is, I made new friends and got back in touch with old ones, whilst also finally finishing off my house and finding time to expand my hobbies and social life a little.  None of which probably sounds like a big deal, but when you've spent more than half a decade of your life knowing you'd likely be moving to yet another part of the country within a few months, a little stability goes a long way.

And at least a few definitely positive things are going to happen in 2016.  I'm already thrilled for the release of my debut novella Patchwerk from Tor.com in a little under two weeks from now - especially since the early reception has been strong.  The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories should be out from Spectral at around the same time, and if it isn't then I have plans in place that will hopefully ensure that it still sees the light of day sooner rather than later.  C21st Gods has a new artist tenuously attached, and there's a good chance there'll be at least an issue or two of that out before year's end.  And then there's my biggest bit of news - and the other major thing I can't talk about.  I suppose I can safely so that I've sold a new novel on pitch, that I'm going to be writing it between now and May, and that there's a solid likelihood it will be out before the end of the year.  Needless to say, this is hugely exciting for any number of reasons, but the one that I keep coming back to is that it's relaxed some of the financial strain I'm under; I now have actual income, at least for a while, and that fact alone is enough to make 2016 a much more hopeful place than 2015 ever was.

Degenerates Regenerated, and Other Novel News

Once upon a time there was a novel called Funland.  It had a tough gestation, one that I documented at length in what feels like another lifetime and can hardly believe was only five years ago, and for its troubles it ended up with its name changed, to the less blunt but perhaps sillier War For Funland.  Then it sat for a long, long time on my hard drive as I got diverted by the adventures of a certain Mister Easie Damasco, rapscallion and thief of giants.  Then I came back to it and decided that War For Funland should be called Degenerates, for a whole lot of reasons but mainly because it was a much better title, and rewrote it again and again and again.

Novels don't always come easily.

But hammer away at them for long enough, as if your life depends on it enough, and they do eventually get finished.  As such, I'm declaring Degenerates, nee Funland, temporarily War For Funland, to be finally done.  Because it is.   And now, after five and a bit years, I get to the really difficult part, which is trying to sell the thing.  But I don't want to think about that, let alone talk about it here - so let's move on spryly to happier pastures.

Because elsewhere, my sixth novel and first stab at writing crime at any length, The Bad Neighbour, should be finished early in December, and I felt good about the second draft so I'm not expecting too much in the way of unexpected horrors.  (Though I suppose it's fair to say that the thing about unexpected horrors is that you don't expect them.)  Meanwhile I'm maybe three weeks off completing the first draft of White Thorne, my medieval witch detective novel*, and book number seven - eight?  Hell, I've actually lost count - is comfortably hovering near to its first draft midway point.  That of course being as good a reason as any to start plotting the next one, which I'm scheduled to begin at the start of December, assuming that the novella I'm writing in the meantime doesn't overrun.

And yes, in case you're wondering, I'm now officially working on too much stuff.  For some reason that possibly involves bad planning or maybe makes no sense at all, everything seems to be falling out at exactly the same time.  Then again, the flip side of that is that there's an imminent point - in January, to be precise - when I'll be working on a mere two novels.

That's going to be really weird.





* As in, she's a witch who becomes a detective and it's set in the Middle Ages.  I really need to find a way to phrase that better.

Novel Update, Mid-2015

It seems like a while since I've talked about my multifarious ongoing novels here, (or indeed about anything much besides nineties anime), and so I thought that June drawing to a close was a sensible enough reason to stop and think loudly about just where everything's at.  It's a good time for a little retrospection and forward-thinking, too, as it turns out, since some long term projects are finally drawing towards a close, whilst others are in the process of blossoming from half-formed ideas into actual, real work that I have to figure out how to begin in the near future.

On the endings front, I literally just finished with the second draft of my first attempt at a crime novel, The Bad Neighbour.  Of everything I've done, I can't think of a project where the first and second drafts were such completely different experiences.  I wrote the first draft at - what was for me, anyway - high speed.  I'm coming to learn that the first drafts of novels aren't my favourite part of the writing process on the best of days, but this felt like four and a half months of yanking my own teeth out, and by the end I wasn't hopeful for what I'd accomplished, only grateful it was done with.  So that when the feedback from my beta-readers came back as almost entirely positive, I felt nothing but confused; had I somehow sent people the wrong manuscript?  Maybe e-mailed out a copy of someone else's book?  But as it turned out, no.  Going back to Bad Neighbour, I was shocked by how well it held together.  I still am, really.  The second draft work felt like what I'd normally expect of a third draft, lots of tidying and polishing and not much in the way of surgery, and I liked what I ended up with.  It's a vicious, pulpy little beast, not even slightly like anything I've attempted, but I'm not sure if it isn't the best novel I've written.

Mind, maybe I shouldn't say that, because I'm about to embark on the final draft of Degenerates - the novel once called War For Funland, though it's changed immeasurably since those days - and I'd hate to hurt its feelings.  Overhauling relatively old work into something I can be happy with has been a hell of a thing, and not only has it involved adding a new viewpoint character, greatly enlarging the role of others whilst removing a few more, excising huge chunks and adding others and an overall staggering amount of editing, but in the last draft I completely rejigged the basic structure and changed the entire damn book from past to present tense.  Which is not a thing you want to do to a one hundred and thirty thousand word novel, I tell you.  But, you know, worth it - I think.  I mean, I've just read over the last draft and felt pretty good about it.  If I feel the same in three months' time then that's novel number five in the bag.

As for number seven - that being my medieval noir fantasy White Thorne - it's at almost exactly its midway point.  And so far, if it's taught me one thing, it's that writing historical fiction is really damn hard.  I mean, writing about the First World War was no easy thing, but at least I felt like I had some fundamental things in common with the folks I was trying to make real; technologically, psychologically, sociologically, we had enough shared ground that it seemed like I could find a way into their heads.  But the Middle Ages?  Those people were basically aliens.  Months of research have taught me that they didn't live like us, they didn't think like us, and I'm at a point now where if someone tried to convince me that they all had four arms apiece I might believe it.  So - White Thorne is not going smoothly.  However I just got through explaining how an agonising first draft can yield solid results, and damn but I'm clinging to that belief, while I shovel on with what is absolutely, definitely the most difficult thing I've yet tried.  All I'm saying is, this book better turn out great, because if not then I'm going to punch it in the mouth.

Last up, and next on the horizon, there's the project currently going under the tentative title of The Uplifted.  It's been bouncing around my brain for a long while now, ever since I wrote a short story called Wunderkind, which appeared to minimal attention in a fanzine called Bards and Sages Quarterly.  The core idea - of superheroes in a world ravaged by an apocalypse that they, with their unfamiliar and unchecked powers, inadvertently brought about - somewhere along the line combined with the classic story-line of Red Harvest - which if you haven't read it, you've certainly come across in one of its guises, as A Fist Full of Dollars or Yojimbo or the original Django or Last Man Standing - and then suddenly I had this thing that I kept referring to as my Post-Apocalyptic Red Harvest Superhero Novel, to the confusion and consternation of everyone.  But hey, if you're a writer and you're not causing confusion and consternation then you're probably not doing your job properly.  Or so I'm telling myself, as I try to put together an outline of its increasingly tangled plot, with the (perhaps slightly optimistic) view of starting work before the end of this month.

Is that everything?  Well, no, not quite; but it's enough to going on with, and I'm sure I'll be getting to the other stuff soon enough.  Now back to the all-but-impossible task of trying to invent superpowers no one's thought of before...

2014: Year One

I'm pretty certain I've never put as much weight of expectation on a year as I did 2014.

I mean, as the year when I gave up my old, safe career in IT for my new, hazardous career in professional Authoring, the pressure on these last twelve months has been absurd.  Almost all of it self-imposed, it has to be said, because everyone I know without exception has been completely supportive; but for my own sanity, I needed to know for sure that I had a chance of making this thing work and that I hadn't just driven my life off a cliff in some fit of self-delusion.  Not only that but my health, social life, home and pretty much everything else were in shabby condition indeed at the start of the year, and I wasn't about to let them stay that way for a day longer than I had to.

That basically left me fighting on three fronts.  I had to produce enough work, and enough of an increase over what I'd been able to do around a full-time day job, to feel like I'd done the right thing; I needed to try and sell some stuff if at all possible, since otherwise I'd be that bit closer to running out of money; and somewhere amidst all of that I needed to sort out basically all of the rest of my life.

I won't dwell too much on that last one, except to say that things are vastly better now than they were twelve months ago.  And number two, that's kind of tricky to quantify, so we'll come back to it.  But as for getting the work done, yeah, that's definitely been a success.  Frankly, I even shocked myself a bit.  After years of making grand plans only to have them sabotaged by cold, hard reality, it was easy to assume I was expecting far too much.  I wanted to get drafts down of three novels: World War One-set Sci-Fi novel To End All Wars, post-apocalyptic thriller (and part-rewrite of earlier project War For Funland) Degenerates and my first hesitant step into Crime writing, The Bad Neighbour.  On top of that, I wanted to finish a few short stories, comics and such, and I had a great deal of research to get through.  With all of that ahead, and however much it looked doable on paper, I couldn't but go in with the assumption that I was basically doomed to failure.

So to be sitting here with everything I wanted done done is a strange feeling.  Beyond the fact of having it all finished, and given that Degenerates ended up being such a strange hybrid of revamping and reinventing my unfinished second novel War For Funland, it's difficult to put an exact number on how much I wrote in 2014; but guesstimating that half of Degenerates was essentially new work, I'd say I've produced about 260'000 words of new novels, plus some 55'000 of shorter work over seven short stories, one comic and a novelette.  With the second draft of To End All Wars, two redrafts of my first novella Patchwerk and much polishing work on some of some older stories, I'd be surprised if I've done less than 200'000 words of editing on top of that.  All of which is heartening, because it means I can comfortably write and edit two novels a year, plus a few other bits and pieces, and I figure - based on little real evidence - that that's about what I need to be doing to make some kind of a living.

Which brings us neatly to the topic of selling things.  On that front, things were going appallingly until late in the year, and though I hadn't expected much (I had no novels to pitch, after all) I'd still hoped to do much better off short fiction than I did.  That never entirely turned around, but a few other things - arguably much more exciting things - did come together in the eleventh hour.

First up, I have a buyer agreed for Patchwerk.  I can't say who yet, but I can say that they were my absolutely first choice and are a publisher I'm hugely excited to be working with.  Both of which are also true for my graphic novel C21st Gods, which went from a long-talked about dream project between myself and artist Duncan Kay to a concrete reality, by such a bizarre chain of events that it's a story in itself, and one I'll probably share here in the not-too-distant future.  Then lastly - and the one thing I can officially announce - there came the contract signing on my long-gestating short story collection The War of the Rats and Other Tales, which will be coming out from my absolutely favourite Horror small press, Spectral, in August of this year.

With three major projects and a ton of short fiction scheduled for the next twelve months, I'm starting 2015 in a stronger position than I ever anticipated.  And as if that wasn't enough, the belated discovery that Working Tax Credit is a thing has put my financial situation on a less tenuous footing than I expected it would be at this point.  With To End All Wars almost ready to go out and both Degenerates and The Bad Neighbour hopefully to be finished before the end of the year, the question now becomes, can I sell novels too?  And, perhaps the even bigger question, can I do it for enough money to live off?

Well, who the hell knows, right?  But at least I'm looking forward to trying, and twelve months ago I never thought I'd be saying that.

How To Make Lulu Work For You

And no, I don't mean the singer.  Because honestly, that would be a whole 'nother post, and if I knew how to bend aging former celebrities to my will like that then you can be sure I wouldn't be wasting my time with this writing lark.

Not likely to work for either of us ever.

No, the Lulu I'm talking about is the Print On Demand service.  You know, the one that's not CreateSpace.  The one that I sort of get the impression no one uses much anymore, and that I'm probably only still using out of habit.  Still, that stubborn refusal to explore alternatives despite the fact that Lulu frequently makes me want to strangle myself (again, the POD service rather than the singer.  Although...) has meant that I've managed to get quite a good handle on how to make the most of it.

I should say at this point that what I use Lulu for is mocking up copies of my early drafts of novels, because I don't much like proof-reading from electronic copies and I know a lot of other people don't either - and because there's a certain psychological benefit to having your book-to-be in a form that makes it look and feel like a book when you're trying to hammer it into a book-like shape.  So my emphasis has been on making something readable and cheap, although a couple of disastrous early attempts have had me lean a little towards aesthetically pleasing too.  The main point, though, is that I wouldn't have a clue how to use Lulu to self-publish, although my experiences so far have made me wonder if such a thing would be feasible; I think I've bashed down the costs about as far as they'll go and it still isn't exactly cheap.

Probably not the final cover.

So anyway, the book that I just Lulued was Degenerates, this year's novel number two, which I finished in first draft at the end of October.  I chose Digest from under the Value options, which gives a book 13.97 by 21.59 cm, a ratio somewhat wider and taller than the average paperback but that nevertheless produces something looking and feeling very much like a proper book.  Degenerates, at a whopping 470 pages, came out at £6.25 a copy, which was about acceptable for my purposes; but you see my point about how this might not work for self-publishing.  Because that £6.25 is before P&P, and boy are Lulu's P&P charges on the preposterous side.   With that in mind, be careful to opt for the cheapest option; Lulu will try and convince you that this means your books will turn up in about four years time, but in my experience this is a fib.

A few other thoughts.  If you're planning on doing something similar to what I'm doing, make sure to set your project to "make available only to me" on the first page of options, otherwise you may end up with complete strangers reading your draft novel.  Unless you're ready to create your own cover from scratch, Lulu's cover designer is very much on the rubbish side, and it's exceedingly fussy about the quality of images it will accept; I've gotten around this by using the fantastic and free IrfanView to crank up the resolution and dpi.  Oh, and something I probably shouldn't mention but will anyway: it's very easy to find money off coupon codes for Lulu, which they appear to give out like candy, and they don't seem terribly bothered when you misuse (or reuse) them.  Five minutes of hunting will probably save you at least 15% off your blatantly over-priced order.  Lastly, something I plan to experiment with when I have the time is the options to create an e-book; since Lulu appears not to charge for this and their software sounds quite robust, it might well prove a straightforward and cost-free option.

Those, then, are my experiences of trying to bend Lulu to one specific task.  Has anyone out there found ways to drum that price down even further that I'm missing?  And am I wasting time anyway?  Should I have moved over to CreateSpace long ago, or are there other, better options that I'm not even aware of?

I've Earned A Break

So, where are we?  Late October?  Only I'm writing this a few days earlier, because I'm about to go on holiday (off hiking in the Lake District, to be precise), and since I have no intention of doing anything that might be considered as work next week, and also since I want to go away feeling happy and maybe a little good about myself, here's a post about where all of my ongoing novel projects are currently at.

By way of context, I should mention how I have a bad habit of setting myself crazy targets and then sticking to them, even when there's a chance that doing so might kill me and possibly others in my vicinity.  This is something I'm working on; in the shorter term, I did worry that trying to finish drafts of three novels plus all the other things I had planned for my first year of writing full time might be a bit on the insane side.  As such, if there's one fact I'm glad for right now it's that not only am I on target, it hasn't proven apoplexy-inducingly difficult to stay there.  Nor, for that matter, has it been anything like easy.  Which I seem to remember from some government-mandated training course I did once is pretty much the ideal for targets.

Now I'm cheating a little, because once I get back (which, I guess, is when I'm posting this), there'll still be another week for things to go hideously wrong in; but assuming that doesn't happen, here's where all of my current projects should be by the end of this month:

• To End All Wars, the World War One-set Science-fiction novel I began at the start of the year, will be half way through its second draft.  And it feels like it's coming together nicely.  Given that my biggest issue with the first draft was its wordiness, it's satisfying to be going at the thing with a bone saw.  That first draft was a little over 103'000 words; I'm confident it will end up somewhere around ten thousand words shorter than that.  Whatever happens, I'm liking it a lot, and I'm still comfortable with saying it's the best novel I'm written so far.  Although that may change at any time, because...

• Degenerates, the book that began as a rewrite of 2010's difficult second novel War For Funland and has since turned into a whole new, vastly more interesting thing with the skeleton of War For Funland wriggling beneath its muscles, will be finished in first draft.  I'm way too engaged with it right now to be sure what I think of it, except to say that there was never a point where I felt that War For Funland was entirely a success and there's never been a point where I've felt Degenerates was a failure.  I find myself falling back on that word, interesting; and I keep realizing that at this stage I'm absolutely okay with it being that.  I know that in the next draft I'm going to have to hammer this crazy monstrosity into some sort of shape, but right now, interesting is an adjective I'm comfortable with.

• Then lastly there's The Bad Neighbour, my first stab at writing a crime novel, which will be past its mid-point and well on the way to an end-of-year finish.  Okay, this is the one thing about which I was maybe lying slightly above: as much as I'm on target (and indeed a fair bit ahead), it's looking like the target itself may be off; something that's been causing me a degree of panic since a) I'm pretty clearly obsessed with targets and b) this should not be a long novel.  It's supposed to be a book that jumps out and kicks you in the throat and then runs the hell away, and if it breaks 100'000 words I'm not sure it's going to be that book.  Still, that aside, I'm plenty happy with it.  It's not a bit like anything I've written, and since a large part of why I chose to write it was to see how far I could get out of my comfort zone before I burst into flames, that makes me feel like at least I'm achieving what I set out to.

All of which means there's a solid chance that I will in fact finish three first drafts this year, just like I planned - and perhaps more importantly, that I'll be happy with all three once they're done.  Giving up my livelihood to write full time has been one hell of an experiment, and one that still scares me a little every day.  Until I've got some books ready to sell I've no sure way to judge whether it has a chance of being a long-term success, and in the meantime my only measure is whether I can do the amount and quality of work I feel I should be doing to make a living as a writer.  So it's great to be able to say that right now, by those terms, I'm winning.

Six Months In

I've actually been working permanently as a writer for about seven and a half months now ... but I tend to discount that first month and a half before Christmas since I mostly spent it allowing myself some slack and addressed some lingering health problems, so by my reckoning it's basically been six months since I began writing full time.

Sadly this is not a cake I made myself to celebrate.

It's been, on the whole, a good six months.  But for a tough relationship break-up and a vicious bought of flu and the fact that you don't go from being physically and emotionally wrecked to joyously happy and Zenishly calm overnight, it might even have been a great six months.  But you know what, good is okay.  Good is, in fact, pretty good.  And I'm glad to say that the personal stuff is much improved: I've finally finished the interminable-seeming work on my sort-of-recently-purchased house; I've been learning and relearning all those life skills that working two jobs pushed to the sidelines; I've been repairing my health, rediscovering neglected friends, even starting to think about actual hobbies.  And most importantly, I've been writing five days a week, writing and editing and researching and blogging and submitting and keeping on top of e-mail, doing all those jobs that fall under the banner of Writer and being able to enjoy it all again.  Like any job it's had its off days, but the good ones have been by far the majority, and given what I gave up and gambled to do this it would have been pretty devastating if that weren't the case.

The upshot of all that is that I've written one and a half new books.  Almost exactly, in fact: To End All Wars is finished in first draft and The Novel Formerly Known as "War For Funland" is well past the fifty thousand word mark.  Add to that a comic and half a dozen short stories and I've produced nigh on 200'000 words, which is somewhere around three times my output of last year or just under twice that of the year before.  At the six month mark.  And most of it, I think, is as good as or better than anything I've done up until now.  I've also redrafted my first novella Patchwerk, thirty thousand words worth, and worked through about the same in short fiction.  And research-wise I've plowed through some twenty books, something I could never have even conceived of when writing was a second job.  I've done everything I'd hoped to get done and maybe a touch more, and while I'm definitely keeping busy it's rarely felt like a slog.

So that's it for the first six months.  Between now and Christmas I'd like to finish The Novel Formerly Known as "War For Funland" - god I'm so bored of calling it that, it's called Degenerates now, okay there I've said it!  I'd also like to get most of the way through an initial draft of my first Crime novel, currently under the working title of The Bad Neighbour.  At the same time I need a chapter plan of novel number seven ready by the end of December, which means figuring out an actual plot, which means a hell of a lot of research into both witchcraft and the Middle Ages.  Then there's the second draft of To End All Wars, a few more short stories, and ... well, whatever else comes up.  Even us obsessive planners can only obsessively plan so much.

The conclusion, if it isn't obvious by now, is that I'm not regretting my hazardous leap out of full time employment and into full time writing.  Right now I feel that even if it fails I still won't regret it.  I've wanted to do this since I was a kid, I understand now how badly I needed to do it, and now I am, and as I think I mentioned somewhere up there, it's good.