I'm just going to work. I may be some time

Ooh, there's been a bit of quiet on here, hasn't there? Now, what happened in February/March to distract me from here?

Oh wait. That.

So uh. Hi. I work at Waterstones now.

It's been a busy few months. I curate the sci-fi/fantasy/horror/manga/graphic novel/boardgames section at Waterstones York (aka, all the good stuff). I am a horrifying recommendation monster that appears behind people innocently reading blurbs and excitedly extols the virtues of the book they're holding and also these three over here and have they seen that there's a sequel in a couple of months they should preorder...?

It's been a lot of fun.

There have been signings. So many signings.

There have been parties.

There have been games.

There have been costumes.

And there have been conventions upon conventions and dear heavens so many books. So many.

I have taken time off, too. I went and sailed a ship to France and back for a week.

Not kidding.

But it has been hectic, and I haven't been writing much. I managed 50k for NaNoWriMo but I'm only happy with about 10k of it and it encompassed six different novels in the end. I need to get back to the writing properly, somehow. In between everything and everything else, and all the other stuff.

Been reading a heck of a lot, though, particularly for work. I have a whiteboard in the sci-fi section (and tweeted on the Waterstones York account) where people can (and do, surprisingly) vote for what I should read next, and I've been getting through at least one book a week since March.

So during 2016 I'll try to update this place a bit more regularly with those, at least. Read some spectacular stuff during 2015. Some new, some old, some I really should have read sooner...

Top 10 20? Why not. Alphabetised because I work in a bookshop okay:

One Good Dragon Deserves Another by Rachel Aaron
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
Twelve Kings by Bradley Beaulieu
The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette De Bodard
Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Kindred by Octavia Butler
The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey
Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling
Fool's Quest by Robin Hobb
The Alex Verus series by Benedict Jacka

A Thousand Nights by E. K. Johnston

The Empress Game by Rhonda Mason
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
The Anvil of Ice by Michael Scott Rohan

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab
Vicious by V. E. Schwab

The Martian by Andy Weir

The Iron Ghost by Jen Williams

Honourable mentions:
Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen
The Parasol Protectorate series by Gail Carriger
The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
Empire Ascendant by Kameron Hurley
Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

Yeah. I enjoyed a lot of books this year. Also read a couple that I will actively discourage anyone from reading, but that seems a bit mean to single them out here.

Films and TV have been pretty awesome this year too. Predictably, I loved all the Marvel stuff, and Star Wars, and all the magnificent geekery made available to us lucky things.

My favourite glorious geek media from this year might still be Mad Max though...

Yeah, I shaved my head for that. Cosplay commitment, baby.

Oh, and uh. I have a girlfriend now. She's awesome. We're swapping geek culture at the moment and now I love FullMetal Alchemist and she loves Loki, so that's all going well. Also contributing to the hectic busy, but that's okay.

Lots of shiny to look forward to in 2016. Here's hoping it's a good one for all of us!

Your name will also go on the list

In real life, I spend a lot of time chatting and hanging out with the people I met through NaNoWriMo. They're a pretty cool bunch who put up with my weird ways, and some of us swap short stories and the like for feedback.

We've also challenged each other with random short story titles (usually deriving from accidental turns of phrase promptly stripped of all context, often varying wildly in spelling) every now and again, which has created a couple of rather good stories in response. Mostly the title doesn't stay the same for the final version, but it's a good starting point/prompt.

In any case, thanks to a full on title war at the last cafe meetup, we now have a List. Some are terrible, some are decent, some are merely in jokes. I expect there to be more as time goes by. And we needed somewhere to put them all. So hi!

Your Stories, Should You Choose To Accept Them:

Lavender and the Random Acolyte
Chilli and the Lighthouse Family
Liquid Gravity
The Happy Cupcake of Depravity
The Judas Locket
Penguins of the Mind
The Grump-Bucket
As My Hand Moves Slowly to My Pocket
Spirit Familiars for the Socially Maladjusted
Swansong
Protected by Lore
The Scorned Glass
Reflections of a Stormy Sky
Has My Head Stopped Spinning Yet
The Amber Glow
In The Nicest Possible Way
Not Yet
A Tea Flooded Drought
The Tear-Filled Pool
Tempus Fugitive
Assassins and Jelly Tots
Amethyst Deceiver
Pavlova's Dogs
Ribbons of Death
Gustave and the House of Magic

More to come, I'm sure. Suggestions welcome! And I'll add more links whenever anyone else takes one on.

Has my head stopped spinning yet?

Whoo-ee, it's been a busy few months. I think I've been to... technically three cons since the last update, making five this year, and then, of course, there was NaNoWriMo (during the course of which I wrote 40k on one novel, then ditched it and wrote 50k of Dryden 2.0 in the last 8 days instead, clocking in a couple of 10k+ days, and a grand total of over 90k for the month, which is the most I've ever done in that sort of time frame. Check that awesome graph!).

And then I got a job at Waterstone's. Just a Christmas temp, for now, but of course it's extremely busy already and I am rather enjoying myself getting to be excited about books all day long. I really should stop clapping and cheering when customers who go off on an epic quest to find one specific book return to me at the till waving it triumphantly in the air, though.

In any case, that's what I've been up to and why the blog has vanished a little! I was all set to do a Fantasycon write up (probably still should; I have lots of notes and had a lot of fun) but was in the process of writing a short story (more like novella, and the most wonderful writing experience I've had in years) over the con anyway, and from then on life sort of hasn't stopped.

But! NaNo is over now, and I shall try to do some catch up here (and on my emails, which have been a bit neglected in all the hectic rush; sorry about that, patient people).

Oh, and Hanith is now out and about in very exclusive printed form; the British Fantasy Society journal finally landed at the very end of November, and I am at the moment rather pleased with how he turned out. I only have the one copy myself, so it's being passed around friends who want to see, but it's reassuring and encouraging to have him in print now.

Onwards!

Back by popular demand

You may have noticed a lack of posts over the last few days. Interestingly, I've had complaints about that. I was expecting complaints about the excessive chatter, not the lack of it. Oh well.

So, quick refresh: the daily posts were part of an intent to focus on the happy, good things in each day and try to stay positive. You can draw your own conclusions from the lack of posts, I suppose.

Despite that, there were actually quite a few good things over the last few days. I helped a friend plan a complicated cosplay on Wednesday, and received art (and random little presents too, which was so sweet) from my friend Cally. She drew me a dragon for the new pen name, and named her, naturally, Leaf Pendragon. Ah, the puns. I should've thought of that one. Leaf's now the background of my Twitter page. I'm still playing with settings to work out if I can get her onto the background of the blog too, and keep everything legible. She's a pretty thing, though, you have to admit.

I also got some more feedback on Dryden version whatever it is at this point, and more again on Thursday. I was getting very lost in attempts to rewrite, second (and third, and fourth) guessing myself at every turn, certain of some problems and hating other bits but not sure if that was just me or if they actually needed work. Hearing back from my readers settles that - even if I disagree with the odd comment, it still solidifies what I have to do to make progress. It clarifies matters, and reassures me that there's something worth saving in the draft.

There was also the NaNoWriMo group chat on Thursday night, which meant I got a little writing done. Hanith again, poor lad.

On Friday I made it into town to pick up the latest Loki: Agent of Asgard comic, because Loki. It did make me laugh like a drain, too.

Saturday included a trip to the cinema to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier for the second time... So I really can't complain about that. I even managed to do almost all the dishes and cook again, afterwards.

Today was monthly NaNo in-person meetup, too, so I spent the afternoon hanging out with half a dozen other writers, generally geeking out, chatting, and keeping up to date with everybody's plans and current writing status. It's nice, though this particular meet did leave me more exhausted than usual. I think I'm still not quite entirely recovered from the troubles of Tuesday through Thursday. Remember I mentioned how the food and the happy overlap a lot? This does mean that lack of happy equals lack of food, especially if I'm feeling guilty. That in turn slows me down for a while, which does mean a much lesser chance of sparking off further guilt-inducing incidents, but also means it's difficult to get back up to doing a full day of normal stuff without ending up utterly shattered at the end of it.

Oh well. The delays in getting round to actually writing Dryden 2: The Second One have meant that the plot is getting longer, more in depth, and crueller with every passing day. Shame it all makes sense and follows on from the chaos of the first book. My poor characters. They did so little to deserve this.

Inching forwards

Current writing status:

1 short story submitted, awaiting a response (Hanith)
1 short story in progress to be submitted by March 15 (Tick Tock)
Feedback trickling in for Dryden
Plotting/signing up to April's Camp NaNoWriMo for Dryden's sequel

It's a lot of hard work to remind myself that all those points up there actually count as progress. They do, honest. Really. But I get very frustrated with the inching part of inching forwards. Especially when Dryden was mostly finished in current form within the space of 30 days. The fact that three entire months, a quarter of a year, three times the length of time it took to write the thing in the first place, have now passed since then and I'm not really any further on at all grates like you wouldn't believe. Finishing the sucker was the big hurdle, supposedly. But the longer it takes, the less confident I feel in it. There's a very good reason I submitted Hanith ASAP - given enough time, I will learn to hate everything about something I've written and never let it see the light of day again.

I'd point you to all my unfinished fanfiction if I thought you needed proof, but that could be embarrassing for us all.

Anyway. Frustration. Dissatisfaction. Cabin fever. Et cetera.

Good stuff has been happening too, though. Mostly Loki-related. Because Loki is fun, in all forms.

Re: Marvel Loki, I have acquired the big display stand for Thor 2 DVDs from my nearest supermarket, so I have Anthony Hopkins or Tom Hiddleston squinting at me wherever I stand in my bedroom. It's very pretty and frees up my bookcase for actual books, so that's a win. Also, Loki-centric Marvel comics are most amusing.

Re: non-Marvel Loki, I was given a copy of Joanne Harris's The Gospel of Loki at the last local NaNoWriMo meetup. Read it the next day. I am simultaneously giddily in love and slightly worried that my infrequent ESP (Extra-Sensory Plagiarism) has struck again, because at the current time Dryden himself is very, very Loki-esque. Ah well, at least he's in good company.

I'd do a proper review of Gospel of Loki except that there are already dozens out there that all say exactly what I would: exceedingly good fun, delightfully narrated, pleasingly interweaving the classic myths with new material, and rounding off a lightly-explained magic system with consistent rules (which is hard work with old myths!). So yes. I enjoyed that a lot.

It's the little things that help, when the big things are trapped in limbo.

Never enough hours in the day

About a year ago Dryden informed me I'd be writing a novel about him. He just turned up one day, nameless and superior and amused by his current situation, in media res, and left me to work out the rest for myself. I wrote a few of the scenes that laid out his character best, but 2013 was a fairly tumultuous year for me, and I simply didn't have the time or concentration to actually write the full thing for quite some months.

Then November came along. I've been a fan of National Novel Writing Month for years, and actually managed to make the 50-thousand-words-in-30-days requirement to win in both 2011 and 2012, though both those projects were abandoned promptly on the 1st December, eternally unfinished. For 2013, I decided I'd up the ante, and aim for 75 thousand words in 30 days. 75k, I hoped, would be enough to actually get through Dryden's plot, from beginning to end, to put down one last full stop and declare the thing finished.

Finished is a magic word. One I haven't had much opportunity to use. I get distracted by other things, lose confidence in whatever it is I'm writing, and generally sigh and give up and go back to writing all the random little bits and pieces that never go anywhere, or try to get a proper job again.

I finished (cue gasps!) Dryden's first draft at 74k on the 30th of November, wrote another 1k to make it past both my targets for the month, and put it aside to start editing soon (and went off to start buying Christmas presents).

Things have been a bit busy since then. I've not just had Christmas and New Year, but been up and down the country fairly non-stop (it feels like it, at least). And there's a lot coming up too:

If I get Dryden edited in time and think it would help, there's this at the end of February. (Though it costs to enter, and that's an inhibiting factor for me right now.) (EDIT: Yeah, that didn't happen. Dryden isn't ready and I had too much on to get it there.)

I must, absolutely must, find the time to do my final proofreading/copy-editing exam and send it back to the sfep approved group who did my training course last March, within the one year deadline from said course date. (Though this requires my brain to be functioning at full capacity.) (EDIT: Did it, managed it, with a day or two to spare. Now I never have to think of it again.)

If I find time to write that steampunk short story I've had in my head for a long time now, there's this anthology (or two) which it fits nicely, to which I need to submit ideally by March 15th. (EDIT: Yup, managed that, just waiting to hear now.)

If I find time to finish up that other LGBT fantasy short story, there's also this rather nice edition of the BFS journal which I need to get to before May 5th. (EDIT: Of course, I went and worked on that one first, and finished a first draft of the thing just shy of the 5k upper limit at about half past midnight on what's now the 15th Feb. Oh well. It's all progress, I suppose. And I think it's quite cute. EDIT AGAIN: And it's submitted now, late on the 25th Feb, so we'll see what happens.)

Oh, and I'm currently ill, for the first time in about 18 months. Yay!

So here we go. Busy, busy, and a blog to boot. Wish me luck.