The current state of my things – writing, edits, fights and articles

I’ve got a lot of stuff going on. But I’m getting there. My primary focus for the majority of this year has been working on my latest novel, getting it up to the best polish I can. I’ve been working on it during every spare minute and I’ve just sent the manuscript somewhere, so wish me luck! I’m very proud of this book. You know you’re onto a winner when you’ve read something you’ve written many times in a few months and the story and characters still excite you. Of course, I’m biased, but I’ve also had some great feedback from my little team of beta readers that helped make this book even better. Thanks to all of you – you know who you are. You people rock. I’m not going to jinx myself by mentioning any more, but a lot of you may know already or can guess what I’m talking about. And no, I won’t be answering guesses.

While this has been my main focus, I’ve been busy with other projects too. I’ve had some good success with short fiction recently and have several stories forthcoming in various journals and anthologies. I’ll let you know as and when each of those is published. I think the next one will be my story Mirrorwalk, in Murky Depths. I blogged about that last week. Working with editors on those things is always interesting. A good editor makes a good story into a great story. I’ve just had another one of those land in my inbox, actually, so I’d better get on with that pretty sharpish.

Another project is my Write The Fight Right ebook. Using my experience as a career martial artist I’ve been running the Write The Fight Right workshop at conventions for a while now, helping people understand how to write a convincing, realistic fight scene. I’ll be doing it again in April at Swancon, for anyone interested. Every time I do the workshop people ask me for further information and I don’t really have anything to give them, other than telling them to try martial arts classes. After I ran the workshop at Worldcon last year, with a big room full of people from all over the world (which was both a little overwhelming and very gratifying) several people suggested I should write up the content of the workshop into a short ebook and make that available for people to buy. What a good idea. So I’ve finally got around to that and now the novel is submitted, and once these couple of short story edits are dealt with, I’ll be finalising that and making it available.

The Write The Fight Right “book” is about 11,000 words, basically a set of detailed notes about all the things I cover in the workshop with a few extra bits added in. I’ll make it available in all formats on Smashwords and as a Kindle edition at Amazon sometime soon. I’m hoping to have that available before the end of April, so when I do the workshop at Swancon and people say, “Is there anything else I can read about this stuff?” I can reply, “Why, yes, there most certainly is.” (And many thanks to Laura Goodin for helping me with a proof-read and editorial suggestions on that project.)

Also, before the end of May, I need to put together an article for Writing Queensland magazine that I was asked to write. I’m honoured to have been asked to do something for them, so will make sure I do a good job of that as soon as possible.

So that’s me right now. Kinda busy, but all good stuff that I’m very excited about. I should really stop cocking around blogging about it and get on with some of it.

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This entry was posted on March 23, 2011 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Anthology, Books, Convention, Dark Fantasy, Ebooks, Fantastic Fiction, Magazine, Martial Arts, Publishing, Short Story, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.