July is slipping by and I’m afraid I have to report a delay to the actual writing of Book 3. The trouble with (slowly) increasing my Twitter network is that I keep seeing these really tempting short story calls for magazines and anthologies. Well, I saw one a few weeks ago that it turned out I couldn’t resist in the end. A story gradually formed in my mind that eventually pushed Book 3 into the passenger seat and took over the wheel for a week or so!
In my defence, this particular short story is set in a hot July and we were in the middle of an actual heatwave. Book 3 will have a wintry December setting, so my mind just wasn’t in the right place as the temperature in my International HQ (aka the garden shed) exceeded 33 C!
I still have some editing to do, but otherwise that itch is scratched, now, and I can settle down to Book 3 with renewed energy! And it’s not as if I’ve been doing nothing – background research and refinement of ideas continue. So does the sketching of little maps, as evidenced below. Nothing quite says laser-focussed planning in detail like “Village up here-ish.”
Mark N Drake 