On A Novel

Tweet God, where is this year going?! It seems like New Year's Day was only yesterday. Oh well. Plenty more of experience means plenty more ideas. I'm trying to read as much as I physically can right now, meaning I've got George R. R. Martin's A Sword of Storms, Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life, Max Barry's Jennifer Government and various issues of BPRD and Hellboy on the go at the moment.

Checkmate should be appearing soon - I feel like I should do something to celebrate my tenth publication, but I think I might save that for the twentieth. In the meantime...I just need to write more work so I have more to submit! I have gone back to the novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo's 2008 campaign, so I'm editing and polishing with gay abandon. Time throws an unflattering glare across the work; the flaws are blindingly obvious, but thankfully that just makes them easier to correct. I keep finding bits I like about it, so with any luck I'll soon have a redraft I'm happy with. And then I'll redraft it again.

It's funny, I first "met" the character in 2007. I was on holiday in the Trossachs (Scotland), when my family and I decided to have a day trip to Glamis Castle. I'd heard about all the weird stories about the place and wanted to check it out myself. As the journey's navigator, I was poring over the map, when I noticed a tiny village named Fowlis Westenby. The name caught my attention, and a cavaliar named Fowlis Westerby strolled into my head to say hello. I originally wrote a short flash piece about him at the time, but he kept coming back to nag me to tell more. It took me until last November to give in to his demands. Hopefully he'll be happy with the finished novel...or he may nag me even more...