I’ll cut to the chase: my short break following completion of the draft of Forever became a longer hiatus.

Oh sure, I did some writing in that time. I wrote a couple of pieces of flash. I did an outline for The Scarred God (TSG). Hell, I even considered submitting TSG to the Angry Robot reading month but decided I just wasn’t happy putting it out there or working on it until I am*. I did Stuff. Just nothing substantial. Nothing that really opened a vein onto the page in the way you kind of need to for a story to take life.

It seems such breaks do me no good. Lesson learned.

This week finds me trying to pull things back on track:

– I’ve begun to read through the draft of Forever (I’m about forty percent through) and – while it needs work – I don’t hate it thus far.
– I’ve taken a longer short story that I wrote a while ago and got very near to submission state and revised it with a view to sending it out. Subject to a final line edit this week it will go for submission soon.
– I’ve started to look at a much more formal writing plan with a view to getting novel length work in front of agents and editors.

Let’s see how I get on. Thanks for reading.

* To explain, The Scarred God was my first finished novel and first novels are – by and large – awful. TSG is not awful, there’s lots of things I like about it but there are also a couple of areas that would need revision: dialogue needs tightening and I tried an interleaving chronology on the climactic scene that doesn’t entirely work. The main reason for not making these changes is in order to move on from the project. It was time to write something else. Forever, is unlikely to be ready to go near anyone until late April or more likely May.