​The timeframe kind of wrecked both me and the cleanliness of my house (something had to give and it was housework) but I have finally FINISHED the first edit of Monstrous Heart and sent it back to my editor. After the main part was completed and saved on an increasingly fussy laptop on Tuesday I got back from the coffee shop/writing establishment and then went straight to bed at 4 in the afternoon to nurse my fried brain-cells back to help.
 
So, it looks like the HarperVoyager stand at the Young Adult Literature Convention (YALC) in London next week is going to have some exclusive samples of MH available MINUS the decidedly un-young adult bits, which happen later in the book.
 
I got a cover!

This is only a temporary cover for the sample, but for something put together fairly quickly with a couple of design elements and a colour scheme with actually fits the text, it’s lovely. Obviously the marketing is going hard for the fantasy romance angle, but everything in commercial publishing is filling a niche. Even the better self-publishing forums scattered around the internet are strongly geared to “finding an under-served genre”, which is why military science-fiction has really matched romance in the indie publishing universe.
 
(Thinks of military sci-fi romance I have trunked on my hard-drive. Hmmm.)
 
The full ARC might be available during Worldcon in Dublin, cross fingers. Obviously I could fiddle around with the manuscript forever.
 ​

#I’mWriting

• A draft of MH Book 2 has to be in by December. I’ve done a draft. It is exactly what one expects a first draft to look like
• A short story I said I’d do but not sure if I have the time
• Put some short stories up on Amazon/Smashwords for 99c in the next couple of months so I at least have something for folks to read! Most of my stories are in anthologies. Someone emailed me and said they were interested in publishing them earlier last year but I’ve forgotten who it was? My Mum was terminally ill at the time, so I wasn’t really thinking in that direction, sigh.
• My updated Website – which is sort of writing…

 
#I’mReading: UNDERLAND, by Robert MacFarlane
 
#I’mWatching: Stranger Things Season 3

So, the blog starteth. Normally I update on Twitter a lot, but as it is mostly shouting to the void, I have returned here for a more comfortable roundup of what's going on without the extra noise.

Over the next 2 weeks I'll have started--and finished--edits on Monstrous Heart. No, that's not a lot of time given that it's been over 12 months since I last looked at the manuscript and that was only at... draft 3 then, maybe? My editor, Vicky, is planning to get some samples out through YALC and Worldcon in Dublin next month--the A4 Times New Roman comb-bound special edition. Its a bit early for a cover design of any sort, I'm sure one will be mocked up in MS Paint. Publishing is slow until it is not. As much as someone leaping out of the blue giving you a 2 week turnaround is a bit of an imposition, its a dreadfully good opportunity to prove oneself not to not be tardy or a shirker. (I got to use the word shirker in an office meeting the other day. It made a good change to the more utilitarian and common "lazy fucker".)

I'm finishing off Book 2 at the moment. For those of you in the know, the Universe is equal in its distributions, so my book deal last year was swiftly followed with All The Worst Things, so writing has been a bit like swimming through sludge to get to the other side. The other side has been reached, and there is a book at the end of it, so, a big middle finger to you, universe!

So anyway, the journey must begin somewhere, and this is as good a place as any. I've joined a #2020Debut group on Facebook, and re-met a Twitter friend Samantha who I'd met about 4 years ago back when we were both newly signed to our (then) agent in Jenny Bent (fantastic, unfortunately we had to part for project/genre reasons). After I'd left Jenny, I'd taken a detour to writing a new book and hitting the query trail/new agent again, Samantha had stayed and worked on her manuscript. It was such a strange thing to finally meet up in the same place at last!

​Now I'd better get back to writing and my edit-orphaned family...