The Bandstand?  Railman?  These ring any bells?

Lol.  Yeah, I’ve been a bad boy with letting a lot of writing duties slide.

Now, let’s not get carried away that by posting on the the 1st of January about this that I’ve made any bold New Year resolutions.  I have every belief that i’ll get caught up in ‘life’ just as I always do.

But I have been writing, doing a fair bit of work away from the blog.

Just keeping you in the loop. 

http://www.flurb.net

Looks like they’re looking for submissions for issue #13.  The submission window is Feb 1st to 28th of next year.  Stories between one and six thousand words with strong characters and an actual story.  Fancy that.

Time to hunt though my yWriter files and see if I have anything appropriate.

Other than this post I’ll not be thinking of NaNoWriMo.  Tomorrow is when all the fun begins and despite not having a proper coherent story I’m refusing to fret.

I discovered over the weekend that the ending I wanted doesn’t remotely fit the beginning I was planning.  I have a few scenes in mind for the start, an almost clear picture for the first two or three days and beyond that I’m in full “bluffing it” mode.

Oooh, this’ll be fun.

And if it all grinds to a halt too quickly I have another daft idea for a novel, something that Ruth and I were talking about at the weekend.  It’ll serve as a backup if the first crashes and burns!

And if NaNo goes so well then there’s no reason not to try to write both of them at once…    (this, of course, is madness talking…)

I’ve been giving it a lot of thought and I’ll not be writing anything completely new this year.  A few years ago I wrote a pulp sci-fi/horror called Planet of Snakes, the first and only time i finished a NaNoWriMo, which was a sequel to the story I attempted the previous year called Desert of Zin.  Thing is, i never finished Desert of Zin…

So, Planet of Snakes was the sequel to an unfinished novel?  Yep.  And it depended on the ending of Desert of Zin to work.

My thinking is that I’ll use Snakes and other works to write a space adventure.

It’s not strictly just an editing process.  The setting works, after a fashion, and I’ll only need to change the characters, the dialogue, most of the plot and anything else that springs to mind.

But that’s not all.  Oh, no.

It’s not about writing a 50k story this time.  It’s about writing something that actually works, that’s actually readable and is actually complete.  Planet of Snakes was a mess filled with quick fixes.  But my writing has come on in bounds.  I don’t fall into the same repetitious traps.  (Or not as much.)

Nothing quite like setting the sights high, eh?

And it doesn’t have many spires and it’s not set at midnight.

I’m sure I’ll fix that in the edit, and that begins tonight. 

Looking through the blog it seems that I started this all the way back in September/October 2009 and was dropped for not having enough ‘spark’.  Reading though it again and there’s spark there, just needing a bit of work and an ending.

This is a sequel, of sorts, to Living On Reputation and a story I’ll be sending out into the wild.  Have to make it supergood!

As a big H.P. Lovecraft fan it’s my first serious attempt at writing a Lovecraftian creeping-evil styled tale.  I don’t really know if that’s how it’s going to end up but that’s my intention certainly!

I’m away now – words to write – and I’ll update later.