Working Hard...

Well then.

As you  know, I've been writing. Writing, writing, writing. You don't get to do an awful lot of other things when you're writing. Well, sometimes you do, but not when you have deadlines like these. The short stories I'm writing, all of them, need to be delivered by Wednesday. The first draft of Book Nine needs to be delivered by the middle of next month.

To say I am a tad busy would be something of an understatement.

Of course, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and why would Jack want to be a dull boy? I've been doing things. Reading things. Watching things.

Take this evening, for instance. This evening I watched the last Sherlock of the current season. The first episode of the season was oddly character-driven, at the expense of the central mystery, but I didn't mind that in the least. The second episode, the wedding episode, was hilariously sublime. And the final episode, having Sherlock face off against a truly unique villain... well. It was just wonderful stuff.

And I've been reading. Stephen King, mostly. Going over his early works. His classics. When I was a kid, I went straight from The Three Investigators and the Hardy Boys to Stephen King and these wonderfully violent and detailed Gold Eagle books like The Executioner and Able Team and Phoenix Force, books that gave you diagrams of the weapons they used at the back of the book. Basically, I graduated from kids books to horror and action. And after a few Stephen King books like Cujo (the first King book I can remember reading) I went on to James Herbert and Shaun Hutson — overtly violent and brilliantly horrific.

And now, after all this time, I'm going back to Stephen King, and loving it all.

Recommendations? Read The Stand. Then read It. Two MASSIVE books. You won't be sorry.

So these things have been my break from the writing. Christmas, for me, was mostly about the short stories. But there was one story...

It started off fine. Exactly as I planned. It would be a new kind of story, something I hadn't really tried before. It would probably end up as one of the longer stories of the collection, though, but not by much.

I thought.

I have just finished it. Half an hour ago, I finished it. At the moment, before edits, it is over 20,000 words long. That's twice as long as The End of the World. So you'll be reading through Armageddon-Outta-Here (haw!), and hopefully enjoying the stories, and then you'll get to this brand new novella, a good, solid chunky story, and I think this story alone will make the collection worth the money.

I think. I hope. Right now I'm far too tired to form a coherent opinion. All I know is, I've been working hard. And it's not over yet.