I’ve been quiet. That usually means I’ve been busy; busy with things I can’t really talk about for fear that the sheer awesomeness of them might rip open a hole in the fabric of space and swallow the entire planet. Or something like that.
Mostly, it’s because it’s hard to write something meaningful when everything is obscure and in code. It’s also not very interesting to read. However, to show the world that I’m not sitting here slacking, here’s a mini update on what I’ve been up to.

  • Over on the east coast of America, there’s a huge bunch of work going on connected with Project Octopus. I’ve had a lot of input into this, so whilst I’m not the actual one doing the work here, it’s taken a lot of my gladly-given time. I got to see the first fruits of this late last night and it’s looking great. There’s still a bit of work to do, so it’s early days but it’s already looking like it could be stunning.
  • In the meantime, I’m giving a manuscript another read. Polish, Polish, Polish. I’ve given myself a deadline of the next WoW expansion to do this, so I have little more than a week. I’ve downloaded iannotate to try and facilitate this as recommended by Anne Lyle. I’ll see how I get on and report back with a blog post sometime afterwards.
  • As a result, Project llama has taken a back seat for September. I’m ahead of schedule anyway so I can afford this time. I’m hoping to meet face-to-faces ome of the team I’m working with on this in the near future
  • My personal writing project, let’s call it Project Calamari as one of my family did the other day, is going well. I have added a new first chapter and I think this works a lot better at setting the tone of the novel. One of the things I’m really keen is to avoid the trap a lot of fantasy novels fall into by resetting everything back to the way it was at the end of the novel. I want the first chapter to know that things have changed and they are not going back. As you can imagine that’s hard to do in a first chapter, but whilst I think I need to tighten up a speech, I think most of the chapter and particularly the last line, nails it.
  • I’ll be at Fantasycon at the end of the month. I’d hoped to do a reading but I left it late and they were already doubly over-subscribed so I have no cause to complain. Instead I will be hanging out in the bar, attending a few panels and generally just mingling.

So that’s where I currently am. I have a mountain of work to do this week so I may be relatively quiet the next couple of weeks. Then… then things get a little crazy!