The Best Life

 NaNoWriMo is over (already). I won, managing 58,000 words in November despite having a new job, volunteering at Cancer Research UK and spending time every day with my fiancee. This is good. Especially the last bit.

 Troy volume 3 will need a major rewrite and then the usual metric ton of editing, as all first drafts do. But it still feels like the end of my Troy saga, after well over a year. I wrote volume one for NaNo 2013, and spent the months before planning and plotting the story - everything from characters and events within it, to researching details of Bronze Age weaponry and clothing. So this is the culmination of some 16 months of work, during which time I've got a bit fed up of Troy, as I said last time. Sometimes an itch needs to be scratched or it drives us mad, but this took a great deal of scratching.

 I've decided that next, I'll rewrite "The Bone-Smile", which is volume one of a trilogy set in a world controlled by a shadowy group of sorcerers who destroy any culture which grows advanced enough to threaten it. The world is full of relics and ruins left by these vanished peoples, and there are fragments of their knowledge too - pieces which survived, and which tantalise but often make no sense. One of the reasons I want to do this is that it's so different to Troy. "Bone-Smile" is a much more mainstream Fantasy, with magic and mystery right out front - unlike anything else I've published, in fact. It includes (among other things) a man following a prophecy, gypsies, curses and creatures not fully alive, all in a land where magic has mutated some plants and animals into new forms.

 Unfortunately it's hard at the moment, because my time's a bit limited. But if we want to do this writing lark properly we have to find time, and thankfully my lady Caz is the type to send me away to do some work whenever she feels I might be slacking off. I still can't quite believe how lucky I've been to find her. She makes me even more determined to make it as an author, even if I only earn an average wage by it, because I want to be able to give her the best life I can.