Updates...

I know... I've been completely missing in action for months! I've been writing. Well, re-writing. You remember several years ago I did NaNoWriMo? I completed the 50K in November 2020 (see my posts about that here and here) but then everything got shelved. I published "Invasion", then wrote and published "Chaos". In between publishing those last two parts of the Guardians of The Realm series, my beloved father passed away, and my writing mojo vanished. I concentrated on getting the audiobooks finished (which took a lot longer than I'd anticipated), then finally turned my attention back to the book I'd started in NaNoWriMo 2020.

Well. That was an interesting experience.

When I started going through it in March of this year, I couldn't make head nor tail of my notes! The book stood at 65.4K words, but it was spaghetti.

I re-plotted it out, scene by scene. The basic structure was okay, but I could not get the central plot theme to work where the book was set. It either had to change location, or change time-period (or both).

By 30th May, the main comment in my notebook was AAAAGGHHH!

The book had been set in Ardersier, and there had been a major plot point based around Fort George and the Jacobites. If the book moved either location or time-period, that whole plot-line had to go.

My notes on 30th May said:

I need to think about all of this. A big chunk of me is ready to abandon the whole thing... so much of me is thinking "why bother?" not helped by finding out today that all of my books have been pirated and are available for free on a website.

Thankfully, I'd been able to get back into running, because I needed a lot of plot-runs while I figured out what on earth I was doing with it.

Over the next week, I sorted out a whole new plot! The book moved from Ardersier to Masham (Yorkshire), and various characters changed names and occupations. I finished the "first draft" of the new version of the book at the end of September, and started on editing. By the start of November, I had a book I was happy with!

It's been out to my amazing beta readers, and they all love it (hooray!), so now I'm on the eleventy-sqillion things I need to do before it gets published. The goal is that it will be published at the end of this year.

And then...? Well, then the Shiny New Thing that's now been brewing for a few years might finally get its turn.