After several months of utter chaos and carnage, August has arrived, bringing with it roughly five weeks where I have nothing much on, either personally or professisonally, which means I can draw a breath and catch up with myself.

Well, that’s the theory, at least…

That build up might suggest there’s not a lot to catch you guys up on, but there’s a few little bits, so here we go.

First up, Friday Fiction. I’ve been on a bit of a short story spree, having completed two brand new short stories and got roughly a third of the way into a third. One of the completed stories is a piece of back story for Ved’ma, so that will go up later in the year. The second completed story, Waking Up, will appear next week. The third story, The Show Must Go On, is aimed to be next month’s Friday Fiction – but if I get it finished quicker than that, you may just get a bonus this month instead! I’ve also got a few ideas for more, including a second short story connected to Ved’ma. That one will be less plot-relevant, but will feature a character who gets her debut in Ved’ma so it probably won’t be posted before Ved’ma comes out. Probably…!

On the Ved’ma front, I’ve got a lot of work still to do to get a draft pulled together, but the holes are shrinking (slowly) and I’ve had a major break through in terms of resolving one of my remaining plot issues this week. Hopefully, given this is a quiet month (and assuming that I haven’t jinxed myself, of course!), I’ll be able to largely wrap things up and start getting stuff across to my editor (hi J!). I’m also starting to think about cover art (hi S!) – though I probably won’t actually start on that this month. (Really do need to get that draft together first!)

Sage has made a small amount of progress…mostly in that I’ve removed stuff that no longer fits thanks to Cambiante and Ved’ma. That’s the price you pay for writing stuff out of sequence and adding in things that weren’t in the plan *cough*Cambiante*cough*. I’ll probably have to do another run through as Ved’ma’s draft wraps up.

Book 6 has also inched forwards. This week (see, I said August was my calm month!), I’ve had a few ideas and breakthroughs about the epic climax (I mean, it’s book 6 of a 5 book series; it’s got to be epic to wrap up everything and be a satisfying conclusion to it all) in terms of what needs to happen and where and, just as importantly, who is where, given that by the climax I’m going to be juggling upwards of 30 characters of varying levels of importance! (Yes, yes I do in fact have a score card for this – while I can keep quite a lot of balls in the air, mentally speaking, 30+ characters is definitly a challenge too far.) The real trick with a cast that big will be making sure that each character used has a solid reason for being in that position – because if it’s hard as a writer to juggle that many characters, it’s even worse as a reader.

And given the cast size, you can assume that there will be more Elsehere-related short stories between now and book 6’s release so that I can flesh out a few more of the characters. In an ideal world, I’d get each and every character into a decent sized role in the first five books but that’s not been entirely possible, so short stories it is…unless I get a particularly juicy idea, of course! I’m certainly not ruling out the possibility of more Elsehere books, given that I have such a big cast and I have the whole of human history at my disposal and there are so many fascinating periods to play with. So watch this space!

Finally, Monday saw the launch of my summer fun music feature for Monday Music. There’s six posts in total, featuring six very (very!) different pieces of music that I associate with summer. One way or another, at least!

So there we go.

Happy reading 🙂