Hi all - August was Quite a Month for us, so since the dust has settled a little I thought I'd do a quick update...
My partner had a big operation in the middle of last month, and was in hospital for a couple of weeks. Thankfully he is now home and taking it easy, so I can stop climbing the walls quite so much. We're also technically back in lockdown again for two weeks (getting covid while recovering from serious surgery would not be the greatest move) so I am largely pottering around indoors, making a frankly astonishing number of cups of tea and planning future books.
In terms of writing, this is a slightly odd period of time for me. My new thriller, Dog Rose Dirt (A Dark & Secret Place in the US) is almost finished (one more proof read to go, I reckon) and the second thriller (tentatively titled Scare Crow Stitch at the moment) now exists in a first draft, so I'm letting it sit and gestate for a while before I start redrafting it. So. What do I do now? Well the answer to that seems to be work on the world bible for a new fantasy book. I've been using World Anvil to do this, which - once I got my head around it - has been very useful indeed. I've already written about 15K of this draft, but I thought it would be nice to have a place to go to look up all of the many (MANY) made up terms I tend to make up willy nilly at the beginning of the book...
I'm also taking a small break from twitter at the moment. I'm sure it will only be a couple of days, but to be brutally honest we have had one of the most stressful months of my life, and I have found that many aspects of twitter sap my energy - and I just don't have much of that going spare these days. If I can't be trusted not to lose my temper, it's best I knock around another bit of the internet for a while, i.e. spend time looking at Greedfall fanart on Tumblr. I'm still monitoring DMs on twitter, if anyone desperately needs to get in touch, or wants to share an especially juicy bit of gossip.
In media consumption news: I watched all three series of Selling Sunset while Marty was in hospital; we watched both series of Cobra Kai in two days once he was home; I am still playing Greedfall and loving it; I am reading Hilary Mantel's memoir Giving Up the Ghost and of course it is brilliant.