Nick Bryan

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NickNoWriQuart – Failure Broadcast

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After a few weeks of admin-linking to work elsewhere, a full on-this-website blog post this time – although not a super-long one as I’m going to talk about something I failed to achieve and I don’t think dwelling on it for thousands of words is super healthy.

Between that paragraph and the title, regular readers may guess where I’m going – my one-thousand-words-a-day-for-three-months word count challenge did not reach its final goal. To be precise, it wound down a week or so back at around 66k, but due to real-life busywork, writing blogs for other sites and the huge amount of comic-based TV I’m trying to follow, I haven’t got round to posting about it for a while.

Still, after going to the trouble of announcing the challenge was happening, I shouldn’t gloss over my non-success. Pretty annoying that I chugged along fine for two months on my own and then died off just as everyone else joined in for NaNoWriMo, I must say.

Anyway. Where did it all go wrong?

Plan Vs Reality Vs Words Vs Plan

A lot of my problems can be summed up with this post I wrote in June, which is nice as it saves me typing all that out now. Turns out, planning a new novel in a whole new world is harder work than planning another nice comfy Hobson & Choi book.

My plan didn’t entirely fall apart, which is nice – my words were going in the direction I planned, but the way they got there and the circumstances under which the story took place changed so much that I couldn’t really keep going. Or rather, I could, but I’d be writing stuff I knew I’d end up deleting and much as I sometimes enjoy the NaNoWriMo forge-ahead-no-matter-what approach, I also don’t like knowing beyond all doubt that I’m wasting my own time.

Plus, in terms of progress along my book plan, I’d written sixty-six thousand words to cover plot that should’ve taken about forty thousand max. So, even if I did my planned ninety-one thousand by the end of this month, I’d never have a full first draft as I barely covered half the story. Not to mention, I don’t see much point in writing a new major part if I know huge chunks of the foundations will be removed, but haven’t yet decided which ones.

So I’ve started bashing together a better, more coherent draft of the early chapters, re-using existing material for most of it, but stitched together differently. We’ll see. As with all these word count challenges, best to focus on the fact I achieved something. Even if a huge chunk of my 66k gets cut, it all went toward figuring out the world.

…Vs Reality Vs Plans Vs Leeds…

Also unhelpful, I admit, that just as I started wobbling on how to progress the novel, I became incredibly busy all the time so momentum died. I was in the day job a lot, many birthday parties came along, I went to Leeds for Thought Bubble – which was fun, by the way. Saw loads of comics, feel like I want to write some more of them soon.

No idea how that fits in with the novel writing, no. Will try and keep bolting together my better draft.

To be honest, it is with some confusion that I stagger towards the end of 2016. At least I know to start editing H&C4 in early January, that’s a pleasing constant. Everything else is in a state of weird flux.

And that’s a current writing update, for anyone interested. If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, good luck to you – you’ve just passed halfway, that’s gotta feel good. And if you’ve attempted and failed NaNo, ah well. Stick with me and focus on the fact you wrote something. There could be gold in there somewhere.

Writing challenge update! Guest post! GollanczFest! ADMINARAMA!

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This is going to be another post which mish-mashes together some smaller points rather than having an amazing structure of its own, I’m afraid, as I’ve been writing a lot of guest-posts for other people’s blogs, so haven’t got a huge amount of fuel left in the Blog-Engine (or spare time left in the day) to produce a properly-structured masterpiece for my own.

However, I want to do some kind of update on my ongoing thousand-words-a-day writing challenge and I’ve got a few other bits and bobs too, so here’s another disjointed general summary!

NickNoWriQuart – OOH WE’RE HALFWAY THERE

The big news (for me anyway) is that I’ve made it over the halfway mark of the daily writing challenge I outlined on this blog a month ago. My day job got quite busy for a while and then I had to publish the third Hobson & Choi book and write all those guest posts and I really thought one of those things would smash it to bits, but no, I’m still on track. In fact, I’m a few days over quota, as I’m busy most of the weekend – for reasons I’ll outline a little further down – and wanted to make sure I didn’t drop the challenge.

So, the good news is that I’ve done nearly 50k and, if this were NaNoWriMo rather than NickNoWriQuart, would have won by now. But NickNoWriQuart is both more hardcore (longer total!) and less (smaller daily wordcount!) than NaNo.

The bad news is, as with nearly all my first drafts, decent-sized chunks of the plan haven’t really survived contact with reality and various changes became necessary as I went along. This is something I’ve blogged about a fair bit – here I am talking about making less mistakes and here I am talking about plans going awry – and yet still it happens.

But I’ve got my notes, the broad plot remains in place, so I’m going to try and swoop onwards for now. Mostly because I think it would be useful to have taken a swing at the ending – more infuriating to go back now and make a huge amount of substantial change, then discover this new version doesn’t work for my ending and have to change everything again.

So, in short, everything continues as normal. I still want a full first draft by the end of November (or possibly the end of the year if I need to write a final couple of chapters in Dec) and I’ll do another update at some point.

Guest Post – Five High Street Institutions I Could Turn Evil in Future H&C Books

If you want something that more closely resembles a structured blog post, I’ve written this one for Jim over at YA Yeah Yeah in which I talk about five fixtures of the British high street that I could theoretically turn all crimey for a future Hobson & Choi novel.

Do give it a look for some fun. Even if you’ve no interest in hearing about my writing process (in which case the previous section of this post must’ve just killed you), this really is all silly jokes.

Oh, and as this is the only H&C-relevant section of this post – yes, the book 3 launch went fine, thanks for asking. Sold a decent amount of book three, gave away a huge amount of the newly-free-on-ebook book one.

Coming up next: some promotion, including a few more guest posts (I’ll try and list them here in some kind of link compilation) and maybe even some Multimedia Content. We’ll see if that works out.

GollanczFest – Will it be GollanczBest?

This weekend, I am going to GollanczFest in London, in which a bunch of sci-fi/fantasy authors (who happen to all be published by Gollancz) will be talking in general about their work on Saturday and in a more advice-to-writers way on Sunday. I hope it’ll be interesting, there are some great authors in attendance (including Joe Abercrombie, Ben Aaronovitch, Paul Cornell, loads of others) and after the excellent fun of Nine Worlds in August, I’m up for more of this kinda thing.

Linking back up to the first part, GollanczFest is why I’ve written a short way ahead on the NickNoWriQuart challenge. It may also be the topic of its own blog next week, if I can think of much to say beyond “Yeah, it was good.” If you want that level of analysis, follow me on Twitter and it’s a safe bet you’ll get some over the weekend.

Okay, that turned out a decent length (if still quite bitty) post in the end. Cool cool.

NickNoWriQuart – One K, Once A Day

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I stopped blogging regularly about my writing a while ago, felt I was running out of new/readable ways to say the same things – certainly, nothing I couldn’t say on Twitter more concisely. However, I’m embarking on a Big Writing Exercise shortly, so I’m throwing it a post.

Because, yes, it’s autumn, the end of the year is poking its head over the door, leaves are brown and it’s cold in a Winter-Preview kinda way, all that can only mean one thing – Writers Doing Calendar-Based Word Count Challenges!

Obviously, I’m a little ahead of everyone else here – most are waiting for November to embark upon the epic NaNoWriMo quest. But I’m doing something a little different and I’ll now attempt to explain it…

Own Goals?

If you read my 2014 writing retrospective post (and why wouldn’t you?), you’ll see I listed my third goal for last year as writing the first draft of my new fun-adventure post-H&C post-devil novel. Well, nine months on, I wrote about twenty thousand words of that in Spring before deciding it wasn’t working, then sidetracking for ages writing H&C4 and editing H&C3 (out soon!).

Basically – writing the first draft of an entirely new Thing has been on my to-do list for literal years at this stage, and I’d like to have one last aggressive punt at it before 2015 dissolves into memory.

So I’ve decided to do a word-count challenge, but not NaNoWriMo, because

  1. The daily targets on NaNo are slightly too tough for me to produce work I’m happy with, even by first draft standards – not that I can’t produce 1.6k of tolerable first draft on a day when I’m not busy, but catching up after days when I am busy soon turns it into a miserable chore and flushes the quality down the toilet.
  2. The overall target of NaNo is too short for me to finish a book – and not even just because I ramble. The NaNo standard 50k is shorter than almost all adult novels and many (most?) YA ones too. Even my H&C books, which aren’t exactly epic tomes, are longer.

So, what am I doing instead?

Quarter Master?

Don’t worry, I’ll probably still tweet.

Well, I spent a lot of August trying to hammer out my new ideas for an adult fantasy novel (not the one from earlier this year) into shape, and I decided I was ready to at least give a first draft a go. I also noticed there are ninety-one days in the months of September, October and November. So if I write 1000 words a day for the entire of that quarter-year, I get something around the length of an adult novel.

Plus I’d finish at the same time as everyone doing NaNo and piggy-back on their party! It’s a win win! I could feel bad, but I’ve been “rebelling” at NaNo – working on projects outside the normal parameters – every year for ages now. Would be more rebellious to not rebel, at this point.

Hardcore calendar users might note it’s nearly halfway through September, so I’ve not told you about the challenge until it is one-sixth over. This is because I have an ego, so decided I’d put off blogging about it until I’d met the quota for a while. If I trailed off in the first week, no-one need ever know.

Numbers Up?

The existence of this blog post suggests that it’s going okay. I’m writing this at 11PM on the 13th Sept with word count currently at 15k. I could have padded it out to 16k maybe by drastically overwriting the description in recent scenes, but the whole goal here is to produce a first draft that isn’t a smear of shit. So let’s try and slow down, pace properly, otherwise I’ll get to my 90k and be nowhere near the end.

In fairness, the one remaining risk in the plan is that this might happen anyway. Realistically, I probably need to get 100k (or slightly more) to finish a book, but if I can make 90 by the end of November, I might conceivably be able to squeeze the last tiny bit out in December around all that Christmas stuff.

The biggest threat to this enterprise is myself, as I’m releasing H&C3 on 6th October (EXCLUSIVE ANNOUNCEMENT), smack in the middle of this challenge. Fortunately, I’ve already done most of the formatting and tech prep, so I’m hoping I can keep it clattering along. We shall see. I do have a very busy week coming up approximately right now, so maybe the plan will fall straight off the rails after doing the blog post.

And now my ego is considering putting the post on hold for a few days to make sure that doesn’t happen, but I’ll power on through. I’m going to refrain from banging on about this endlessly, but at least one or two updates will follow if the project continues. Good luck with anyone else out there doing pre-NaNo writing challenges, let me know if you want to form a support group.

Nine Worlds 2015 – Ten Highlights, One Bookpile

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Nine Worlds! It came! I went! Did that sound weird?Anyway. This weekend just gone was the third annual Nine Worlds convention at Heathrow, an event that is such a geekfest, it is called that on Twitter. This is a single con attempting to devote at least some programming to as many difference aspects of geek-beloved media as possible, all the while remaining as diverse, inclusive and people-friendly as possible.

If you think that’s a huge and challenging remit, you’d be right. I went to the con last year as well, how did the 2015 effort stack up? What were the best panels this year? Did I manage to take a photo of anything other than the view from my hotel? Well, as you can see on the right, I’ve certainly equalled that, at least.

Ten Most Paneltastic Panels in Panel-Town

KNIGHTMARE MADE SOME VALID POINTS

Firstly, yes, Nine Worlds remains an impressive, sprawling convention. I definitely came away feeling pretty inspired by a lot of the discussion, especially on the Books track. (Sorry, ‘All of the Books’.) They managed to improve on an already-strong 2014 – I could have sat on Books events for the entire con and not had a bad time.

However, seemed lazy not to sample the range available. I also went to a few panels on the Creative Writing track, who didn’t get my attention much last year, but put on quite a few hard-to-resist items this time. Also a shout-out to the Young Adult track – only went to one of their’s in the end, but there were definitely a couple I wish I could’ve made. So much good stuff, I didn’t make it to a single Comics event. And I really like comics.

I was at the con all the way, from Thursday evening until Sunday evening. If I listed every event I attended like last year, this blog post would be novel-length and a bit dull. So here are Ten Highlights:

  • Cheese & Cheese – Readings of cheesy books with a supply of IRL non-metaphorical cheese to eat. The only event I attended on Thursday night and a great way to get into the con spirit of affectionate laughter. Might have overindulged in cheese, though, as I tried some cheddar today and was repelled. Whoops.
  • “Waiter, you spilt some sci-fi in my fantasy!” – Despite the silly name, this was an excellent panel on different genre-bending books and how to deal with the heave-ho between the different kinds of story as you bash them together with a hammer. Very funny (especially the gravity-rage of James Smythe) and relevant to my personal creative interests.
  • Knightmare Live – Yes, Knightmare, the classic CITV gameshow in which a child walks through a CGI maze with a bucket on their head, guided only by their friends talking in their ear and a few actors pretending to be fantasy characters. Here’s a video if you want an idea of the style/tone/level of camp. The stage show is a well-judged mix of affectionate homage and gleeful panto and I laughed myself silly. I believe they’re still touring around, so if you have any fond memories of the TV series, find a tour stop. It’s hilarious. Even better, as seen nearby, I got a photo of myself wearing the Helmet Of Justice. Also pictured: my Rachel & Miles X-Plain The X-Men t-shirt featuring fellow bucket-head Magneto.
  • The End Of Author Mystique – A discussion of social media (especially Twitter, inevitably) and how it has changed the author/reader relationship. Great combination of fun chat and genuinely potent questions, especially around the issue of responding to criticism. (Probably best not to.)
  • NaNoSessMo – At this event, so intriguing it was covered in The Guardian, we tried to write a novel in 75 minutes. Due to only having 29 people and taking around half that time to plan the book, will likely be more of a novella. Still, the creativity flowed like blood at a vampire party. Nice to exercise the active part of my brain after two days of mostly listening. I believe the resultant epic will be published for free online, and I may write more about it when that happens.
  • Death In Genre – A fun panel talking about both genre fiction’s use of death and its occasional personification of the concept as skeleton in cloak, perky goth girl or gigantic crushing hammer. It’s a strong topic, all the panelists were on form and it was a con highlight for me. Even though I discovered seemingly-charming author Paul Cornell killed off Dr Spiller in Casualty, which moved me to tears as a teenager.
  • The F-Word: Sex in Fantasy – From one universal constant to another, another excellent panel combining serious discussion of handling sex in your writing with thoroughly amusing/disturbing recounting of, um, specific occurrences. You can never have too many mentions of the penis-dunking beaker, it seems. May sound like a joke, but I bought Snorri Kristjansson’s book after he reminded me of that beaker.
  • TV vs Books vs Comics vs Games: FIGHT! – Another panel which sells itself on concept alone, but all the combatants turned up with serious points and brutal trash talk to elevate the pitch. Peter Newman deservedly won the day for books, though. Or maybe his argument that books are awesome because they work through our imaginations and we’re obviously amazing just tickled my ego.
  • Writing Support Groups – A panel about writing groups, and I like writing groups. Chat with Claire, Kirsty and Lizzie of the Big Green Bookshop group (of which I am a member), as well as representatives from the T Party and Super-Relaxed Fantasy Club (which I also sometimes attend). Talked about why writing groups are awesome and looked into the practicalities too.
  • Critiquing Critique – Last panel of my weekend, almost didn’t go due to exhaustion, but I’m glad I did. Partly because Val Nolan and Roz Kaveney gave an extremely accessible yet thoughtful talk about the art of reviewing, which will always be close to my heart. Also because listening to them dissect someone else’s story helped me make some big realisations about one of my own. Lovely end to the weekend.

And that was the #content of Nine Worlds 2015! But we’re not quite finished yet.

Free Books and The Bar

Not posed, I swear, the lanyard fell there naturally.

The main appeal of Nine Worlds for me is the focus on interesting discussion over signings and/or advertising, more so than other London-based conventions. So the above panel-chat is my main reason for going but it isn’t the only aspect.I also got some free stuff! To the right is a picture of the books I obtained over the weekend and I’m looking forward to every single one of them! Also smeared coffee and chocolate cake over my new copy of Nunslinger at the Super-Relaxed Fantasy Club panel, but never mind. Sometimes life happens.

And beyond that, yes, the social aspect. I am a shy, shy human, but managed to catch up with a few people, from my regular supporting cast and beyond. I live in hope of one day being better at that sort of thing – maybe trying to do it more than once a year might be a start? Might attend a few more London-based events, even see if any other conventions look fun.

As many have already said on Twitter, the hotel bar was frustrating at times due to mega-queues. When you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of people in for an event, only one or two bar staff at peak times seems silly. See also: the coffee outlet, which took so long that I found I could get my steamy brown caffeine quicker by walking two hotels over to Starbucks.

Also, a few occasions where events featuring bigger names were in comparatively small rooms, leading to a tight restrictions on access. I get that there are a lot of events on, but if the con continues to grow and attracts more A-listers across different track areas, maybe it needs a bigger venue? With a better bar?

In short, no room for complacency and we can always improve, but I’ll almost certainly be going to Nine Worlds 2016. Despite a few growing pains, it was another really fun year, with a friendly, relaxed atmosphere and a lot of really good discussions. Finally, I’d like to thank my bag of ten preservative-ridden stodgy mini-croissants from Lidl for saving me from buying breakfast.

Five ways my book plans collapse upon contact with the real world – A Metaphorical Disaster Movie

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At this stage, I’ve written a lot of novels, and started even more than that. Every single one started with a plan of some form – sometimes a couple of ideas scribbled on a pad, other times thousands of words of ideas, followed by a chapter-by-chapter outline and then individual scene breakdowns within those chapters.

But either way, the plans always come a little unstuck when exposed to the writing process. As I’ve been doing a lot of first drafting lately, so spending a heaping helping of my time dealing with plans not corresponding to prose.

So, to inform and reassure anyone in a similar place, I’ve broken my Plan Vs Reality problems into an internet-friendly Buzzfeed-style five-point list. Yes, only a thin membrane separates some of these feelings, but I’ve spent enough time staring at my plans in despair to know they’re all distinct. If you’ve experienced all five of these, you can award yourself a prize when you reach the bottom!

1) “This bit read a lot better in bullet points!”

“It seemed a good idea at the time!”

BRAIN: “Look, y’know, this scene sounded amazing in my head and even survived the transfer to the planning stage as I wasn’t thinking about the nitty-gritty too hard, but bloody hell, as I try to actually make my characters do it, I feel like I’m trying to shove them in to an ampersand-shaped iron maiden.”

RETORT: Much to the relief of my tender ego, this one happens a lot less as I grow older, accruing more feedback and more experience. Generally, by the time I’ve written broad notes and narrowed them down into a plan, I’ve eliminated most of the utter gibberish.

However, still mega-disheartening when it appears, especially because it often hits on a really macro level. It’s rarely just a scene or a paragraph that withers on contact with the outdoors, it’s the whole damn ending or an entire character subplot.

Like, you were totally gonna write seventeen chapters from the perspective of Rufus The Hot Ice Cream Man but the material just isn’t there. It’s incredibly annoying, but rest assured, you’ll feel happier for having noticed now than after writing an entire first draft.

Although, yes, that can happen and it’s a complete arsewrench.

2) “This is an amazing twist!”

[INSERT ‘YOUR MUM’ JOKE HERE] [PHOTO ATTRIBUTION HERE]

IMPULSE: “Wow, y’know what would be amazing at this point? If he discovered his mother was a hamster! Because people won’t see it coming and it kinda-sorta flows into the rest of my plot and ramps up the tension, even though it does also ruin the next few scenes by disrupting almost everything I was gonna do, since all the characters will probably have to react to Bob being suddenly half-rodent…”

CONTROL: Less depressing than the last one, because at least you feel like you’re improving the story rather than tearing parts away, leaving only frayed edges stained by your tears. However, it still requires a degree of control and interrogation.

After all, many creative types (me included) get massive self-targeted erections when a killer plot twist comes to us mid-writing. We can smug-tweet about it and set about enacting a huge reveal and exploring the exciting ramifications.

And all that is awesome and has often improved my stuff – the sense of excitement and spontaneity travels from your fingers to the words. However, do make sure you still know where you’re going, otherwise you can veer into…

3) “I can’t get there from here!”

“Can’t Get There From Here” is a good song by REM

CARROT: “I… I just can’t get to the end. I mean, I know what it theoretically is and I still like that idea but I just can’t… I don’t know, it’s been hidden behind spontaneous plot additions and mountains and that total eclipse…”

STICK: So the next transition just won’t come. You’ve written yourself into a corner, then built walls around that corner, locked the door and only now wondered about what happens when you next need the loo. You still want that ending, but (possibly thanks to the previous step or perhaps just general drift or oversights in your plan), it won’t work. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just unavailable. Like your celebrity crush or becoming an astronaut.

Unfortunately, this means making some hard choices – probably either deleting one of your beloved off-the-cuff plot points or changing the ending. The degree of the change might be negotiable, though – I’ve usually found a way to have my cake and eat it with only a few nips and tucks. I tend to go for tweaking the ending rather than removing plot twists, because I find my initial plans are often overly linear and a sudden sharp move livens them up.

4) “I can’t get here from there!”

wibbly-wobbly-planny-wanny or something like that

CRIME: “Ever since my brother Lols got into that time machine, I’ve felt like everything has changed, y’know? Like none of the previous passage of my life actually points to where I’m now going? Like once upon a time, maybe my Mum wasn’t a hamster, but now everything hinges on the reactor fuel I’ve squirreled away in my cheeks.”

PUNISHMENT: Okay, this might move into time travel logic, but stay with me.
So, you’ve worked your way through a string of plot problems – maybe the above-mentioned, maybe others – and you find yourself with a clear run to the end. And you’re gonna make it, but… but… you’ve made so many on-the-fly changes to the current set-up to make the new ending work, you’re now aware that huge chunks of the earlier part of the book need to be rewritten in order for everything to flow smoothly.

Good news: this doesn’t mean more work right now, but it does leave that hanging over your head for when the next draft comes around. It may even be tempting to go back and make changes now, even though conventional writing wisdom nowadays tends to gravitate towards finishing the first draft and then tackling this eternal to-do list.

Personally, I lean towards the standard POV, partly because if I go back and do extensive changes before I get the ending down, it’s entirely possible I’ll then make spontaneous changes to the ending, which will cause more butterfly effect ripples back into the past, thus causing me to rewrite the start yet again, trapped in an endless vortex

And at that point, time to collapse and scream. If it were an episode of Doctor Who, I would stop watching it.

5) “This is a pile of shit and I’m going over there to cry.”

My post-novel-abandonment selfie

BLOODY: “This is terrible. I definitely didn’t plan on making it terrible. I don’t even remember when it became terrible. I can’t even point to a specific scene which isn’t working out. It’s just everything. I have built a tower and the foundations are rotten – now I can only cower below as the girders tumble, punching red, gushing holes in my prone body.”

HELL: No, you won’t be the first writer to have these emotions. Again, conventional wisdom dictates you push ahead to end of draft and assume you can fix it in edits, and that will probably work most of the time. No-one but you can judge whether your worries are real or if it’s just a momentary wobble you should shake off, Taylor Swift style, and fight on to fix later.

I wrote the first 20-ish thousand words of a novel recently and it’s come to a halt – partly because other projects demanded the time but also because I really think some of the foundations are fundamentally wrong. I need to rethink some stuff rather than piling more and more dirt on top of myself until my bones start to splinter and crunch.

I stress, I don’t think the problems are unfixable, but still, they’re pretty extensive. And, much like the first point in this post (man, remember that?), it’s mostly experience that teaches you when you’re at that stage. Reading posts like this on the internet might get you looking in the right direction, but ultimately you need to hone these instincts. This is why most writers have at least one ‘trunk’ novel they worked out their issues on and eventually gave up, moving on to apply the lessons to book plans with stronger foundations. Personally, I have,.. at least four, maybe more than that.

And there is the five-step love-hate-love-hate-hate-love relationship between me and my novel plans. If any of this made someone out there feel less alone, it was worth writing. If it made you worry about my well-being (or if the tone appealed to you and you want more), feel free to buy one of the Hobson & Choi books to make me feel better. They are darkly comic London crime stories and quite a few people seem to like them – review quotes also on the page linked above.

But don’t feel like you have to, I’m just throwing that out there. Now, I’m off to rewrite a book plan for the seventh or eighth time.

Thirty-One Year Check-Up – Comics, Hobson & Choi III, Life

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Today is my thirty-first birthday, and after making a giant messy fuss of my thirtieth, I feel like this might end up being a quiet one. Still, it’s been a while since I blogged about what I’m up to in a broader sense, so I figured this was as good a time as any for a check-in.

So, where is the third Hobson & Choi book at? What else am I working on? How am I feeling, y’know, deep down? Some of those questions answered in the following words.

Comics Of Future Now

The biggest new news, as posted on social media yesterday, is that I received a print copy of my first published comics work: a story in The Gathering: Noir from the good folk at GrayHaven Comics. You can see my hand modelling the comics in the nearby picture, and I can confirm it is a lovely, well put-together object with attractive cover art. For more details on this comic and a single solitary panel of art preview from my actual story, see this post from last month.

In previously unspoken news, I also have another short comic story approved and assigned to an artist with an entirely different indie set-up. More details on that when it happens, although we’re probably talking 2016.

Would be nice to advance the comics thing further, but currently all my spare creative-project funds are going into H&C books. If the comics internet has taught me one thing, it’s that asking artists to work for free is not a good look. Speaking of Hobson & Choi…

H&C3 – No wolves, no recruitment agencies

The third Hobson & Choi book, Trapped In The Bargain Basement, is currently being read out loud by me, sitting alone in my house. As discussed in this old post, that’s a dull process but always ends up being worthwhile. I’ve cut 3000 words of needless burble this time, and not even finished yet.

It should be off to an editor in the next two or three weeks, and hopefully out to you, the reading audience, in the latter half of this year. I’m hoping late summer/early autumn, but should probably be a little vague, for reasons I’ll get onto in a minute.

If you want to make me feel good on my birthday, feel free hit the Hobson & Choi homepage and buy one of the books (the first one is very cheap on digital). If you’ve already purchased and read, you can leave a review on Amazon/Goodreads/your own site or tell your friends/social media followers/blog readers/whoever about H&C. All pretty crucial to the whole authoring game.If you’ve already done all that: thanks, I love you, you’re fine.

Thirty-One Life

Alright, I’ll talk a bit about the birthday as well. My feelings about life and the passing of time haven’t changed much since last year’s 30th-marking blog post, to be honest. All is alright. In addition to the self-publishing, I have my urban fantasy novel finally out with agents and we’ll see how that goes.

(I considered blogging about that as it happens, but I’ve yet to come up with amazing new perspectives as I haven’t done much beyond send a few emails. So I figured I’d just not bang on about it, lest I sound like I’m complaining about “literary gatekeepers” or whatever the angry people say.)

It looks like I might be moving back south of the river some time this year. I like Walthamstow a lot, but there’s something weirdly homely about the Peckham/New Cross/Brixton region. And yes, the inevitable disruption involved in moving house is why I’m hedging my predictions for H&C3 release dates.

That’s probably enough from me to keep you going into April. Now, I’m off to hack out another quick chapter on my tentative sci-fi project that probably won’t see the light of day until 2016. Work doesn’t stop for a mere 31st birthday.