My latest release, The Last Outpost, is available to buy now on Kindle.
Alex is the navigation officer aboard The Calico, a colonial supply ship. He’s far from home and can’t shake the feeling that he doesn’t belong. After dropping out of university on Mars, Alex joined the ESDC, hoping to find purpose among the stars. Instead he found himself on The Calico, in love with Eden, the XO, and desperate for a place to call his own.
Life in deep space isn’t what he imagined.
When The Calico arrives at a remote colony on Enceladus for what should be a routine supply drop, the crew discovers something far more troubling: there’s no one there.
Alex, Eden and a pilot called Jack descend to the icy colony and the mystery deepens. Where did the colonists go? What strange secrets lie beneath the surface of the moon?
Caught between his sense of longing, and a growing sense of danger, Alex must confront his most deeply held beliefs. Can he find his place in the vastness of the solar system, or is he doomed to wander, forever searching for something he can never reach?
This morning I published my first short story of the challenge: Sisterhood. I am just waiting for it to go through the Amazon approval process and then I will share the link here.
It took me 230 minutes to get the editing and publishing process done. The first draft was 8,855 words long, so that means it took me 1.5 seconds per word to publish it. I’m not sure that’s a particularly helpful statistic.
Tomorrow I will add it to the website and then, if there is time, move onto editing The Last Outpost.
The writing is still going well, although it feels a bit like I’m struggling to reach a turning point but can’t quite find my was there. It’s not near the end yet, but it’s moving forwards.
I’m enjoying the reading challenge. I have a pretty good collection of short stories I’m working my way through but I want to mix in some more modern essays and poems, so I found some to download. I think this element of the challenge is going to be very interesting.
And that’s the end of the weekend.
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Pre-Production
Stories planned (total): 26
Production
Words written today: 1,049
Words written total: 45,381
Plus / Minus target: +3,381
Currently writing: The Lottery
Post-Production
Minutes today: 22
Minutes total: 230
Plus / Minus target: +30
Currently publishing: Sisterhood
Reading
Short story: Dip in the Pool – Roald Dahl
Essay: My County Right or Left – George Orwell
Poem: I Saw a Man Pursuing the Horizon – Stephen Crane
I decided to go for it on the Bradbury Reading challenge. At the bottom of this post I’ve added a section so you can see what I’ve read. It seemed appropriate to go with a Bradbury short story for day one.
Although I have an Enlish degree, I’ve never really gotten into poetry for pleasure. I’m not sure if that’s going to change during the course of this challenge or not, but I think I get something from reading it.
The way I was taught to read a poem is to read it at least five times. Once in your head, followed by three times out loud, then a final time in your head again.
This is not all the reading I will do in a day. I am also listening to the audiobooks of the Expanse series, and reading Unruly by David Mitchell. I don’t expect to read them any less because of this. This reading is extra, the time it takes will come from time I was otherwise spending online.
The writing is still going well. My current story is going to be the longest one so far, but that’s not a problem. On the editing side, I am just working on the product description fo Sisterhood, and will hopefully have that up for order next week.
I finished formatting my first short story this evening so it’s getting closer to the finish line. Tomorrow I will be making the cover. Its been a while since I’ve done one, so I am probably a bit rusty, but looking forward to flexing that muscle again.
One of the things I am having to think about now is how I brand these short stories and whether I do that around the challenge itself, or something else. I wrote a short piece about the challenge to go in the back of the books, but do I want the covers to reflect the challenge as well?
I don’t know is the answer, but will try and figure it out tomorrow. The good thing with stuff like this is that I can always change my mind later. If the other books I’ve published are anything to go by, there will probably be multiple covers over the years and, of course, they will get added to collections as well.
The writing is going well. I haven’t hit the point of feeling like I want to quit yet, which either means the story is a lot longer than I think, or I am getting out of this one without it. That would be the ideal scenario, but I can’t rely on it happening. Even if it does happen this time, each story is its own thing so it will probably happen again.
But none of them worth sharing right now. Like a lot of people I’m not sure how it happened again and am trying to remind myself I’m not American and had no control over this.
I am sure that Britain will roll out the red carpet, we’re already seeing it. What I wonder is where we draw the line? At what point do we say this has gone too far? I understand that there is politics involved, but presumably there is a line he could cross where our politicians will say ‘enough.’ Or maybe there isn’t and we will just go along with whatever he wants. Unfortunately that seems the more likely scenario.
The writing happened in between frantically checking the news. Let’s all hope the next four years aren’t as bad as we fear.
