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?
A good morning of work. I managed to get myself three days ahead on the writing side, and am half a day ahead on editing already. I think that’s a pretty good way to start the weekend.
It’s going to be interesting to find out if I can actually edit every day next week. Tuesdays are the busiest day of the week for me and I have got it into my head that I can’t even find twenty-minutes to do a bit of work. Logically, that’s probably not true, but it might mean that I have to edit on my phone, or grab some time first thing in the morning after I’ve done my writing.
Twenty-minutes doesn’t sound like a lot, but over the course of a year, it’s going to add up to over 120 hours, which is a much better figure. And if I find that I can easily edit this amount, there’s nothing to stop me doing more.
I have to accept that editing is the thing most likely to be disrupted by Christmas and other things. So far I haven’t had to use any of the lead I’ve built up but it’s only a matter of time before that changes. I went into this knowing it would happen, but I think it will still feel a bit like a failure when it does.
Most people probably wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I suffer from an all or nothing personality. No idea where I got it from, but it’s mine to deal with.
It comes out at times like when I try to improve my relationship with the internet. A sensible approach would be to reduce the amount of time I spend online, but I find myself jumping straight to not using the internet at all.
And it snowballs. I go from not using the internet at all to trying to reduce all my technology useage, until I’m ready to sell my phone and computer and go and live off the land.
This writing challenge is a good example of me trying to do the opposite of that. But it wasn’t until yesterday that I realised it.
The first writing challenge I set out to do was a million words in a year. Which I failed. To be fair, I got something like 800,000 so I failed well, but even if I’d managed it, I couldn’t have sustained it. This time things are different. 1,000 words a day is a goal I can hit pretty much every day. It’s not an impressive number, but it’s something I can do consistently. And that’s what I’m looking for.
The same is true for the planning (one story plan a day) and the editing I’m going to be starting on Friday. And now that I’ve realised it, I’m looking at other areas of my life where I can apply this simple goal of being a bit better.
It has been 27 days since I started this writing challenge and I am at 29,682 words, which means I am averaging 1,099 words per day. And, if I’m honest, it’s starting to feel easy. So I am thinking about increasing my daily word count to 1,100 words per day at the start of November.
It’s not that I particularly want this to feel like hard work, but I would like to feel aware of the challenge.
Of course, an alternative argument is that I will be starting the editing and publishing portion of the challenge in November, and that will brings its own challenges. So maybe it’s premature to think about changing the rules until all the pieces of the game are in play.
