Ethel the Muse was working overtime on Saturday morning and by the time I got up I had a fully formed idea for a new story – Backwards Boy.

The first half was written on Saturday but by Sunday morning I hated it so I ended up rewriting a lot of it.

It’s pretty short – 986 words – and it’s also difficult to categorise. In a lot of ways it’s not really speculative fiction at all. But it might be, it depends on what happens after the story ends. Unfortunately, that means it will be a tricky story to place but we’ll see how it goes. Of course, it needs to sit in my unfinished folder and age for a couple of weeks before I edit it and start submitting.

The addition of Backwards Boy means I have five stories waiting for me to edit them. Can you tell I’m not a fan of editing? My goal is to get all five finished and out into the wild by the end of the year.

Other than a couple of hours of writing, the weekend was filled with day job and trips out and television. Specifically we caught up with the latest four episodes of The Walking Dead, ending with the mid-season finale. Great stuff, particularly the closing scene.

Sunday night we watched Book of Blood - a horror movie based on a couple of Clive Barker stories from his Books of Blood series. We’ve already seen The Midnight Meat Train and were lucky enough to go to the UK premiere of Dread (on our honeymoon) and in both cases we were pleasantly surprised. Similarly, with Book of Blood, I went in with pretty low expectations but it’s pretty well acted, the special effects are…well…effective and there’s some genuinely creepy moments. It’s not a classic movie by any means but if you’re into Clive Barker and/or enjoy haunted house movies then it’s worth a look.

Sunday is Long Slow Distance day which also makes it not really do much else day.

Yesterday was a 20km run – our longest before the race we’re doing at the end of November – which meant the rest of the day was given over to resting and a handful of random chores.

We did watch the third episode of Grimm though and I’m still not sure whether I like it. I’m used to genre TV shows taking a while to get going (Battlestar Galactica being the notable exception) so I’m going to keep watching for a while longer but so far it seems like a fairly average show.

A good writing day yesterday. I clocked up nine hundred and fifty eight words and completed the first draft of the story currently known as Rainshine. The first draft wound up at 3362 words, a bit longer than I’d originally thought but pretty much an average length for me.

I’m pretty happy with this one, now comes the time to put it aside and let it age for a couple of weeks. Hopefully that will give me a bit of distance so that I can come back with a fresh perspective when I come to revise it. Maybe I’ll also have my final title by then.

After the I’d finished writing Rainshine, we caught up on the latest episode of Supernatural.

[Slight spoiler ahead]

I don’t watch a lot of TV – too many other things to do – but Supernatural is one of the few series that’s a must see. We’ve reached Season 7 though and its starting to feel like it might be time to wrap things up. I still enjoy it, although less so since we lost Castiel, but I’d rather it ended on a high rather than degenerate into mediocrity the way The X-Files did.

This week we also watched the last episode the UK series, Bedlam. Although there were some spooky moments, this one never really hooked me – the haunted-tenant-of-the-week concept got tired pretty quickly. The last episode ended with the obligatory cliffhanger but seemed disjointed and rushed which left me wondering whether it had been edited for length.

Today is movie day – we’re heading out to see a couple of films and will probably watch something at home as well. I’m also thinking of picking up the DVDs of the latest series of Doctor Who.

But first – more writing.