Having spent far too long on Saturday’s blog post the rest of the weekend was dedicated to editing – I want to get all my in-progress stories cleaned up and out of the way before I start revising The Ghost Smuggler.

I wrapped up the newly renamed science fiction tale – For the Queen’s Amusement (previously called The Queen’s Toys). That one’s already been submitted. I also did a last-but-one draft of The Origami Man (also known as Origami Man and Paperboy). This one’s a little bit hard to describe but I think it has a bit of a fairy tale feel to it. I’ve passed it off to my wife – she’s my first reader and I rely on her for weeding out and typos or grammatical errors I’ve missed along the way.

This will be my last post this week, I’m heading out to San Francisco for a few days to the Game Developer’s Conference. GDC is a big event – developers from all around the world converge to talk game development (and drink). This is the first time I’ve been able to attend so I’m looking forward to it.

Okay, so I guess technically we’re still in the afterglow of Christmas and the twelve days have only just started but I’m already back in the office, working at the day job so, for me, Christmas is done.

It was an odd Christmas this year, my wife is back in England so I spent Christmas Day on my own. For a lot of people that’s a big deal but I actually enjoyed it. I did some writing, read The Lake and then watched a traditional Christmas movie – The Evil Dead. An odd choice maybe, but I’ve been sorting through my movies and realised I hadn’t watched it in a long time. Obviously the low budget effects are very dated now and in today’s world of Saw and Hostel, it’s strange to think that for a while The Evil Dead was banned in England but I enjoyed seeing it again – it’s violent and bloody but the gruesome humour that became a trademark of the series is still there.

On the writing side of things, I finished the first draft of Origami Man and Paperboy although it’s now just called Origami Man which was actually the story’s name when I first started it. It ended up surprising me with an unexpected twist in the middle which was nice. The final length was 2,859 words – a respectable size but still within the guidelines for pretty much every market. Ethel the Muse was in an excellent mood so I ended up writing another story as well. This one’s pretty short (1,618 words) and very different to my normal stories – not quite sure what I’m going to do with it yet. I know of one market that might like it but otherwise it’s going to languish on my hard drive for the foreseeable future.

Yesterday I was back in the office. I was mostly there to support the team but I’m also pitching a new project in the New Year so I started pulling together some content for that.

In the evening I submitted another story – Curfew. That’s a total of thirty one submissions so far this year. One of my goals has been to submit more often and that’s the  most submissions I’ve made in a single year so I’m pretty happy with that; especially since the majority were made in the last six months. There’s still a few days left before the end of the year and I have six stories in my unfinished folder that I’m hoping to get out into the wild by December 31st so that number should increase.

Not a good day today – hence the late post. I decided to go running this morning but picked a route that was longer and tougher than I should have so the rest of the day has been a bit of a disaster. The only good point so far has been re-reading three stories from Cate Gardner‘s Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits. I was planning on posting a review, but that will have to wait until later in the week.

Luckily, yesterday was a productive day. I finished editing Backwards Boy and submitted it to a website. It came in at 1117 words and I’m pretty happy with it. Unfortunately, the speculative fiction element is very subtle so I think it will be a hard sell. I have another story with the same problem – Hidden and it’s difficult to find anywhere to submit it to.

I also wrote the first of a series of longer blogs I’m calling Meaty Mondays. It’s about my attitude towards self-publishing and will go live tomorrow morning.

And because that wasn’t enough writing, I also wrote the first 643 words of a new story. Its working title is Origami Man and Paperboy but that may well change.