Well, I finally bit the bullet and started reading the China Mieville short story collection I bought months ago. I got through one short story before I went to bed. It's called Looking for Jake, and is from the collection of the same name.

Admittedly, I was reading it at half-eleven at night, but I was deeply impressed. Mieville has a wonderful eye, which is something I've always lacked as a writer. I've got the equipment, so to speak, and I can turn a description when I want to, but usually my emphasis is character and voice.

With this first story in the collection, Mieville turns character into setting and back again. And he makes it look easy, the bastard.

As has been previously indicated, I've now completed the planning for the first act of Goodspider the Mad, and started planning the second.

 This whole 'planning' lark is a new one to me, which is kind of why it's taking so long. The first book I tried to write, Coldtouch and Dark, had no real planning and so fell apart in the second act in a rather heart-breaking way. This time, I'm unashamedly hyper-correcting: planning on a chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene basis, trying to pull the whole thing together in shorthand before I write it long hand. It's working pretty well, so far, but there's a part of me that wants to throw my hands up in the air and just start going at it. The only problem with that is that I know it won't work.

 I've also been recycling. The title characters of Coldtouch and Dark fit in this new book's second act rather well, albeit with a little tweaking. Their established dynamic is an engaging one, and one I know how to write. Because they're secondary characters in Goodspider, it leaves me free to put a lot of their character arcs off-screen, shedding the millstone-like weight of exposition and freeing them to be the fun, interesting characters I always wanted them to be.

 One also becomes conscious, when one plans in detail, of just how much an authorial voice matters. When you can review your complete story in every major detail, it makes you realise that there are things that you want to say with the book, things you always thought were implicit but aren't. And it also makes you realise that there are other things you are saying that you don't necessarily want to, things that have flown unbidden form your subconcious and made nests in the text. It's a very odd process, writing something long-form. You put a lot of yourself in, and sometimes what comes out surprises you.

P.S: Thank you Microsoft Office for the acres of useless crud you attached to the head of this post.

Well, I've just had a lovely holiday, and got a lot of writing done.

The structure for the first act of Goodspider the mad is now done. The second act is underway!

Wahey!

I'm currently busy as hell nailing down the top-level planning for Act 2 of Goodspider the Mad. I've also written the first part of the first chapter, which I'm now quite pleased with.  It sets the tone quite nicely. I've got to force myself not to write any more until the planning's done, which is hard. I might even post some of it, but don't hold your breath.

I've also been reading Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which is brilliantly written, no matter how much I disagree with his opinions on religion. The man is a true artist with words. And his heroine is so brilliantly unconventional that one can't help but like her.

Finally, in some rather sad news, my dog Mina was put to sleep at my parents' home on Monday. There wasn't anything else to be done. She was nine and 1/2, which is reasonably old for a Labrador cross, and she had cancer of the spleen that abruptly decided to attack. After five days' sickness, the vet decided the best thing that could be done was to end her pain.

I'm heartbroken: Mina wasn't my first pet, but she was the first one I was old enough to have a real relationship with. She was the family pet since just after we moved to Lincoln, and although clumsy and rather stupid, her personality was so endearing one couldn't help but love her.

Now she's gone, and I'm faced with the prospect of going home to a dogless house. It won't be the same. And though my parents may get another dog, in the fullness of time, it won't be my dog. It'll be theirs. And what with things being the way they are, I probably won't be in a financial position to own my own dog for some years. So now I am a dogless man, which doesn't feel good at all.

Well, this blog's coming together a bit more now. Just some updates on current status for anyone who's interested: Since the last time I did any serious blog writing, I've now completely abandoned the book I working on.

Yeah, that was my reaction too. But Coldtouch and Dark had become so bloated, so overloaded with ideas and so unstructured as to be unworkable. So now I'm working on something new. Its provisional title is Goodspider the Mad.

It reuses a few of the better ideas from C&D, but has a different feel, a different setting, a different mythology and a different genre. With luck and a following wind, it'll be a Teen/Young Adult novel.

The feel is something odd, somewhere between steampunk and gothic horror, with a bit of Lovecraftian weirdness thrown in. I'm currently plotting the crap out of it, but it takes some doing, and this time, I'm goign to do it right. Peace SB