15,000 odd words into the new book, and it’s flying along. Bounced some ideas off the A-bomb tonight and as always, she took a good thing and made it better, so I’m feeling mighty positive right now.

Above is the Wordle for my third chapter. I love this app, if it’s creator stood before me right now, I would love him in the pants.

BTW, I think I’ve also discovered the greatest webcomic in the history of the interwebz.

Listening to: Pantera, Vulgar Display of Power

Well, I’ve spent the last few weeks bashing around on the idea for my next book, which actually came from a dream my incredible wife had. Even though listening to stories about other people’s dreams is usually about as entertaining as an episode of Desperate Housewives, I always make sure to listen to the A-bomb’s post slumber stories, as some of them are downright awesome. I’m one of those unfortunate folks who almost never remembers his dreams, so can’t really count on my own head for any kind of REM-born inspiration.

So I grabbed the A-bomb’s idea and messed about with it, then charged ahead and wrote a few chapters before really thinking things through. The way I wrote Cold was kind of organic, to use the terminology of an utter wanker – I just wrote myself some characters, dropped them into a scenario and let them run their own course. This next novel is going to be a little more layered than Cold was, well, in theory anyway, so after writing those initial chapters I decided to actually sit down and try to plan the whole novel, which was about as easy as sitting through Transformers 2: Rise of the Fallen without gouging my fucking eyes out with a Choc Top.

However, I think I’ve reached a point where the novel should be pretty cool – I’m leaving the end open in my head for now, but I’ve got about 75% of it nailed down (ish) which is enough to roll ahead on and start banging out the chapters. I want this sucker finished by September, so we’ll see how we go on that.

Still querying, awaiting responses from my initial rounds (about 4 weeks ago now) but tbh, my query letter wasn’t super-fly back then, so I’ve got much more hope for the new rounds.

Listening to: Karnivool, Sound Awake