A lull in things (but another pet project)

It’s all quiet here on the writing front. Indeed, it is all quiet everywhere it seems, with only Lucy, Shameless and of course, Grumpy Old Bookman, writing new entries on their blogs - see left for links. On the Macmillan New Writing side they are still tweaking the cover to the book, so as yet I’m not allowed to release it to you all (though I can’t wait to – I’m quite taken with it!). My immediate writing goes on with The Burning Sands of Time – I’m almost through the first half of the first draft, with over 50,000 words under my belt.

I have also decided to embark on a web-project for the new website. It will basically be an anthology of writing on the end of the world (the title is under-wraps for the time being folks, though if you happen to be studying at Sheffield Hallam University you might discover it, as the title is the same as my final year writing project in 1997, and should be archived somewhere at the university!). Originally the project was a collection of eight short stories based around the same catastrophic and biblical event that grew from the first story “Clare”, to the final tale based in a remote farmhouse in the Peak District. Without giving too much away, it was a homage to those old Romero films, but this time with an added twist that subverts the whole “undead” convention (and we’re not talking 28 Days Later here, nor the remake of the Dawn of the Dead – no, this is definitely more apocalyptic than either of these…).
I will be adding new stories as I go, and all the original stories need updating (they were good enough to get me a very high grade at university, but my writing has improved since then – and besides, here the end of the world occurred in the year 2000, so I might advance the apocalypse on a few years!).