New Story: Half Moon Island

I never planned to write a horror story, but here we are. On my travels this summer I started listening to The No Sleep Podcast during the drive instead of my usual playlists and became a fan. Long story short, Half Moon Island is one of the stories featured on the tenth season premiere of the show.

I’m very happy with how this turned out. The cast did an amazing job, especially Erika Sanderson: she had no lines but, oh man, that was worse than I imagined it in my head when I was writing it. You can check it out by visiting their website, or listen on iTunes (or your favourite podcast app.)

Better Late Than Never

It’s fall. I’m so happy. It was a long summer and I spent most of it driving around, listening to podcasts and waiting for the opportunity to close the windows. September and October was that crazy limbo between getting nothing done and getting something done.

And I got something done! Two somethings, actually. The first I’ll talk about a little later. The other is this:

Yep, that’s the cover to the companion novella to my historical YA Shadows May Fall (which reached 10K reads in October.) My short story about Robbie turned into a novella. Initially it was supposed to solely focus on the last few chapters of SMF, but since I started motoring through it the story has equally focused on Robbie’s past before meeting Dorothy. It’s an interesting twist which has allowed me to explore relationships that were only scribbles in a notebook stashed away.

This has been a good exercise leading up to finishing the sequel to SMF. It’s let me reconnect with characters I’ve stepped away from and silenced over the past few months as I mess with other things. I won’t be putting the story up all at once like I did with SMF but instead I’ll be putting up two chapters at a time beginning on Monday, and that should take me through November and possibly December. I’m not even going to attempt to be ambitious enough to try Nanowrimo – I have a few other things I want to wrap up this month so I’m more about the words on the page than trying to write a novel from start to finish.

So that’s autumn so far. I love this time of year. I love the sweaters and the hot drinks and the creativity boost.

I Do This Every Year

Why do I do this every year? I know it’s coming. I anticipate it. I dread it. And yet, I still do it.

I’m referring to my complete disregard for my lack of writing productivity from mid-June to mid-September. I’m not a summer person in the slightest. The noise, the traffic, the heat — all those hallmarks of summer are brain-killers for me. I should know by now not to mess with this, to just sit back and chill out, but I’ve only ever half-learned my lesson. When I was writing for a publisher who gave me deadlines that crossed into summer, I’d bust my ass to get them out of the way by mid-June. “Fantastic! You’re so prompt!” the editor would say, and I’d keep it to myself that I had barely slept in an effort to make my deadline.

I’m not under contract for anything right now. My book is in a potential publisher’s TBR pile, and even if she came back tomorrow to tell me she was publishing my book and I needed to start working on it right away it wouldn’t be so bad, because editing isn’t writing. Editing requires me to be critical instead of creative.

I had hoped this year would be different. I have a nifty new writing space begging to be used. I made a to-do list of manageable bites. “Bring it on!” I said to myself, and then proceeded to hurl myself into that dark pit of failure. I crawl out, I play some video games, and then I go for another leap.

This is different from my failed attempt at writing a historical novel in 30 days. At least I wrote something that week. This is just a soul-sucker.

There are countless articles, books, and admonishing tweets about needing to make the time to write, how you can do it on top of a flaming pile of garbage if you were really serious. I’ll give an inch, a lot of writer’s block is just procrastination, but at the same time I challenge those people to listen to my DIY-loving neighbour drive his riding lawnmower up and down his lengthy driveway for three and a half hours while his four-year old screams in the background.

July 20th and I’m throwing in the towel. I’m going to read books and play video games for the next six weeks. I’ll end up doing it anyway, but at least this way I won’t have the crushing defeat of summer on my shoulders.