Gosh! I seem to have had a lot to moan about of late. So I thought that maybe it was time to say something about positive stuff.

As you well know, there is an upcoming book reading on Sunday the 21st of September (see previous post about it for details). I’ve decided I ought to combine the run up to this with trying to finish off the revision of ‘Countdown to Extinction’. I’ve talked about the plans before. They involve a revision of the text as well as an all-new cover. The original cover artwork I never liked. It looked too much, in my opinion, like a biology textbook. So the same talented artist who did the cover to ‘The Atlantic Connection’ is going to also have a go.

I’ve been very impressed by some of her CG style artwork, which in some ways has a similar quality to the partial CG look of some of the covers to the Gollancz SF Masterworks series. We’ve talked a little about what to have, and she has a couple of ideas. We’ll see what comes together before the weekend; it’s scary how fast time goes.

I still need to do a few practice read-throughs for ‘Bringing Home the Stars’ for Sunday. I want to be ever so familiar with the text so that I’m not prone to stumbling or losing my place. I also want to check that it sounds right when read aloud and that there are no points where I find flaws in the text that don’t read well. It did go through extensive editing though, so hopefully at least this aspect won’t be a problem.

There is a plan to put together a book of short stories from both myself and Zoë Robinson under the over arcing title of ‘Bringing Home the Stars’. Whether anything comes of this idea, mooted some weeks ago, remains to be seen. I need to complete the next short story that I have been working on though to have enough material for my half. Again, it is all about time. I don’t know where time goes, but it seems to dribble away like water in a seive. Or some other such metaphor like that.

Today is the last day of the holidays, and it seems that already there is so much to take up my time. I need to be able to cut back down to three or four days on the ‘day’ job, but at the moment it seems I am feeling obliged to work every hour there is. Oh bring back the first half of this year when I seemed so productive on my writing!