I’ve been so busy this week, and with one thing and another I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting ‘The long Summer of War’. However, all is not lost and I’ve found the time to sit down and do some work on it today. I don’t want to give too much away, not least because even I am not so sure of where the plot is going in its entirety. But the love interest is coming along and the more I write the more that gets suggested to me by the progression of the words on the page.

It is typical though that I am already thinking in the back of my mind the next project. I have a habit of doing this all the time, and it can be very annoying. It distracts from the job in hand and, especially towards the end, it becomes a powerful attraction to want to do something new instead. But usually I manage to fight through that feeling.

The next piece though is more of an edit job. For this anthology I’ve decided it might be interesting to add in at least one piece of work that was cut from one of my already published books. They go through a couple of drafts, and sometimes something that doesn’t quite work gets dropped. I never delete these, but instead move them to another file that gets saved on my computer for posterity. Usually they just languish. However, occasionally the odd piece gets used in another book in the series, though I cannot think to hand of an example of this such is the scattiness of my mind this morning.

There is a large piece cut from ‘Syndicate Dawn’ that I am planning to edit up and put into the anthology. Some people may find it quite interesting, not least because it contains charectors who were cut in the final edit of that book (long story – the final edit dropped around 30,000 words of text and I removed a weak charector from the plot entirely because he did sweet Fanny Adams). It is pretty rough at the moment and I’m not prepared to show off warts-and-all a piece I wrote in 1998/9 without some cleaning up!

I think there is also floating about somewhere the short story that ‘Orb of Arawaan’ grew from. I’ll have to think about whether that goes into the anthology or not, as I don’t think it changed much at all before the book was written around it a few months afterwards. If it is too similar then as it is only around 1,500 words I might just not bother with it. I am tempted though to use the piece that ‘Countdown to Extinction’ came from which was written way back in 2001/2 for a magazine.

Time though is once again my enemy. Where does it all go? Little time gnomes keep coming and stealing it away from me when I’m too preoccupied at a keyboard to notice.