Actually, the title of this post reflects the title of a short story I’ve just edited, rather than anything more meaningful. I’m taking a quick break from writing ‘The long summer of war’ and having a look at some of the material I wrote a while ago and put to one side because I wasn’t fully happy with it. One bit is the original opening to ‘The Atlantic Connection’ and the other is actually the remnants of a cut section from the first draft of ‘Syndicate Dawn’.

A part of me worries a little about recycling material that wasn’t good enough to make it into previous books. I’m looking critically at these two pieces, and whilst I’m happy with the edit I’ve done on the first (it was cut because it just didn’t fit with the direction or feel of the book), I’m not so sure on the second so that may get dropped by the wayside. It was written in 1999 originally, so it needs rather a heavy edit to come up to standard, in my opinion.

I’m nearly done on ‘The long summer of war’ and only have one little scene left to pull together towards the end. I’ve even got ahead of myself and written the very end page! But, I’m starting to get bored with it. It isn’t sci-fi or fantasy, and marked quite a departure for me. I’m not sure how well the piece has worked, but it is certainly different. One thing is for certain that I won’t be trying regular boring run of the mill fiction again any time soon. It was nice to have a change, but we’ll just leave it at that. My ‘day’ job workload is impeding on my time a lot at the moment though, so it looks like it might be next week at the earliest before I get this wretched novella done. I’ve had to resort to listening to my Clannad LP collection to try and inspire me to the right setting. There’s only so many times you can listen to them before you start accenting vówels and typíng wíth á lílt. It’s a bit weird. I’ll just be happy when I move back onto good steady sci-fi – you know just where you are with a huge robot from outer space ripping aliens limb from limb and pimping his futuristic spaceship ride.

I want to clear the decks of current projects in order to get ready for this NaNoWriMo next month that my silly PR person signed me onto (“It’ll be good for your profile….” My arse, more like). I’ll have to think about what story I’m going to try and throw 50,000 words at in thirty days. At least by the end of it my internal monologue might have lost this infernal Irish accent it appears to have picked up listening to Clannad albums.