Stories and a bang in the night (is your microwave on fire?)

I’ve been happily working away on the new book, ‘Bringing home the stars and the stars came home’. It strikes me that now the short story of ‘Bringing home the stars’ has been extended into this work, it makes the anthology that I was planning rather a flimsy affair. I don’t think that it would now be right to use a story that is now part of another book in it; it would feel rather too much like I was padding it all out. Dropping it leaves me with an anthology that is a little too short.

I’ve therefore been wondering about this, and as some of the short stories still left have been published elsewhere, and other stuff is cut material from published books, it really only leaves ‘The long summer of war’ as out on its own as not having been published anywhere else (apart from the first little bit on the portfolio section). So I’m sitting here thinking during a break from writing that it might be an idea to serialise it on the portfolio section over a number of months so that I can at least do something with it. I might even put here the cut scenes from ‘Syndicate Dawn’ and The Atlantic connection’. It’s just a thought.

I’m pretty busy until the New Year now. I’m going to try to write what I can, and there is some good progress coming along, but I doubt I’ll get to anything more than 30,000 words done by the beginning of January. I’m still planning on finishing it – all going well – by the end of January, but then January is always a quiet month for other work.

Finally, the bathroom light broke last night. Zoë has not had much luck in the last week with electrickery stuff. She set fire to the microwave by putting a potato in for far too long, then made the coffee machine blast milk all over the kitchen. Then finally I got a text from her last night when I was at work to announce that she had pulled the cord off the ceiling leaving the light stuck on. We fixed it by removing the bulb, but sometimes I do wonder what she will have a mishap with next? 😉