Mother Hold the Laptop Steady While I Vacuum the Cat

All too soon it's going to be that month again.

Brief notes of an outlining nature, now I have the better part of October to obsess about it: I'm back to writing Jenny this year. Last year's effort was interesting enough, but I didn't carry quite the burning love for it of previous years, so I think that's a lesson learned. I'm considering a story from relatively late in the saga, when Jenny's been settled and married a while, and how she deals with the inevitable weirdness with that perspective; but that's just first thoughts, and I may yet change my mind.

Also, I'm doing this one as a present to myself. I have no agenda for this, no thought of selling it; I may even post it online as I go, and first publication rights be damned. I want to get back to how much fun my first effort at this was, and what a grand time I had cavorting around my universe with my characters. That's what I want to do - a novel I'm not stressing over what kind of commercial chances it has. Too much of my headspace the last couple of years has been given to worrying about that ephemeral hypothetical, and I've lost sight of the reason I do all this in the first place. So there.

Fear not, though, you happy few who have given me joy by being Jenny's fans these last years; I've also been chipping away at a Second First Draft of The Vasty Deep, which I do hope to turn into a more polished - and finished! - work in the next year. Consider that an early heads-up for beta readers.

There's also, sometime on the horizon, the story commissioned by Niels, which has direction now; I'm still deciding whether I want to make it an Eldritch-cosmos story or not, but otherwise the wheels are in motion for that too. Watch this space!