Progress Update: Project E and Project 🐸

If you happen to follow me on social media, you may have noticed amid the non-stop barrage of ads for Penstricken: Collected Stories and brief updates on the second draft of Project E that I recently completed the first draft of something else which I have dubbed Project 🐸.

Project 🐸 is not a novel. It’s a picture book for children, around the 800-1000 word mark with a story which my own four year old claims to have enjoyed (she also spent several days pretending to be the protagonist, which I took as a real encouragement on this, my first true foray into children’s fiction). Right now I’m working on a second draft of this and painstakingly trying to sketch out a few illustrations to accompany the words. This is proving considerably more difficult as I am not much of an artist.

If things go well with Project 🐸 then I intend to write a series of these books as I have quite a few ideas of other adventures for the protagonist and my daughter keeps badgering me to come up with new ones so watch this space parents of young children: your kids new favourite book might be just around the corner.

In other news, I continue to make dogged progress on the second draft of my novel, which most of you will know only as Project E. The second draft is now in full swing (I’m about 7,000 words into it at the moment) and is going well. Of course, I’m still writing part one, which I didn’t plan on making too many significant changes to anyway. Things are probably going to get stickier once I get into the middle sections of the novel which is where I expect to see the most dramatic changes. I have a plan, of course, but my plans tend to be in a state of flux until I write the last word so we’ll see what happens.

Let’s see there was something else I was going to tell you…

Oh yes, The Nest didn’t win the Voice.Club ‘Scary Story’ contest but thanks to everyone who voted for it anyway. I received a great deal of encouraging feedback from folks I don’t know which was absolutely lovely, especially given the supernatural genre isn’t really my usual cup of tea. I didn’t even expect it to be shortlisted so I’m absolutely delighted with how it went. I think(?) The Nest will be getting published in Voice.Club’s annual Kindle anthology so I’ll be sure to let you know when that happens.

That’s all for now I think. See you soon!