I’m Not Just a Picture Book Author (Really!)

It feels like I’ve done nothing but bang on about Detective Mo and Rollo recently. You could be forgiven for thinking I just write picture books and stories for little kids because that’s what my recent releases have been, so here’s a wee update on my non-picture book related writing projects.

My main work-in-progress, a YA fantasy novel known to all but the chosen few as ‘Project E’ (title tba), is currently on its fifth draft. The story is more or less as I want it and is currently in the hands of a few trusted associates who will hopefully tell me all the ways it doesn’t make sense so I can fix it. Aside from any corrections that come from that, all I really need to do now is finish editing and beautifying the manuscript, then it’ll be ready to go off to a professional who can tear it up into far smaller pieces than my friends or I can.

I’m not going to lie to you, I’m getting sick of the sight of Project E. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m happy that I’ve written a decent story and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you, but I’ve been working on it for so long that I just want it to be done so I can move onto something else. I intend to have it traditionally published, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a temptation to just self-publish straightaway so I can move on with my life but I’ll persevere with it, even if it does mean it has to follow me around a little longer. I’ve worked too hard on it for too long to just skip the final hurdle.

In other news, I’m also working on another collection of short stories, currently dubbed ‘Project ❤️,’ since I still don’t know what to call it. Unlike Penstricken: Collected Stories, these are brand new stories written just for this collection (well, I might’ve also included ‘The Nest’, but apart from that they’re all new). It will also certainly be longer than Collected Stories and will include a greater proportion of stories in excess of 2,000 words compared with Penstricken: Collected Stories, which was made up mostly of 100, 500 and 1,000 word stories. I probably will just self publish that as a kind of successor to Collected Stories.

There’s a bunch of other stuff in the background I’m going to come back to as well (mostly half-written YA novels and middle grade fiction) but Project E, Project ❤️ and Rollo is more than keeping me busy just now so I’ll tell you more about that at a future date once I’ve got this other stuff out— hopefully sometime this half decade or so!