Hellooooooooo.

I know. I know. My streak of surprisingly consistent small-form blogposts came to a crashing end, this summer, with a rather resounding 4-month absence since I finished the first draft of Herakles. Long enough, in fact, for the weather to turn a pleasant shade of autumn in the meantime (when it wasn’t bucketing down in a deluge of colourless misery).

Well.

Since then, I’ve edited it. A lot. And formatted it. A lot. I lost about 15,000 words from the first couple of cuts alone, and working with my very helpful copyeditor to refine and reformat the rest, what’s left behind is a manuscript that actually looks far more professional than my last one ever did.

I’ve also been querying, a lot, since then, with… mixed results. After almost 50 submissions (out of my 80-strong spreadsheet), met with blank rejections or simply ghosted me, it’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll be heading down the self-publishing route once again. Which isn’t a total loss, even if it was the situation I wanted to avoid.

I’m currently a few hundred words into a short story, Huntress, which acts as sort of coda to one of the most important characters from the novel.

And, more importantly, now I know it hasn’t been longlisted for the competition I entered it into, I’ve a 2000-word short(er) story, The Carrion Rain, which I’ve just dropped on Amazon here. For just 77 pence, you can see the very first scenes of the Iliad, from a… rather unusual perspective.

Don’t say I never spoil any of you.