Ahem.

So it would seem I missed a rather key milestone on this blog the other week.

Not a lot to say here, but given how the last three years or so I’ve been trying (and largely failing) to build a following for my work, which could translate into any sort of meaningful impact on sales, it’s been nice to see this counter rising sedately yet steadily the more I post on here.

In terms of what I can say next, there’s not a lot.

I’ve got two big projects coming up, each of them still in the inception stages, each of which I’m still reading up on and scrawling notes on insofar as my ADHD will allow, before the other one inevitably distracts me.

The first of them, as I’ve alluded to many times before, is Ajax, the prospective second novel in the Saga of Majesty. It isn’t a sequel to Herakles by any stretch – you can ignore Herakles entirely and still read Ajax as a standalone – but as I intended, it chronologically follows on from that era, and by reading the first book you’ll pick up nuance in the second that isn’t there otherwise.

For a while, I’d envisaged it as a fairly simple, run-of-the-mill-bildungsroman-cum-Trojan-War-retelling (because the myth retelling fiction genre clearly doesn’t have quite enough of those), that would follow Ajax’s journey through his backstory, his presence in the Iliad and his tragic Sophoclean suicide quite conventionally. But after thinking on it for some time, the whole concept just felt a bit… tame. It would have been fine – and even as recent as five years ago, it would have been revolutionary – but a small part of it just felt slightly lazy.

The best books in this genre, in my opinion, are the ones that take the medium of retelling and then push the concept somewhere off-piste, to do something interesting with it. Which after a lot of brainstorming, and insight with some of my very winsome, very talented author friends, is exactly what I’m planning to do.

And as for the second project? That, I’m afraid, is staying under wraps for now. Whether or not I get to it before Ajax or after is neither here nor there (knowing my attention span, I’ll probably flit between each). All I can say is that I got a fair bit of inspiration from my recent visit to the Roman army exhibition at the British Museum (which was awesome, so go see it if you can). Which may give a few things away.

Oh, and I’ve got my Atalanta short story on the coals as well, scrawled out in my notebook, whenever I can finally be arsed to type it up.

So there. Check back in a little under a fortnight for the next major milestone on this blog – its 3rd birthday – and here’s hoping I can pull some more bullshit out of my arse to fill a blogpost with.