August 2024

August is a weird time of year. Summer is on the way out, but it’s not yet time for Halloween, Bonfire Night or the anticipation of Christmas (I’m already seeing tinsel in the shops!). It’s also been a weird time for my writing.

On 13th July, I finished the readthrough of Hero draft 2! It took three months, and I have 60k words of notes to make draft 3 better. I then started Hero draft 3, which currently stands at 18k. I can feel the story improving with each revision listed in my notes. New things are being added all the time – character names have changed, one guy now has heterochromia because different coloured eyes are cool, and I made someone into a centaur because why not. I promise actual plot stuff is also happening. It’s been a long journey, and there’s a long way to go yet, but the pieces are finally, finally, starting to fall into position. I think.

My short story is also coming on well. Hero has slowed down a bit as a result, but it’s nice to take a break from the mammoth ten-year project and finish something. Even the research has been fun, and it’s a subject I’m very familiar with! There probably won’t be further updates on it for a while, but I will certainly let you know when and where you can read it. All I’ll say for now is that it involves seagulls…

Continuing my hyperfixation with Greek Mythology, I’m now on book 3 of the Percy Jackson series. It’s been years since I read them, and I may try out the Heroes of Olympus set after it – I’d like to see how Riordan adds Roman mythology into the mix. I’m now on the last book of Damion Hunter’s Centurions series. I’m curious to know how much of the surrounding history is accurate, but scared to Google for fear of stumbling on a 2000-year-old spoiler.

Next year, I’d like to try a reading challenge or bingo, where you find books based on prompts and see how many you can tick off. (I’m a completionist.) Maybe I’ll create one, and put up some prompts if folks would like to join in. For now though, I’m trying desperately to get through my current TBR…

September is looking to be a busy month, but by then I will hopefully be back to juggling Hero and Storm. Storm may be getting a soft reboot… the coprotagonist’s role grew until it turned the story into a romance instead of an adventure. I’ve often wished I was a faster writer, but I suspect that I’m one of those people who has to “discovery write” my novels as they shift and change; I’m still hoping to revive Green in some form. For now, I’m keeping a list of points as to what Storm is about and why it appeals to me, and ensuring the story doesn’t drift too far from them. Hopefully this one won’t take ten years to finish!

A hobby of mine is learning stuff just for the fun of it – you may remember I learned ventriloquism a few years ago – and currently I’m getting into Excel. Until recently Excel was just “the thing I make word count trackers with”, but there’s a ridiculous number of things you can do with it. Maybe I’ll do some fancy graphs with my exported Goodreads data – I’m a big fan of categorising stuff. Don’t tell me I’m not fun at parties.

Lastly, here’s a little Excel experiment that turned into something I’m proud of. It’s a Roman date converter (the ancient Romans counted their years in ab urbe condita, or years since Rome’s founding):

Thoughts?

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