Well, I hit 50,000 words and beat NaNoWriMo again. Still got some writing to do to finish the book, but it’s coming along nicely. Of course, now I have to take a quick break to get Fox 9 ready for proofing, but Fox 10 is coming together.
Category Archives: Fox Meridian
NaNot Going So Well
Six days of actual writing and my NaNoWriMo project is not going so well. I still think the idea is a good one, so I may come back to it. For now, however, it’s a dud.
So, instead of that, I’m going to work up a plot for the tenth Fox book and see if I can get 50k words of that written before the end of November. Three weeks for 50k. Done it before.
Content Fatigue
Okay, so, if you watch the ‘What I’m Working On’ page, you may have noticed that Liberty is into the editing cycle and I’m now onto the ninth Fox Meridian book. It’s going to be ‘Fox 9’ for a while, I think, though it may end up being The Hellas Find. We’ll see.
Anyway, when Liberty hits the virtual shelves I’ll have done three Ultrahumans books in a row. Two of those were intended to be back-to-back since Guardian and True Dark are heavily linked together. Then I had no ideas for anything else, so I went ahead with Liberty. I’m happy with the outcome (or as happy as an English author can get), but I am really happy to be moving on to a different series. Ultra fatigue has set in. Three consecutive books in the same world is, I think, too much.
I’m used to this with reading. Generally, if I read the same author for a long time, I start to suffer from ‘content fatigue.’ I first noticed it with Anne McCaffrey when I was in my twenties (I think). I had collected the then extant Pern books (this was before they proliferated into the billions) and decided I would read them in chronological order (or as best as possible since some overlap). I was doing pretty well, but by the time I was reading The White Dragon it was getting really hard to keep going. I think Moreta came out not long after and I just couldn’t finish it. Too much of the same world/characters, and the same author’s style.
Writing is the same, but worse. There were seven Pern books to read, IIRC, but it takes a lot longer to write a book than to read one. (With you lot, that seems to be quite an extreme understatement.) Two books should be my limit, I think. After two books in the same setting, I’m starting to get tired of the same universe.
And now, back to researching Mars and living in Fox’s head for a while.
Posted in Fox Meridian, News, Opinion, Ultrahumans
Tagged author fatigue, reading fatigue, writing fatigue
Global Weirding
If anything suggests we’re seeing the effects of Global Warming, specifically a rise in unusual weather conditions, it’s the UK right about now. Last week, appropriate outdoor clothing involved a scarf. This week I am reconsidering my decision not to look into air conditioning for my office. It’s April and we have a minor heatwave. April is usually a wet, blah sort of month. It’s not really warm or cold. It just happens and we hope it’s nicer in May (and it often is because the one thing the British weather hates is being sunny when the kids are on holiday come summer!).
Not that this is really ‘extreme,’ but it is out of the ordinary. On a BBC science programme, Horizon, a few years back, the phenomenon of increasing instability in our ‘usual’ weather conditions was given the name ‘Global Weirding’ by a meteorologist working on the weather in the southern US region where long periods of drought were becoming more common. The programme was a big influence on the state of the planet in the Fox books.
Meanwhile, I’m busy writing the next Ultrahumans book (again). That’s a world where ‘Global Weirding’ takes on an entirely different meaning…
Fox Dominates
Book 8 in the Fox Meridian series is now out.
With new year, Fox Meridian is settling into her new position as the security and terrorism specialist of Palladium Security Solutions, and she’s finally getting over the death of her boyfriend. Then the violent murder of a vote broker throws Fox into a mire of sex and politics, and her friend Naomi Lind is in the hot seat.
NaNoWriMo 2017
I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year. That means I’m doing something different, and you may never get to read it. I’ve had a bad history with writing things for National Novel Writing Month which I end up being unhappy with. In fact, I’m having another shot at something I’ve done through one November before.
We’ll see where it goes, but you get another Fox book next month whatever happens.
Also…
Messing about with DAZ. If you follow the link on the picture, there’s some more explanation on the DA page.
Terribly, Terribly Quiet
As someone pointed out, I’ve been rather quiet recently.
That’s partially because I took a holiday. It was sort of a working holiday since I was scouting out Cornish villages for the next Reality Hack book, but it was a holiday. I needed it. I’ve been having trouble holding focus. So…
The current state of play is that I’ve picked up the Fox Meridian book I was writing, and that is (very likely) going to be the next one out. It’s currently called Dominance, but I’m not absolutely sure that title is going to stick through to publication. I just ground to a halt with the Ultrahumans book, though there’s a chunk written and I mean to get it and its sequel out as soon as I can. I’m going to add a new section to the ‘What Am I Doing’ page called Doldrums; it’s for books I have plotted and partially written, but the wind has gone out of their sails.
The Reality Hack sequel has some chance of coming in the next few months, though I still don’t have the precise course of the plot worked out. I was wandering around Cornish villages (and driving down roads that get narrower, and narrower, and narrower…) and having great ideas, but they don’t make a whole book yet.
So, that’s the update. It’s been an absolutely miserable day here in Manchester and I feel like someone sucked all the energy out of me. I’m falling asleep in my desk chair. This is never a good thing and results in really bad neck ache. I am going to do something to try and wake up before I go to bed.
What? It made sense to me.
Fox Character Art
Click through the image to take you to the collection. I think I got most of the recent updates in.
Eden Burning
The seventh book in the Fox Meridian series is out now.
Witches and Ray-Guns 