Okay, let’s see if I can actually finish this post before something else happens.

It’s been two months since my last post. I never intended it to be that long. Life, however, has not played along and other things have required my attention for the past few weeks. Nothing critical, nothing too bad, just a lot of low grade interruptions and irritations that by themselves would have been fine and nothing exceptional, but they all seemed to come along in a steady stream. When they haven’t required my attention, I’ve been trying to focus on writing a novella and editing The Theatre of Shadows: The Vasini Chronicles II.

What was going to be

Before I took my forced hiatus from here, I did manage to write a title and a sentence of a post:

Misprints

I’ve recently finished reading The Complete Maus – Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel retelling of his father’s experiences during the Holocaust.

I’d intended to write about how, though I’d found to Maus to be compelling, I’d discovered that my copy – that I’d received as a present several years ago – contained a misprint. A section of pages were repeated and, in turn, the final pages were missing. So, technically, I hadn’t finished reading it and won’t until such time as I can find a copy to borrow to read those last few pages.

I then planned on writing about other misprinted books I’d owned, including:

• The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower by Stephen King, where a third of the way through the book I’d discovered that a section of pages had been repeated and that it then skipped ahead 20 or so pages. I’d bought the book in hardback and given the time between buying it and discovering the misprint, I’d figured that I wouldn’t be able to exchange it. I decided to set it aside with the intent of buying the paperback when it came out. Of course, I ended up getting distracted by other books, and when I finally went back to it, I’d forgotten about the misprint until I reached it again. I ended up buying the eBook (the first Kindles were three years away when I started reading the book), but only used it for the bit that was missing.
• The first misprint I can remember coming across was in my first copy of the Dungeon Master’s Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition. I was twelve at the time and had been saving pocket money since buying the Player’s Handbook a month earlier. We were visiting my grandparents, and I popped down to the hobby shop where I bought nearly all of my role-playing game books and dice for the first few years of my gaming life. The book was wrapped in cellophane and I didn’t get a chance to open it until I was back at my grandparents. After eagerly unwrapping it, I became very confused when I discovered that although the illustrations and the headings were there, there was no actual text. My brain tried to come up with an explanation for why the elements that were there were perfectly printed, yet the majority of the book was blank. The best I could come up with was that I was supposed to fill in the gaps in someway, that TSR as it was then, would release the content through some means and I was supposed to copy it into the book. By the time I’d admitted that it was a misprint, the shops were closed and I was forced to wait until the next week to swap it for a copy with the actual words.

Other things

So that’s what I’d intended to write about back in January. Since then I’ve been concentrating on, slowly but surely, editing The Theatre of Shadows. It’s coming along, not as quickly as I would have liked, but editing 180,000+ words takes time. The hope remains to publish it by the end of the year, but there’s an increasing chance it may be early 2019 instead.

The non-Vasini related novella I’m working on, after an initial splurge of writing has settled into a slower, more steady pace. I’m likely to finish the first draft (all being well) by the end of March. I tend to guess at what the final word count will be for each story I write. Lately the final word count has ended up 50% over my prediction. This time it looks like I may only be 10% over.

Back towards the end of January, I was happily surprised to discover that The Winter Fayre from A Divided River: Tales From Vasini I was shortlisted in the Best Novella category of the Subjective Chaos Kind Of awards – a group of bloggers who have got together to have some fun judging their favourite books of 2017. You can read more about their endeavours at Bethan May Books and at The Middle Shelf.

Anyway, here’s hoping that the interruptions are over and it won’t be as long until my next post.