At long last, my first collection of short stories now published on Amazon for Kindle. Official launch to be next Thursday.

I reached the 50k word limit back on the 25th November, but it’s taken a couple of days to complete the actual story. I still have to submit the text for validation, but all the spadework is now done.

It feels quite sad not to have it around anymore – I won’t start revising until January at the earliest – but it’s a lot more straightforward a story than Crooked Usage, so is likely to be submitted to an agent/publisher/Amazon sooner.

Leaving Mallingry is going well – it’s day 18 and I have 38,162 words out of the 50,000 so far. On the spur of the moment I invented a woman to be irritating on a sofa and she immediately wormed her way right to the core of the plot, only to be bloodily despatched several chapter later, at the hands of the villain!

Leaving Mallingry is now in progress – on day 8 I have 13,483 words out of the 50,000 so far!

Cover for the collection now finally done, see here. I am aiming for the Launch to be at the beginning of December.

Spent a day at Gloucester Guild Hall with some fellow writers on an e-Publishing course. This was given by Jarek Adams and John Thorn and covered cover image, blurb, formatting plus marketing techniques.

A fascinating day, and a chance to meet, discuss things with fellow-minded writers.

I have been working on a Stage Play based on the story of the Wooden Horse of Troy entitled the Gift Horse. The latest version has now been submitted to the Script Readers team (http://www.thescriptreaders.co.uk). If successful, I get to hear a rehearsed reading.

Bread was recorded last night at the StroudFM studio in Stroud, and a good job they did too!

We did an initial read-through which worked well, and then recorded it, which went even better. So thanks to Chloe, Swithin Fry, Claire Jackson and PJ Cox who all did sterling service, plus Laura on the desk who recorded it all.

I have decided to self-publish a small collection of short stories on Amazon and iTunes. I am still working out all the technical details – creating the iTunes version is pretty straightforward, but converting to Kindle is more involved – but it should all be done and dusted in a couple of weeks time.