Hi all. At the beginning of this month, I wrote a post about naming the new year, and how I was going to make some changes to my organisational skills this year.
As you can see, while I’ve been relatively on time with my chapter posting (at least, compared to previous years), I definitely haven’t picked up with the blog posts. I’ve been pretty flat out, what with getting home from the holidays and diving pretty much directly into some convention volunteering and then the job hunt. Those of you who follow my Twitter will have seen a few photos of me floating around from Arcanacon, wearing myself out but having a great time doing it.
One of the things that I was going to do to make this blog a little more active, and to make my life a little more organised, was to keep folks updated, earlier and more often, about my convention comings and goings. I’ll try not to say that I’ve confirmed attendance to anything until I’ve actually booked tickets and gotten schedules and all that, but I do at least want to give people a head’s up.
So, there’s a few things on the boil at the moment, including some very exciting but also extremely secret news which I’ll update folks with in due time, but for a start, here are some basics.
1 — I can’t make it to Worldcon this year. Despite it being actually pretty close to me (New Zealand is a much smaller hop than Dublin was), it just doesn’t look like it’s going to be feasible in the time I have this year to make things happen. So, sad as it makes me, it looks like that’s one convention that’ll have to wait until another year.
2 — This year I’ll be representing both Whimsy and Metaphor and also Liberation Industries at various conventions. For those who haven’t heard or don’t know, Liberation Industries is the roleplaying actual play podcast I occasionally appear as a disembodies voice on. We run a lot of indie games, especially eldritch and cyberpunk (and games that combine both), and we end up playtesting a lot of new and interesting games as well. You should come check us out! We’re on hiatus at the moment, but there’s no shortage of back catalogue to listen to and get caught up while you wait for us to record some new content. But this means I’ll be at both writing and gaming-oriented conventions this year. Hope to catch folks at both kinds!
On the writing side of things:
1 — The Ferryman’s Apprentice is in its last season, as I’m sure you’re aware, which means that particular ferry ride is finally coming to an end and it’s time to enter the unknown, misty banks beyond. I will be taking a hiatus, though, because I need some time to get things squared away. I’m not the sort of person who can just write a serial chapter by chapter as I go (my sense of pacing is not nearly good enough for that), so there may be a gap as I finish writing. How long a gap, I’m not sure of yet. It could be up to two months, but I’m hoping that it won’t be quite that long. The exact details will depend on whether I get a job soon, how busy I am at that job, and the exact amount of editing required to bring the planned story up to scratch. I’ll be announcing a title and putting up the plot synopsis pretty much as soon as The Ferryman’s Apprentice is finished, though, with its release date.
2 — If you caught me at a convention last year, you’ll have heard that The King’s City is getting ready for its launch, too. If you weren’t there, then you may not have picked up that I was sending out teaser chapters of The King’s City, which declared confidently that I would be releasing The King’s City in the first half of 2020. I’m happy (and frankly somewhat astonished) to announce that that goal is still on track, and while I don’t have a release date yet, I do have some truly stunning cover art on the way, and the process of getting the actual words ready is trucking along just fine. I’ll be posting a real announcement page soon, too.
Other than that, there are some other projects on the back burner, and some interesting things happening this year, and I’m excited to be able to announce them when it’s time! I’m considering making this infodump a monthly thing, so that I’m not just springing information on you willy-nilly, and you can get everything neatly packaged up instead of in bits and bursts. Let me know what you think! I’d like to be able to get information to you in a way that works best for you — if nobody’s interested, there’s no point in me making these posts. But if you’d like to know what I’m up to a little more frequently, then I’d like to know that, too. So what do folks think — do ad-hoc or monthly updates work best for you?
Whimsy and Metaphor 