What d’you mean, it’s March?

Sorry guys, I know I have been sorely lacking in keeping this blog up to date since the start of the year. March is probably too late to be expounding on my good intentions and New Year’s resolutions—although, too be fair I don’t do NY resolutions because I feel you are only setting yourself up to fail—especially as one of my good intentions was to blog more regularly. *has déjà vu moment from 2015/14/13*

An update post is probably a good idea though.

I’m ashamed to say that New Lease of Life arrived in this world on 25^th December with very little in the way of fanfare. I pushed it here and had a spot on the Dreamspinner blog a couple of days after release, but apart from that I did no blog tour or promo. In spite of that, New Lease of Life spent several weeks in the Dreamspinner Best Seller list and has garnered some favourable reviews. Some of which I still need to post here. Dreamspinner have a 25% off across the board sale until tomorrow so you could pick NLOL up at a reduced price until then.

RL has been somewhat hectic and of course the first thing to suffer is my writing in whatever form, but I am attempting to put pen to paper in some form at least a couple of times a week.

The sequel to Resonance (currently free at Are), tentatively titled ‘Resistance’, has been thoroughly betaed and I’ve just put the finishing touches to the third and, hopefully, final draft. It’s a sweet, low angst story looking at how Rick and Mal cope with life after their cutemeet. I'm currently looking for some pre-readers including some from Sussex. In the next few weeks I need to make a decision about whether to send it out to publishers, of which there are fewer by the day, or if I can justify the cost of self-publishing with my limited fanbase.

Next up in the pipeline is a story dealing with Smudge, another resident of Slopy Bottom. He plays quite a pivotal role in Resistance and demanded his own HEA. In fact there are a slew of characters in Slopy Bottom that want to tell you their stories so I may have to spend some time there. I have signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo in April and plan to use this focus to work on Smudge’s story. More on that later this month.

At some point this year I need to organise getting Lesson Learned re-released. Ellora’s Cave returned the rights to me in December and I intend to self-publish this novel with very little changes (apart from swapping back to the UK English it was written in). It’s been a long time since I’ve read this book and l’m looking forward to revisiting Drew and Nathan. I’ve been trawling the premade covers over at Meredith Russell and Garrett Leigh’s cover art sites in case anything strikes me as suitable but I’m yet to find anything. I should check out Lou Harper and some other cover artists, I suppose. Any suggestions? Failing that it looks like I’ll be subjecting one of my go-to cover artists to my own form of torture. Ask Meredith what I mean, she’ll be happy to enlighten you.

Also planned for this year: reworking of my WW2 submarine story, Under the Radar.  I’ve been working on this on and off for years. Maybe 2016 will be the year I finally get it finished and submitted.

And I’ve had several questions about writing a sequel to Theory Unproven. Hopefully I’ll be able to start something later this year. Although whether it will be set at the elephant reserve with Eric and Tyaan—Andrew really needs his story told—or back in England with Benedict and his (unrequited?) love for his boss, or maybe even in some other part of the world where animals are in danger, I couldn’t rightly say just yet.

Are there any stories that you want to see from me?