Dead, on time

I work better when there’s a deadline. If I’m allowed to bimble my way through a project and just get it in whenever, it’s a surefire way for me to spend all day slobbing in front of the xBox with a coffee drip in my arm.

So yes, I like deadlines. There. I said it.

Unless they’re day-job deadlines. Twelve weeks of them, one after another after another, without let up, a sequence of circumstances combining to create the Perfect Shitstorm. So for the last couple of months I’ve written precisely nothing – the last thing I’ve wanted to do with my spare time has been stare at a computer screen.

That’s not to say I’ve not been ‘writing’ on some level. Little ideas have been jotted into notebooks, and plots have been simmering at the back of my head, but it’s only now, with Christmas approaching and the pressure lessening, that I’ve been able to actually sit down and write.

Yesterday broke the drought properly – a full story outline from start to finish in the space of a lunchtime. It’s out now with the editors, pending approval (or not), and doesn’t it feel good…

In other news, I’ve had a couple of stories released since I last posted here. Bloodstones (edited by Amanda Pillar for Ticonderoga Publications), which features my story Dead Inside, hit shelves last month, at almost exactly the same time as the latest volume of The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror. That’s also from Ticonderoga, and includes a tale of mine from 2011, Someone Else to Play With.

Up in the Northern Hemisphere, meanwhile, Graveside Tales released the third volume of its Beast Within series, Oceans Unleashed, at the start of December. Edited by Jennifer Brozek, it’s a collection of stories blending lycanthropy and marine life, and features Dry Run, a tale I wrote about thwarted love and shark attacks.

And that’s it for my pre-Christmas output – but as one last thing, I would just like to throw out a big hooray to World’s Collider, which made number two on Amazon’s list of sci-fi books a couple of weeks back. It’s a great collection, and a real labour of love for editor Richard Salter – you’d do well to check it out, if you haven’t already.