Here’s a photo of some of my hand-made pottery, nestling amongst the lavender which is spilling over our garden path.

I finally finished tweaking The Club, and so this 3000-word piece was emailed to Dark Moon Press yesterday for consideration for inclusion in their forthcoming anthology of vampire fiction. The first draft of this story was written around two years ago but I wasn’t happy with some aspects of it. For very similar reasons, writing Tamsin ground to a complete halt for a while. The whole issue of blood-drinking vampires irritated me. Not only was I bored with the theme but it seemed increasingly silly. My fiction is laced with metaphysics, and the disparity between this and the stereotypical gore-chomping imagery had grown so wide that the one simply could not tolerate the other. Consequently, my writing ground to a halt. I could not move forward with it until I had resolved this issue.

Exactly how this resolution was arrived at is not something I’ll reveal. Suffice to say that The Club has been re-drafted and Tamsin has only the final chapter and the epilogue yet to be written. All I have to do now is edit it, sell it, promote it….. *groans* Ah, well - onwards ever onwards!!! *chuckles*

I’ve had an idea. Don’t all gasp. I’m aiming to write a piece of short fiction each month, at least for the next year. These short pieces will complement or echo the novels. Some of the characters from the novels will be in the short pieces, which will be intended either for publication separately or collated into book-form. I’ve no working title as yet. I’ve found myself interested by several series which portray a complete pantheon of characters, whose lives intertwine, who might refer to the same event but from a very different view point. This is something I intend to incorporate. I’ll let you know how this project develops.

Oh, before I go – my poor mother almost got struck by lightening last night! She’d stepped beneath the covered pergola to watch the heavy thunder storm. She reached towards an old Lloyd Loom chair just as a small arc of lightening flashed through the corrugated plastic roof and hit the very same chair. She was knocked off her feet but is quite unhurt. How’s that for fortuitous timing?