Things in the world

This has been a good week, not so much for writing (as in, actually getting some writing done), but definitely in terms of getting stuff out there for people to read!

My second novel for Black Library, ‘The End of Enlightenment‘, was published on Saturday. A broader and more expansive look at the Warhammer: Age of Sigmar setting, this is perhaps a bit closer to traditional fantasy than my first book. I seemed to go into a trance writing this one, I was a bit obsessed with it and got the first draft done in record time. I hope readers enjoy it.

Secondly, I’ve just had a short story published by the excellent Lunate website. It’s a story I’m really proud of, but for which I’ve strangely never made much of an effort to find a home. A more surrealist/hallucinatory piece, the story is called ‘Canvas’, and can be found on the Lunate website here:

https://lunate.co.uk/short-stories/canvas-by-richard-strachan

The numbers game

I’ve been writing my current novel for about three years (by ‘current novel’, I mean my own, non-IP or non-Black Library related work). That’s quite a long time to have spent writing a novel, but of course not every day has been spent actually writing it – weeks and months have passed where I’ve done nothing with it, and evenings have gone by in a blur when I’ve pushed it on further than I would have thought possible. Looking at my old notebooks I see that one year ago (9 March 2020) I had 10,000 words of it in hand, and it had taken me about two years to get there. At the moment, the draft is around 90,000 words, which means that 80,000 words have been added to that original 10,000 in the last twelve months.

But in fact, the numbers don’t tell the full story, because the vast majority of those extra 80,000 words were added in the last two or three months. And of course, even if I keep that pace up and manage to complete it in the next two or three months (I think it’s going to top out around 130 – 140,000 words), I still wouldn’t have a complete novel. All I would have would be a first draft, and that’s a very different beast.

I suppose in the end the numbers don’t really count, or not as much as you might think. I can keep track of them and feel like I’m achieving something as they mount up, but all I’m really achieving is getting myself closer to an arbitrary total, and I won’t know what I’ve actually got until I get there. I just hope it doesn’t take me another three years to find out.

The horror …

More book news – the newest volume of Warhammer Horror was published earlier this week, and includes my story ‘Tesserae’.

New Writing Scotland

I received my contributor copy of the latest issue of New Writing Scotland the other day, containing my story ‘Mercury’. This was a more experimental piece, exploring time, landscape and permanence, loosely organised around my impressionistic ideas of the atomic bomb test sites in New Mexico, and the nuclear missile tests in Nevada, USA.

I haven’t been devoting as much time to my own/non-genre or tie-in fiction recently, so it was good to see some of my more personal work in print. I’m slowly working on a literary/fantasy hybrid novel at the moment, and I’ve got a couple of short stories planned, which I must get back to when I have the time.

Copies of NWS 38 can be bought from Bookshop.org here:

https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-last-good-year-new-writing-scotland-38/9781906841423?aid=2111

The End of Enlightenment

Black Library had a preview event yesterday, teasing some of the books they’re going to be releasing in 2021, and amongst them was my second novel, The End of Enlightenment:

This is going to be an epic clash between the aelves of the Lumineth Realm-lords, and the dread legions of the Ossiarch Bonereapers. I’m not sure exactly when it’s going to be released, but hopefully it should be round about the spring.