You have been so patient. Well done, you. You are truly beautiful/handsome*
*delete as applicable
I got sidetracked. What can I say? I AM HUMAN.
Life is a funny and fanastical whirl of ideas and half-finished projects but I am finishing projects and doing new things and diversifying.
One of the major fantastic things that happened started almost seven years ago when my daughter was born. This was both monumentally brilliant but also a huge distraction from writing sweary-stories about people hitting each other.
As a parent you are suddenly confronted with something that is waaaaay more fun than writing. You get to play silly games, go to the park, eat sweets until you barf… and read. You do a lot of reading of books you would never previously have read because, you know… for kids…
And some of them are very, very good and some of them are really, really, really bad. Like so bad you want to tear off the fingers of whoever wrote the book.
I realise this could be judged to be an overreaction to a picture book. Meh.
And so I wrote a picture book. And then I worked with a fantastic illustrator by the name of David Betts to bring the book to life and he did and it looked wonderful and then… well… then I decided to turn it into an interactive storybook for touchscreen devices.
Fast forward two years and it is available for iPad & iPhone as well as Android tablets & phones. If you’ve got kids or just want to check it out it’s called ‘I Don’t Like Spiders, They Walk on the Sky’ and there’s more info here.
And then real life and the day job got in the way. For something like a year and no writing was done. None at all. Which wasn’t nice.
And then the writing prompts book and the writing prompts app both happened and suddenly I’m animated again. Back to writing and all is good. So I revisit the outline I did for the new Defective Detective project which was called A Shot In The Dark and I didn’t like it very much so I filed it under ‘crud’ and moved on.
Started plotting out a new Defective Detective project. One that would probably be novel-length. And the outline was done and I was ready to start writing and –
I got distracted. By now my daughter is six years old and reading chapter books. Once more some are really good and some make me want to scream. Why?
Because they demean their readers.
Oh fairies this and princesses that and let’s all skip. Rinse and repeat until you are a pink-fairy-princess.
I don’t want to be a pink fairy princess. But girl readers of this age range seem to be less discerning. They lap it up and so it is fed to them by unscrupulous types. Shoveled to them. And it wouldn’t be so bad if they had strong characters. Good plots.
Some do. But a lot don’t. And so I was asking some friends for recommendations… I want my daughter to read strong female characters. I want the 6 year old equivalent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for her, not princess-fecking-fairy-pants’ wishy-washy-Wednesday. There were a few good recommendations but then, like the fool I am…
I decided to write it myself.
So now I have a completed kids’ novel with not one but two strong girls and one strong boy as the main characters. Editing is underway and illustrations are being illustrated and more on that as it happens but suffice to say there are going to be a LOT more updates around these parts because there’s a lot more writing going on.
But, I hear you ask, what about NOT writing for those little snot-nose noisemakers? WHAT ABOUT GROWN UPS AND SWEARING AND HITTING EACH OTHER?
Well I’m back on the case. I’m writing something now, it’s going to be long. Maybe a novel. And it’s got a whole new set of characters in it so, you know, Clint will have to wait until it is finished for his next case.
Now go away, you’re distracting me. Or, you know, try to distract me on Twitter if you like.
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