Hey there Hatstanders.

What’s up? We don’t talk anymore. I mean, except when we do. Just not on the blog, so it’s getting a bit ghost-towny. Here’s a quick catch-up on this Thursday afternoon.

I’m still reading, although round two of the #SPSFC is going slowly. I’m enjoying Iron Truth by S. A. Tholin, but don’t have a review ready yet. Turns out it’s a bloody enormous book and even though I’m really liking it, I’m going to be slow reading it because I don’t want to skim, and that might mean I run out of time. Still, that’s where I’m at there.

I’m still writing! I just finished part one (of three) of the third (of four) stories for my next collection, The Clown God. What the Hell does that mean?

Well, I finished A Railgun Brain, which clocked in at 29,923 words.

And I finished Grendel’s Grief, which ended up being 31,503 words.

Now, I have finished chapters I to VI of the story I’ve tentatively entitled The Shortcut, although I don’t know about that yet. Chapters VII to XII of that story will be a whole different narrative, and chapters XIII to XVIII will be a third, and the epilogue, chapter XIX, will be a (quite small) fourth. So technically it is one story, but in three-parts-and-an-epilogue. And chapters I to VI have already racked up 19,394 words. I’m not certain the second and third part of the story are going to be as big, but if they are, we’re looking at a ~57,000 word story. Which according to #SPSFC wisdom, actually counts as a novel. So.

I guess we’ll see how big it ends up being. The First Feast was also a bit of a beast in the novella kingdom, at 49,000 words. And that wound up in a modest-sized collection with three shorter stories. And I’m predicting the fourth story in The Clown God, as-yet untitled, will be another small one … but who knows?

On the other hand, the most recent anthology[1] I published was fucking massive so this one can very well be the same.

What else? Lauren Hough ended up in the Twitter news again, as near as I can tell this time it was because some other random author wrote a book about All The Y Chromosome People Vanishing, it was up for an award from an LGBT+ organisation (pointless edit because nobody cares: it may not have been up for an award; in fact Hough’s book was; -Ed), a bunch of people (including some trans activists?) said “well this story’s pretty familiar and gross but okay” and Hough … well, I’m not going to pass up an opportunity to say that she Houghed and she Poughed and she blew that first author’s (actually her own; -Ed) chance at winning that award right down, because the organisation took it out of the running on the basis of the fact that TERFy transphobic books probably don’t need to win LGBT+ facing awards (or actually TERFy-shit-defending abrasive authors don’t; -Ed). But I don’t actually know any more than that, and Author Twitter is a drama a minute. All I noticed was that my couple of bemused tweets from the last Lauren Hough drama were suddenly getting Likes again, and my post about it got a bunch of views a couple of days ago, for the same reason.

To paraphrase Doctor Who, is seventy-eight a lot? I don’t know, it depends what you’re talking about. Books about All The Men Suddenly Vanishing? Yes. Views on a blog? Not really. But I’ll take it.

Anyway, that’s the news.

[1] Fun fact: I recently learned that an anthology is a collection of stories from various authors, whereas a collection of stories from one author is, well, a collection. So I should not have been calling my Tales of the Final Fall of Man anthologies 1, 2 and 3 anthologies at all, but collections. But now it’s definitely too late to not call them anthologies, so I shall continue calling them anthologies and consider leaning into the idea that different parts of my personality write each story in them or something.