I completed part two (of five) of The Prince of Everything and Nothing yesterday. It’s a cosmically-inflected retelling of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Little Briar Rose. I’m feeling very good about this one.

Still mostly in a first draft state at the moment.  The reason I put it on hold: too damn big.  Some advice I took to heart, if you’re not yet published, is to focus on smaller, standalone pieces.  So for now I’m concentrating on shorter fiction.  I’m hoping to keep The Prince of Everything and Nothing down to a novella, but it’s going to be close.

tigersgogrrr wrote:

Oh, nice.

You too! It's the consistency that's hard and something I've lost over the past few years. Had a nice boost recently which has given me the motivation I've needed to just Get Shit Finished again.

What age is you novella written for?

Love a bit of body horror!

Now tell me about this ‘boost’.

Oops, wrong thread!

After getting a few rejections for my novel I've kinda let it sit for a while. Not sure if I'll dive back in and start rewriting or move on to something else. However, after randomly reading a couple of books that were published by Unbound I decided to submit it to them. For anyone that hasn't come across Unbound it's a publisher that crowd funds the publication of books. So you submit to them and then they decide if they want to take it to the crowd funding stage. 

Not sure if it's any good but thought I'd give it a go anyway.

My screenwriting stuff is keeping me going a bit better. I've been pretty busy writing a TV script for BBC Drama that might or might not happen. I was also commissioned to write a family friendly rom-com in 6 weeks which proved to be quite the challenge. I have another movie which has been on the verge of production now for the last few years. It's currently going out to actors. We need someone fairly famous to say yes. So far a few fairly famous people have said no. So we'll see.

@acemuzzy A portal story is, broadly, a story in which there a character finds a 'portal' to another world. Narnia is the most famous, I suppose. Alice in Wonderland would be one too. Neverwhere would fit the type, too. 

Original print version is here.

Audio version is here.

@Scout 

That's fantastic that you've had such great successes with screenwriting! Keep us informed. I'm still waiting for my casting call, for what it's worth. Have you looked into Inkshares? Not sure if that might be of interest.

I've been totes honest, guv.

Thanks guys. And Tiger, no I've not heard of Inkshares. Looks interesting. Will look into it properly. Thanks for the suggestion.

Any poets here?

There's a national competition around this time of year. I entered it a couple of years ago.

Yeah that's it.

I have found myself being compelled to write the odd one - dead relatives tend to kick it off but there's other events that prompt it.

I've had a few attempts at writing something about 2D shooters. It's a genre I am so enthusiastic about but yet is so misunderstood in my opinion. I haven't yet done it successfully but I have had a go..

http://www.cubed3.com/news/26558/1/insight-a-modern-2d-shooting-game-primer.html

Not a patch on something like @Tempy's polished piece - just that it reminded me of a latent desire I have to write about gaming that breaks out from time to time. It really needs a lot more work - but there it is for now. It was only picked up by that site because they probably were desperate for content. It was thrown together but I intend to go back to it and improve it at some point.

I've not been in here for what feels like an age. Nice to see people smashing it.

Anybody interested in reading a second draft of a short story I've done that still needs a fair whallop of editing? Happy to email it over if so, ive sent it to Moot so far so no worries if not. My missus aint exactly the target audience.