It’s been a hot minute. 

I finished The Massacre at Serenity Ridge, which came in at 23,369 words.
Blurb:

Queensland, 1872.
After getting a tip-off that the abandoned opal-mining town of Serenity Ridge left their buried treasure ripe for picking, the feared Cotterell gang – along with new hands like the Reverend Phillips and the drunk Wilson – ride in to claim their fortune, unaware that a vicious Malingee guards the sacred cave with stone knife keener than its hate for trespassers.

Pleasingly, it lived up to my unconscious expectations: it has decent rhythm and language, effective character moments, good scares, and an ending that – while not entirely expected – feels inevitable. 

The only critique I’ve gotten so far is that there are too many character names, which I can understand, but I want a large enough cast for it to be a Massacre, don’t I? This problem has been temporarily solved with a dramatis personae list between the title page and page 1, but in the rewrite I’ll probably just flatten out and un-name a few characters. 

In other news, I am on a little hiatus from the writing, which both sucks and blows. I finished MASR in August, and September was entirely reserved for putting together evidential materials to apply to sponsor my wife’s visa. Yes, I said “wife.” I am a husband now. Pretty fucking cool, right? Got married September 11th, so that will be hard to forget. 

Am also now dedicating my creative time (that hour or two between clocking off work and opening a bottle of wine) to an editing course I signed up to on Udemy by Jessica Perini, who really seems to know her stuff. I’m hoping it will make me a powerhouse of a re-writer, and improve my chances of getting some of my shit on shelves. 

Many ideas rocketing around for Mark novel #4, or Vincent & Jimmy novel #3, or a Smiley & Ruby spinoff novel, but learning to edit and finish a manuscript has got to be the next part of my levelling up as a writer, because having five novels and three novellas (not to mention half a dozen shorts) sitting in the cloud as “draft 1 finished” isn’t cutting it. Gotta finish.

K bye.