October is definitely the best month for writing because I no longer feel guilty when I’m sitting inside as the sun is shining, and I’m not yet hopelessly depressed from day turning to night at 3:30 pm. In that spirit, I managed to write a third (I think….approximately) of my new manuscript. The good news is that I don’t utterly hate it every time I open it. Some days I actually want to work on it, which is a feeling I’ve been unfamiliar with up to now. Maybe the worm has turned. Maybe one day I’ll happily sit here for three hours each day spewing reams of text out onto Microsoft Word. Only joking.
By the Feet of Men has broken the 600-sales mark, good old plucky book that it is. I’ve effectively stopped promoting it now, because I’d rather do literally anything else, but I did have a few things going on for it in October. Over at Between the Lines, I wrote about how we should respond in the face of a crisis (hint: I’m talking about the climate one) and compare it to some of the characters in BTFOM. At Whispering Stories, the novel received an excellent review, with “vivid gritty descriptions and a liberal use of metaphors, similes and pathos to paint an earthy picture of life lived on the edge”. Meanwhile at The Big Smoke, Joseph Haegar offered a thoughtful, in-depth critique that summarised the book as “like walking into a room and catching a scent from a recently departed friend”, which sounds very literary.
In productive writing news, I had a piece of creative non-fiction titled ‘Rust in vrede’ published in the new journals Cleaning Up Glitter. It was quite a personal piece, so I was glad to see it placed so quickly.
And now for music to soundtrack the comings and goings of hooded human beings on rain-lacquered streets throughout November:
DIIV - Skin Game
Floating Points - Anasickmodular
Teebs - Black Dove
billy woods, Kenny Segal - A Day in a Week in a Year
Little Simz - Pressure
Lone - Glyphic
Nick Cave - Night Raid
shadows in time