I’ve completed the first two chapters worth of edits on Spatterbaum and Zitherbother, and as a result, my brain is taking on mush-like qualities. The book has turned out to be pitched to a slightly older audience than I first anticipated, so a lot of the rewriting is taking the form of New and Improved character motivations and plotting, as well as the standard sentence-level stuff.

I’m working on a couple of short stories at the moment, too (well, about half a dozen, really, but only two today). One, about eco-friendly guerilla protest tactics using contact lenses, is coming along quite nicely, but the other one is about as much fun as pulling teeth (having them pulled, that is, and without anaesthetic. I’d imagine that the act of pulling teeth could be quite a lark for those with a wide streak of schadenfreude). It’s for a themed anthology where I’ve been asked to write a story set to a song with entirely indecipherable, nonsensical song lyrics–and not indecipherable and nonsensical in a good way–and I’m really struggling to keep my story centred around it. I think the song focus has definitely been to the detriment of the story, to be honest. Perhaps I can get off track a bit and make it something that has been ‘inspired by’ rather than ‘written around’ this bloody song.