Still here

The story I mentioned in my last post, provisionally titled Coyote in the Corner, is finished in first draft. As with a lot of these stories I need to revise it once I have some distance from it. Having said that, I usually find myself disliking the stories while I write them and then finding that they're not as bad as I thought when I finally read them through. This is probably because I am in the habit of revising the previous day's writing before continuing.

I had hoped to write the final story in this sequence soon, but Coyote in the Corner sets up a sequel that has to have happened before the final story can take place. So I will now have to write two more to wrap up the necessary loose ends. I think that means the first draft of the collection will come in around 100,000 words.

Stepping back from the stories, I'm pleased with how this whole thing has gone. I make no claims for the quality of my writing, but I do flatter myself that it is better now than it was a year ago. I'm also pleased that by taking this a piece at a time I will have generated a book length collection. They may only ever be read by a very small number of people, but that's OK because I'm mainly writing for my own pleasure with no other expectations.

I also have a queue of future stories building up in notebooks. These constitute two stand alone novels, which carry no macabre payload, and a further sequence of "vamp" stories which follow on from the events of the current series.