Jon's Author Diary - 081 - April 21, 2019

Hello, welcome to my Author Diary for the week ending April 21, 2019.   This week has been a bit different to what I expected. My son went to stay with his grandma for a couple of days, so that gave me chance to do some writing.   Because this wasn't scheduled work week, I decided to focus on the Black Death series, so I wrote twenty scenes—ten for book one and ten for book two—to fill in the gaps from losing one the collaborators.   The scenes are very barebones at the moment—they are in a first draft state. I will add more descriptions and bringing out more of the emotional impact in later drafts, but the dialogue and the story are there. I tend to write something similar to a poorly written screenplay for my first draft and then build on that until I get to to third and fourth drafts where I focus on things on the sentence level. Draft one is just me getting the story out of my head as quickly as possible.    I’ve re-read the first two books, and I have to say I’m very excited about the story. We’ve sat on it for over a year and it’s a relief to see the story works really well, and I especially love the way the suspence ramps up in the second book.   The new scenes are quite dark, so this isn't going to be a book for younger readers. Most of the books I’ve written tend to be suitable for teenagers, but this one is definitely geared towards an adult audience. There are dark themes and bad language.   I made a start on The Hermit, which is book nine of The Ravenglass Chronicles. I’m not sure yet how it's going to work with getting this next book out in June based of how long they usually take to write. I’ve got my sister-in-law staying at the moment and then next week my sister and her boyfriend are coming to stay for the week. The week after that, we're getting a new boiler fitted, so having some quiet time to write will be a challenge. I'll just see how things work out, but I should have a solid first draft by mid-May…hopefully.   Reading    I'm currently reading a book called Yendi by Stephen Brust. It’s a fast-paced, tightly written fantasy assassin story. It's a six-hour audiobook, so it’s the perfect antidote to the thirty-three hour slog that was The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams. I'm already halfway through, and it's a blast.   Game of Thrones!   I watched the new episode of Game of thrones this week, which is very exciting. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this whole things turns out.   My wife and I made a little bit of a date night of it. So we ordered some takeaway food and put our feet up and watched.   I don't know where I heard it, but I was sure the episodes in this series were supposed to be ninty-minutes long—this one wasn't. It was a standard episode. Without giving away any spoiler, it was basically a lot of setup for the finale.   Podcast   Aside from the writing, I’ve also also been working on getting the episodes ready for the Sci-fi Roundtable podcast.   This is a podcast I've been doing with other science fiction and fantasy authors where we geek out about specific topics in science fiction and fantasy. We’ve recorded episodes about the multiverse, steampunk, Japanese mythology, and troubleshooting (with a real rocket scientist!)   Our aim is to launch this on Thursday, April 24, so look out for next week’s newsletter for the download link.   Question   I had a question this week from Amelia. She asked “What is your favourite fantasy series?”   This is one of those questions where there are probably too many to name but think it has to be Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive…so far, at least