Jon's Author Diary - 105 - October 6, 2019

Welcome to Jon's author diary for the week ending October 6, 2019. It’s been a mixed bag of a week. It started well enough. I wrote a short story called The Princess and the Tailor for a charity anthology inspired by Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I took the theme of a person transforming into a monster and ran with it. It tells the story of the way Kat’s parents met in The Ravenglass Chronicles. And if you’ve read the series, you’ll know that things didn’t exactly go well. I want to thank everyone who helped make The Ravenglass Chronicles episodes 1-11 boxed set an Amazon best-seller. It was only there for a couple of days, but I did get a pretty orange tag on my book! I went back to work on The Hanged Man, which is book 12 of The Ravenglass Chronicles, and I’m about three-quarters through now. I had hoped to have my draft finished by Friday, but life has a tendency to throw obstacles in the way…   Digit On Thursday, my guide dog Digit was attacked by a Staffordshire bull terrier while I we were walking my son home from school. It was quite traumatic, but I managed to get the other dog off Digit before he could do any serious damage. Poor guy has three wounds on his front left leg. The vet has stapled and bandaged him and he’s walking around with a cone around his head. The wounds went down to the muscle, but didn’t damage the muscle, so he should be healed in a couple of weeks. What made it particularly frustrating was that the dog’s owner was completely unapologetic and ran off when I tried to speak to him. Luckily, one of the other parents managed to get a photo of him, so hopefully the police will be able to catch up with him. I had to deal with the fallout from that for the rest of Thursday and all day Friday. So this has meant going to the vets (twice), talking to the police, Guide Dogs, and the local dog warden to give statements, etc. And, now, I am out of a guide dog for two weeks meaning I have to go back to using my white cane…which sucks.   Podcasting On the Sci-Fi Roundtable this week, Shane Thomas and I were joined by author Andy Zach to discuss the neuralink, which enables you to link your brain to a computer. But this isn’t science fiction; one of Elon Musk’s companies is working on this. Visit: sfrtpodcast.libsyn.com or find it wherever you download your podcasts.   Patreon Finally, please do check out my Patreon page. We’re coming to the end of the Wizard of the Wasteland re-write, so, next, I’ll be posting the pre-edited chapters of the new version of The Fool, which is set about six months before The Ravenglass Chronicles and tells the story of how Kat and Hansel became friends. Visit: patreon.com/joncronshawauthor  and get access today.   Yours,   Jon