Jon's Author Diary - 108 - October 27, 2019

Welcome to Jon's author diary for the week ending October 27, 2019. This week has been half-term holidays in the UK, so I have been in dad mode. It’s been great spending quality time with my son—the kid is so imaginative! He could talk for England on the subject of Pokémon and got quite competitive over a few games of Mario Kart. I did manage to go over notes from beta readers for book 12 of The Ravenglass Chronicles and a short story set in the Ravenglass Universe for an anthology of stories inspired by Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde. But, the half-term holidays are only a week, so my son goes back to school on Monday and I have to get back to the writing. My plan is start my first draft of book 13 of The Ravenglass Chronicles, which is inspired by the tarot card ‘death.’ I’ve written the outline and am I’m chomping at the bit to start writing—I have a feeling this episode is going to be far too much fun. It’s interesting the types of things I’ve found myself researching for my books. Over the past year I’ve explored old ships and Anglo Saxon burial grounds, and learned about sword fighting, medieval food, and making poisons. This week I got far too much detail from an expert about how corpses decompose. Yuck! At least it’s inspired a rather disgusting scene in my next book. My wife and I finished watching the new series of Stranger Things on Netflix. Maybe it’s because I’m the perfect age for the nostalgia to make me feel nice and fuzzy, but I loved this show. Going in, I was a little bit worried that the quality might dip (I thought the second season paled in comparison to the first—and the less said about Eleven’s tangent episode, the better). But this series was fantastic. And The Neverending Story bit was hilarious. I grew up on 80s movies where a group of friends go on an adventure (The Goonies, IT, Stand by Me, etc.), so this ticked a lot of boxes for me. I’m now at loss as to what to watch next. Now that I’ve finished posting the re-write of Wizard of the Wasteland on Patreon, I have started posting chapters from a new prequel to The Ravenglass Chronicles. The story is called The Fool, and it’s a new novella-length story about how Kat and Hansel first met. Visit: patreon.com/joncronshawauthor and start reading today.