Moving fast. But not actually getting anywhere.

I had such great plans for the year. I was going to finish all the novels I had half-written, as well as the short story ideas that were cluttering up my mind.

I know, the best laid plans and all that.

You can tell from the picture that things haven’t really worked out.

To be fair, January saw a promising start. In the first few days, I wrote over 7000 words of The Collective. Then I had the urge to write short stories. They took over.

I managed four or five, and that thread of inspiration faded.

Now I’m stuck, with no ideas or motivation. I’ve been opening each of my projects in turn. I’m trying to see if any of them will inspire the narrator in my head to start talking to me.

I had no luck with Wake Me Up (888 words). Or Whatever Happened to Andorra Pett (2030 words).

Then, I had an idea that fitted in with an old short story, called Do You Want to Live. I’ve added 2500 words to it, and I think it will become a novel. It’s Magical Realism, set in a sort of Steampunk world.

It’s not Norlandia, where my other Steampunk novels take place, and unlike those, there’s quite a bit of fantasy added to it.

I have also done a bit to Another Rainy Night in Helcon City, a Sci-fi noir with world-weary detectives, femmes fatalé and all sorts of 1940s, Raymond Chandler-inspired chicanery. Set in a place where spaceships cruise the Galaxy

Then this happened.

At 0515 on Tuesday morning, I was typing away when I got this email from Threads.

Sure enough, I tried to log in and found that I had to go through all sorts of security. I got a message saying they were verifying my login. An hour later, I got this,

I have no idea what I’d done to deserve that, no warnings about anything I’d posted or engaged with. My Facebook and Instagram accounts are also disabled, so apart from here and on Substack, I was suddenly invisible to the world.

And there was nowhere I could go to appeal.

Despite what it says, you can’t download your information. That link doesn’t work.

It seemed at that point that the bots were in charge. Happy days.

But then. Someone must have had a bad attack of common sense because about twelve hours later, I got this.

This is interesting because I didn’t request a review. As I explained, I had no chance to do that.

All’s well that ends well. Although I am a little nervous about posting and engaging again.

Also, this week, I’ve been updating my distribution. Inspired by Chantelle Atkins, I’ve been moving all my novels from exclusivity on Amazon to wide distribution. Which means you can now read them via Apple, Kobo, Nook and many other platforms. I thought it would be a lot of work, but it’s been surprisingly easy.

Not only that, I’ve had an offer of another outlet for my books. I can’t tell you more as it hasn’t launched yet, but I’ll give you the details when it’s up and running.

With all that, and everything else that’s been going on in my life (far too much medical information for this post), I haven’t had much time for reading or TV.

Hopefully, I’ll catch up on that over the weekend.

Have a good week.

I’d love to get your comments, please leave them below. While you’re here, why not take a look around? There are some freebies and lots more content, about me, my writing and everything else that I do. You can join my newsletter for a free novella and more news by clicking this link.

Find my books here