Writing Projects Update - aka why I've not been blogging much lately

I’ve had a busy few months writing-wise and here’s the highlights:

• Having a book covers exhibition at the Harbour Lights cinema in Southampton with author friends, Clare London and Charlie Cochrane.
  
• Rewriting, pruning mercilessly, self-editing and sending off to an editor my male / female category romance, currently titled Jilted At The Altar. That’s with the editor now for whipping into shape before I submit it later in June. Because it’s a new genre from what I normally write, it’s been very difficult, has gone through a number of rewrites, starts and restarts, but working with the editor I’m learning so much which is what it’s all about.
• The Elizabeth Goudge entry – this year the theme is The Child From The Sea. I’ve written a 2000 word first chapter based on this, sent to beta readers, edited based on their feedback and sent to the RNA chair for blind judging. The winner will be announced at the RNA conference in July. Even if I don’t get anywhere with it at this competition – which is pretty likely because it’s quite weird, and also not a traditional male female romance obviously – then I have a start of another male male category romance I’ll add to my ‘to be written’ list for later.
• Writing Tony and Nick’s story – this is now at 43,000 words. I started it at the Sussex writing retreat on 11 May and am now self-editing which will probably add words so it’s about 50,000 (yes I know it’s odd, but when I self edit, I generally add words in as my first drafts tend to be mainly dialogue with almost no description, so they can read a bit like a radio play otherwise!)
  
• Writing Kieran and His Friends which ended up being 62,000 words – inspired by the film Peter’s Friends, this is about a group of gay men who are friends from uni, and their partners, spending a long weekend together. They laugh, they cry, they talk about their relationships and get drunk, a lot. And pleasingly enough, it’s spawned 3 spin off stories which will mean three other couples get their happy ever afters – Tony and Nick being one of them. It includes characters from my other stories including Kieran from Best Friends Perfect, Julian, Bjorn and Troy from I Should Be So Lucky (out in August), Tony from the Kev trilogy (out from August). And it was a joy to write from start to finish.
• Planning content for the RNA conference workshop I’m running with Virginia Heath as Real People Write Books – writing sensual love scenes without stuffing the turkey. And it’s going to be practical, jargon-free and above all such enormous fun.
• Doing some panel-beating for UK Meet – we have a shortlist of panels and I’m going to start contacting volunteers to organise the content over the next few weeks.
• Preparing to publish Marketing the Romance – this is with a beta reader now, Himself is doing the cover and will upload to Amazon to publish as an e-book and paperback. I’ve had some wonderful feedback and cover quotes from romance author friends in various genres of romance who’ve read it and I can’t wait to release it into the wild.
• Submitting stories to agents to see if I can get some representation to widen my audience into more mainstream fiction.

Future plans for the rest of 2018 include:

• Writing 2-3 more new stories
  
• Working with my two new publishers to publish and promote 6 contracted books
• Self editing and submitting my back catalogue of finished works in progress – I now have two publishers who seem to be happy to publish my stories, so I’m going to work with them to get more of my unpublished work out there.
  
• Exploring more ghost-writing opportunities
• Self publishing my backlist of 8 books I’ve received my rights back for