Twenty people voted on what I should write for National Novel Writing Month this year, more than I expected. More than half of you voted for And the Devil Will Drag You Under¹, a novel about devils at war with each other in a modern city. Amusingly, this is actually the novel I was planning on writing last year during NaNoWriMo until my friend  Andrea Stewart talked me into writing Padma, a novel I’d been planning on writing for years. I have no regrets there.

If you want to have chapters of And the Devil Will Drag You Underr emailed to you, go click on my contact page and fill out the contact form there. I’ll know what to do.

Speaking of Padma, I’m still revising that one. I had hoped to have the second draft ready for my critique group in October, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’ve been taking an online class in writing inclusive fiction (by Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford of Writing the Other), and learning that there is a lot of work to do in order to properly flesh out my main character, who is a woman of half-Indian descent. That’s not to say that I’m not going to finish it, just that I have more work to do than I had originally anticipated. I’ve been working on it daily for about a month now.

My kaiju short story “Anamet” is progressing slowly. Again, I need to do some research in order to do the main character justice. This is another story I’d intended to have completed earlier; by mid-August, in fact. I tend to be very optimistic when estimating how long it’s going to write a story.

Other writing-related news: My short story “The B.I.M.” is with my critique group right now; and “A Pine Romance” is with a beta reader. We’ll see how they both go over.

How’s your day going?

1. Yes, there was a Jack L. Chalker novel with this title; my novel will have nothing to do with that one.