I’m procrastinating. It’s nothing new; along with chocolate, procrastination is probably one of my biggest weaknesses. What am I procrastinating from? My latest (and soon to be first real and available) novel.

The novel in question (more info here) was intended to be a short affair, straddling the line between novella and novel, and would be self-published so that finally after years of getting up at 4am to write before work, I could hold a book that I wrote. Unsurprisingly, it ended up being longer than intended.

Rough ideas of the lengths of novel/novellas place the divide at anything from 30 to 50 thousand words. However, the SFWA Nebula awards place the cut off point at 40,000 words, so I went with that. It’s currently at 52, but I have some editing to do. Still, it’s nearly done!

So, the point of this post? Other than to avoid doing what I’m supposed to be doing, that is. I thought I’d lay out my [near] future plans for all that are interested (and so I have them written down to reference).

• Finish this novel, obviously - I estimate (most like erroneously), that I have a few days, maybe a week left of working on this novel before it will be ready to force upon the kind and beautiful people that have agreed to pre-read it for me. Their opinions in hand, there will be one more rewrite, then, so long as the extremely talented and equally beautiful people that have offered to do cover art and edit the thing haven’t changed my mind, it’ll be away to them and, finally, release.
• Attempt a reading - I fervently hope to have this available in audio form, it all depends on how much I hate my voice after the first page…
• Overhaul my website - jbullock.co.uk will be getting a new look and purpose. There are so many places on the Internet to post this kind of thing that I hardly feel the need to have a “blog” any more. The site will become a place where I aggregate all my other stuff (Tumblr feed, Twitter, G+ etc) and post updates on writing related escapades (for example, short story publication, book available, told to “stop bothering us” by publisher).
• Write something else - Back to the keyboard. What I’ll be writing is uncertain. There’s the Wrong Universe series of short stories that I started writing (I’m currently leaning towards writing another one for my next project), there’s a NaNoWriMo 2010 manuscript that is skulking on my hard drive unedited, there’s the 100k+ novel I’ve been writing on and off for nearly two years, and there are about thirteen other ideas I want to turn into stories.

So there you (and I) have it. Now, I really should get back to editing this novel, or it’ll never be done.