J P Smythe’s Website.

It’s been a while, eh?

2009 was a good year, sort of. There was lots of stuff that happened that I enjoyed, and lots that – frankly – could have gone somewhat better. But 2010 is starting with promise and oodles of optimism, and I need to ride that wave.

I’m going to be redesigning this site – or persuading somebody else to do it for me – and heading back into blogging full-steam. I feel that, finally, I have something worth talking about again (in the process of the publication of my first novel, Hereditation); I’m going to discuss the blurb process, the cover process, the stuff that myself and my publishers are going to be doing with the digital area (which is VERY exciting, and stuff that I’ve been bleating on about for ages), and the marketing stuff – readings, that sort of thing. It should be interesting, or I’ll try and make it so. I’ll also be discussing the state of writing at the moment, and the state of reading, and the state of the internet; you know, all that good stuff you love. Oh, and I’ll be putting fiction up here. I’ve been writing more and more short stuff, and some of it has been (or is going to be) published, and some of it will go up here instead, for you, for no money at all.

I’ve just finished writing something, and God knows if anything will come of it. The Testimony – the novel that some of you helped me blurb – fell apart as I edited it. It was the first time that I’ve written something that, I felt, was harder to write than I was capable of. What I wanted to say isn’t what was being said in the end, and I didn’t know how to get that across. It was a different book than I intended, and I took it back, rewrote it (almost completely from scratch) and got stuck halfway through. I don’t know what I want it to be now, what I need it to be to actually put it out there, so I’ve just left it, stewing, in a folder. I’ll come back to it someday; I love it too much to not.

And so I wrote something else, something that looks and tastes like Sci-Fi but is actually not, not really. It’s a story about what happens when you can’t control your own life, when you want to do something but can’t. Some people might see this as a metaphor for my current and on-going process of applying for HE teaching jobs. I don’t.

Anyway, so, in summary; lots of stuff will be happening right here. I would say “Don’t go anywhere!” but that would be terribly selfish of me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 3:49 am and is filed under Hereditation, Novels, Publishing, Short Stories, The Testimony, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.