Well, I was quieter than I intended to be here for the last few weeks. Most of it's been mental health-related; the old Black Dog (aka depression) left me flattened and debilitated throughout. I'd hoped to get The Ravening revised and ready to send back to the Angry Robot for approval by the end of September, but in the end I was barely able to do anything.
Depression's bloody horrible, mainly because it makes everything feel... well, meaningless. That, and a huge effort. Even simple tasks can seem monumental, and also leave you asking "What's the point?" I spent a good couple of weeks doing not much more than lying in bed, managing to add a thousand words to The Sound Of The Dark per day.
Writing is one of the things that keeps me sane, or at least (like Evelyn Waugh's Catholicism, maybe) prevents me from being even worse. It helped, anyway.
I'm still not sure what set it off - what sets any of it off, really. Sometimes there seems to be a specific cause: I will admit that despite my resolve not to be disappointed if I lost out at the British Fantasy Awards, I didn't succeed, even though the book I thought was the best novel (Sarah Gailey's Just Like Home - read it, folks, read it) won. I was pretty down for the next couple of days. Maybe that was the trigger. Or at other times I wonder if I got overconfident and pushed myself too hard, so that something give way.
And sometimes I think depression is just something I have, a chronic affliction that's sometimes (usually, hopefully) dormant but which from time to time flares up. Treating it that way seems to help, whatever the cause, because once it hits me it's like coming down with a virus: fighting it only makes it worse, and the best bit is to take it as easy as you can and weather the storm.
Anyway, the worst passed, and I've got back to work.
Currently I'm writing the first draft of The Sound Of The Dark, which if all goes according to plan will be my third novel from Angry Robot, coming out in 2025. It's currently round the 106,000 word mark, and in (hopefully) the final leg of the action.
That takes up my mornings; the afternoons are occupied with revisions to The Ravening, my second Angry Robot book, which should be out in 2024. After that's done there are other manuscripts in need of retooling, which I hope to get done by the end of this year.
One very nice and unexpected bit of news came along yesterday, in the form of a royalty payment for The Hollows. The Little Horror Novel That Could has earned out its advance and turned a tidy little profit. Another first for me
As a result of which, I'll be treating Mrs Church to a week in North Wales, the land of my fathers, in a few weeks' time.
I'm hoping I can get both the revisions and the first draft completed before we go away. It'll make the holiday considerably more relaxing!
Well, that's all for now. Back soon with something more... seasonal.
Till then, take care.
Daniel. :)
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