Writing is something I wanted to do for a long time. I told my grandparents I wanted to be a writer when I was 19 or so, although at the time I struggled with what to write about. I was running roleplaying games and writing lots of scenario material for those, but no narrative fiction.

My fiction writing began with serial stories that I distributed where I was working. That got a couple of my stories finished at least, and I began having more ideas - not all of them were good ideas, and I sometimes got bogged down in tool building (ask me about DataFrame sometime) but I was writing frequently, if not consistently.

Things ground to a halt when I moved from Nottingham to Surrey - lots of things changed then, not all of them for the better. I tried growing up, but it didn't take. Bits of writing popped up here and there, including trying to write serial fiction for colleagues again. Then I had a computer crash which destroyed a lot of data including the latest version of the vampire story I had been working on. I didn't work on anything substantial for a long time.

I was newly settled in Oregon when the itch started. I came back to the story I had lost in the computer crash and tried to move it forward, but I got stuck on tools again. Oh, and editing paralysis: chapter one was excellent, but I never even got to the end of chapter two.

This is where National Novel Writing Month comes in. I saw Chris Baty speak about NaNoWriMo a whole two days before the month was to start. His presentation convinced me that doing this was a good idea, so I dusted off that same recalcitrant story, wrote up some chapter summaries, and splurged out the story in less than three weeks.

And I've been writing novels under NaNoWriMo's auspices ever since.

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These are the books I am working on at the moment. Some of them are a little bit further down the stack than others.

• Livia and the Corpuscles - NaNoWriMo 2015. A story of Steampunk Rome, soon to be available on Amazon and CreateSpace. Rome freed its slaves centuries ago and built machines to do the work instead. Now two friends discover the dark secret behind the technological lifestyle they lead.
• Perscon - NaNoWriMo 2015. "Dack Sudo, a charismatic street tough, has a way out - recording his personality for others to experience - but then he's banned when his mind proves too dangerous. When he is marked for death, he must find the truth about hidden mind control technology before the conspiracy takes over completely." (NaNo draft complete, but haven't read it yet)
• Shapes of Chance - NaNoWriMo 2013. Minarr is a normal peasant girl in a bonded village. She is about to begin her marriage to her sweetheart Lomax when she suddenly starts to see probability. As the threat from the revolutionary army grows, can she learn to control her new gifts and reunite with the ghost of her dead twin brother? (second draft underway)
• A Turquoise Song - NaNoWriMo 2011, 2014. Artificial intelligence is real, but only a few know how to fix it when it breaks. Ghen Wishart is one of those who can, and in fixing a spate of faults in police patrol bots he learns of a threat to humanity with echoes from his own past. (second draft written but unred)
• Bluehammer - NaNoWriMo 2005, 2007-10, 2012. This is a sprawling story about three people with different roles in the fight against an oppressive establishment. This started as a standard 50k draft, but I quickly realised that it was a précis for a trilogy. It's set on an alien moon orbiting a gas giant around a distant star, amongst humans who have been there so long they have forgotten that they are colonists. I'm not actively developing this at the moment, but one day I will figure out how to tell this story so that it is interesting. In abeyance until that glorious time.

Having two books for NaNoWriMo 2015 is not a mistake - I wrote two books that year.

The others from 2004 (my first NaNoWriMo year) and 2006 (the year I came closest to not completing) are even more deeply abandoned than Bluehammer. They are stories I still want to tell, but there is some rethinking to be done.

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