"... what's up with Project Holy Hand Grenade?" you ask (or not). I've been conspicuously silent on that front for a while.
Basically, earlier this year, I shelved it. I wasn't feeling the creative juices at all. My second novel's a bit dark, and after finishing all the edits I just couldn't get myself out of that headspace. Not that it's a bad headspace, it just wasn't appropriate for the new work. The day job situation was also first pretty busy, then pretty depressing, as I found myself caught in the middle of the imploding game industry's layoffs here in Vancouver.
So I took a break from fiction and worked on a side project: putting out Shorescapes of Southern British Columbia, as a non-fiction exercise in self-publishing. I don't want to jump into self-publishing fiction right now, but felt this project would go a long way towards helping me work out the pros and cons of the process, with very little risk. You may have noticed links to the print and e-book editions in the sidebar. I'll probably blog more in the near future about what the process was like and how it worked out.
At any rate, aside from potentially putting out a PDF e-book edition for non-Apple tablets, Shorescapes is now taking up much less of my mindshare, and so: back to Project Holy Hand Grenade! The break let me simmer on some things that were lacking in the initial concept, but accomplished what I was hoping it would do: let the emotional core of the story bubble up to the forefront of my brain.
Who knows? If I time it perfectly I might just have a good enough outline to finally try out NaNoWriMo this year.
And with that, I guess I have a new goal.
