I’m a writer and sometime comicker based in Edinburgh.  In 2011 I wrote the first drafts of 12 books in 12 months and since then I have mostly been editing them (in between the day job and projects like commissioning and publishing an eBook, Homespun Threads, and contributing to a crowd sourced Choose Your Own Adventure story called The Working Barbarian).

12 Books in 12 months began, as so many things do, with National Novel Writing Month.  In November 2010 I wrote my first book (or 52,000 words of a first draft),  The Single Mum’s Aristocratic Library Assistant, and enjoyed myself so much so that in December, far from being emotionally drained from all the writing, I felt bereft at the lack of creative challenges.

I spent a lot of 2011 doing this face.

Writing 12 Books in 12 Months was the answer to this problem.  I picked a different genre for every month and after midnight on the 30th / 31st day I moved on, finished or not.  Unsure whether I would be able to keep up the momentum all year I appealed to the public through this blog, Twitter and Facebook to give me ideas for character names and genre tropes to work into each story.  They were very supportive, as were local media types in Edinburgh, so that whatever other challenges I faced during the project I knew I wasn’t alone.  That might sound trite, but I was genuinely overwhelmed by the level of support I received for what I described self consciously to friends thus: ‘hey guys, I’ve got a potentially really stupid idea…’

Even now I’m still trawling through the ramblings and trying to make sense of them all.  There’s a lot of raw material to sift, especially in light of the fact that I took November 2012 to start work on a thirteenth book about the experience of writing 12 books in 12 months – and because I’ve since started work on several other books for children.  The main legacy of the project seems to have been too many half formed ideas and a devastatingly high WPM.

The long term plan is to self publish some of the manuscripts – although as the only person who has read them all, I can safely say a couple really aren’t worth it (for instance in August, for SF, I accidentally wrote a story that already exists – Uglies by Scott Westerfield.  Awkward.).

In the meantime, this blog consists of musings on my own writing journey, news about literary events, stories, author interviews, and attempts to put a bookish spin on various photography challenges.  I hope you enjoy it!