Me and writing have not been best buds lately – but there’s a reason for that, and a change in the pipeline.

In January 2015, wifey and I (plus the furry ones) moved ~4,000km west from Sydney to Perth (the drive took us 5 days!), where we’d just brought a house. It was a monstrous move, but one we were both excited about. And it’s been great, it’s been excellent. Perth rocks. Best city in Australia, if you ask me (although I’m yet to visit Darwin).

But that move coincided with me becoming one of the Directors of the business I was working for. That new role wasn’t expected or hoped for, and it blindsided me. The subsequent learning curve for how to run a business of this size swamped me, drained me, and just completely silenced my muse. Fortunately, my muse is a tough old bugger and he been banging around in my head of late, getting angrier and angrier at my lack of writing.

So now, more than half a year since this massive change, I find myself itching to get back into writing – to properly get back into writing and treating it like a second career. I’ve found a good balance between my palynology career and my writing career, and when I get home from the rig in a couple of days, it will be full steam back into it.

My HWA mentor, Weston Ochse, is tapping his fingers waiting for the next draft of the story I sent him. I have 4 completed novels all in need of an edit before I work out whether to self-publish them or go the traditional route (or maybe both). And I have Blurring the Line to complete. Plus too many half-finished short stories and one fully outlined but not yet started novella…

Still, for a year in which I’ve done bugger all writing, I will still (somehow) have 3 short stories published in different anthologies, and Blurring the Line released, so it hasn’t been too bad.

Onward and upwards!