Keith's March Newsletter

Hello One and All!

Been a while huh? Three months to be precise. My how the time flies.

For those that don’t know I’ve been dealing with a perfect storm of nonsense recently which I’m through now thankfully. There’s plenty more to come of course, there always is, but for now I can relax and just get on with things.

Here’s what happened…

Keep On Moving. Keep on Moving Don’t Stop No.

I had to move house in January, which sucked. I had somewhere lined up, but it fell through at the last minute, which sucked even more, and so I became what I like to call “Technically Homeless”. It’s not the first time, and it probably won’t be the last, but as I didn’t end up living on the streets I can’t complain too much. There are those who have it worse off than me.

I did however end up living in hostels and B&Bs for several weeks (mostly in York) which was a bit of a pain. And I had to put all my stuff into storage, which was expensive. This was all aggro I could have done without, but after about three weeks of this I found a place to move into at the start of February and have been there ever since. It’s not ideal, but it’ll do for now whilst I come up with a better plan. This whole situation has made me more determined than ever to no longer live at the behest of other people.

News From The Steam Factory

Although life recently has not been not conducive to creative endeavours I have recently finished writing something new, a solarpunk young adult novel called The Journeyman (or quite possibly, In The Valley Of The Wind). It’s short at 53k words but it is, in my humble opinion, very good. I just have a few tweaks to make, a chapter to rewrite from scratch, then I hope to get it out to readers. After that I intend to send it out to agents. I’m hopeful of getting this one traditionally published, and I’d certainly like it to get the sort of push a big publisher could give it.

I also started on book three of The Hammersmyth Tales, Attack Mars!!, but I had to stop again. It was a bit all over the place, and I didn’t have a good escalation for the storyline as I hadn’t written a proper outline. Rest assured I have now, and hope to get back to it real soon.

You all should have seen in your inbox an exclusive short story from me called Professor Schroedinger’s Time Machine. This was a short story I wrote for a “quantum steampunk” competition that didn’t even get shortlisted, so I decided to make it available to newsletter subscribers as a thank you for subscribing.

The eagle-eyed among you will also have noticed a change in format for this newsletter. I’ve moved over from Mailchimp to Beehiiv for my newsletter needs, as the former wanted to charge me $29 a month because I had over 500 subscribers. Deciding that was bonkers I’ve switched to a platform that allows me 2500 subscribers for free, a much better prospect considering I don’t make any money out of this newsletter. I also, in my exportations, have whittled down the subscriber list to about 170, those being people who opened at least one of my last five newsletters.

If you are reading this you are one of those 170, and your support is much appreciated. However, I am aware that some people might not appreciate such cavalier use of their email, it being moved from one place to another, and if that is the case my apologies. Please feel free to unsubscribe with no hard feelings.

When I’m Not Writing

Unsurprisingly I’ve done, seen, and read a lot over the past three months, but I’m not going to go into it all now. I’ve also rewatched quite a lot of stuff, repetition being very comforting in times of stress. I’m not going to go into all of that either. The one thing I’ll mention is my reading of Howl’s Moving Castle.

I wanted to read it because I saw a Tik Tok (I’ve deleted Tik Tok BTW. Best decision I’ve made in a long time.) talking about the theory that the movie of HMC is how Howl likes to tell people he met Sophie, but the book is how they really met. I wanted to see what that was all about so I gave the book a go. I also wanted to see if the book made any more sense than the movie because the movie, as far as I’m concerned, just has a lot of stuff happening without much explanation, and that has always bugged me.

I can report that the book makes about as much sense as the movie. Things still just happen for no reason, and they are often never explained. It’s annoying but what can you do. It is what it is. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine, and I enjoyed reading it, but as for knowing what is going on a lot of the time, forget about it.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ll sign off by mentioning that I should be doing an in-person event in June, as part of a northern authors thing. It’ll be at the Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds, so if any of you want to pop along and say hi that’s where you’ll need to go.

I’m still finalising the details with the organiser, but all being well I’ll be able to tell you more in the coming months. In the meantime, thank you for your time, thank you for your continuing support, and I’ll see you all at the end of April.

Toodle-pip for now.

Keith