Keith's March Newsletter

Welcome to the future fellow space travellers

Hope you all remembered to put your clocks forward last night? Of course most of them are automatic these days but still, there’s always one you miss eh?

I had to get up for an early shift this morning so the loss of an hour was keenly felt. Hopefully I catch up a bit tonight but who knows. That’s usually when the insomnia kicks in.

Two Ten Eleven; Eyes Fingers Toes

I am happy to report that my injured finger is more or less back to its old self. There’s some residual stiffness and a thickening of the skin around where they operated but other than that it’s mostly okay. Some random tenderness around the inside of the joint but that’s only noticable when I stir a cup of tea. I won’t subject you to any pictures. Suffice to say it looks like a finger again.

Apart from my recovery I only did a couple of things of note this month. I went to the ballet, which honestly was a little disappointing, and I went to a retro arcade with some friends from work.

Near where I used to live I’ve always wanted to go, I just never got round to it. There were three floors of games, more than you could play in one night, and for £17 entry you got to play them as many times as you like. I was mostly there for Time Crisis 2 and Sega Rally, two of my favourites. I wanted to see if I’d still got it (I hadn’t). But I also got to have a go at VR for the first time and that was great. I played Beat Sabre, and whilst I’m not up to Rush E just yet I did pretty well, so much so I’d be tempted to buy a VR headset for home. You can get one for your PC so you never know.

I was knackered by the end though. I’m not as young as I used to be, and after four hours of heavy game play I was starting to feel it. Still I’d go again, I’d just take a break every now and then.

News From The Steam Factory

I’ve managed to do some rewrites on In The Valley Of The Wind (The Journeyman) these past few weeks. It’s been going really well. Once I gave in to the idea that I should stop trying to save what was there and just do it again things got a lot smoother. I have kept some bits intact, it’s not a complete page one rewrite, but the bits that I thought were boring I’ve rewritten completely so that they flow a little better. I’ve added nearly three-thousand words and I’m learning stuff about the main character, Kochi, which means it’ll be a whole new book by the time I’m finished.

I’ve also kinda started on a new project, a collaboration with the writer LA Guettler, which for the moment is called Tales From The Fuzzy Duck. It’ll be a collection of fantasy short stories, loosely intertwined, centred around a tavern called the Fuzzy Duck. I’ve done the first one, Why The Long Face?, and LA is working on story number two. There’s no plan to do anything with them right now. For the moment we’re just having fun and trying to amuse each other lol.

When I’m Not Writing

This month’s read entered my TBR courtesy of Twitter. Someone tweeted about the outlandish title and I just had to give it a go. It’s called That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf, by Kimberly Lemming.

A good title and a good cover will go most of the way to selling me a book. Add to that skillful writing and I’m all the way there, no matter what it’s about.

That Time I Got Drunk And Yeeted A Love Potion At A Werewolf is superbly written. Fun, funny, expertly described without going on too much (which is my personal sweet spot) this book was a great read. The second of Kimberly Lemming’s Mead Mishaps, it does exactly what it says on the tin. The main charcater Bree angrily throws a love potion at someone, they duck, and she hits a werewolf called Felix who immediately imprints on her as his fated mate. But is it the love potion that’s made him do it or is he really in love?

What follows is a lot of silly shenanigans as they wait for the love potion to wear off to see how he really feels, intermixed with sexy times that I’m going to tell you now do not leave anything to the imagination. She’s a spicy one and no mistake.

I honestly loved this book, not only because it is well written but because it does something different with the fantasy setting, something fun and interesting, and I always like reading something that does something new, especially when it gives me ideas.

I can recommend giving this book a go. I’m certainly going to be trying more books from the same author as soon as I can.

And there you have it, a relatively quiet month for me (thanks to the finger). The only other thing I want to mention is I’ve entered Glunda The Veg Witch for the Book Blogger’s Novel of the Year Award 2024 (BBNYA24) in both the book and cover categories. No idea if it’ll win but if I can at least get shortlisted it’ll go a long way to getting it some much needed publicity.

There won’t be any news on this for months but even so wish me luck. I’m really proud of Glunda so it’d be awesome if I can get more people to give it a go.

Toodle-pip for now.

Keith