We are one month into 2025 now. The weather in Cape Town has been more beautiful than usual for summer (no wind), and it is really feeling like a holiday city with growing numbers of overseas visitors. I won’t complain about tourists because I am holding out hope that one day I may entice my writer friends to come here. I treat each new year as a continuation of the last. I can’t remember when I last tried to make a New Year’s resolution. Now that I am approaching middle age, instead of cramming more into my life, I’d like to keep doing the same things but better. The good habits I currently have were started at just about every other time of the year. That said, I have started a Substack for cover reveals (and maybe ARC / new release reviews). I like keeping this web page for monthly blog posts, but that will be a good place for additional content that doesn’t quite fit the themes of what I share here.
In November 2024, I entered the last 3rd of my draft for the sequel to Far Removed. It looks like it will be 43 chapters – depending on input from beta readers and my editor, that number may change. I’ve booked my editor for June, and I hope I can make that self-imposed deadline. Involving other people in my publishing timeline is a helpful way to ensure perfectionism doesn’t weigh me down. My goal was to complete draft 1 by the end of January. I am still six chapters away, but the most challenging ones have been resolved. Contributing to the delay was a short story of around 7k words. It may make an appearance in some form this year.
I try to write relatively clean first drafts, though not so clean that I can boldly post excerpts. Still, I consider things like word choice and descriptions early on. Soon, I’ll need to attend to the placeholder names for those background characters that make brief appearances. In Book 2, I’ve decided to depict the enforcers, a paramilitary group in Apidecca, with lethal weapons. We didn’t really get a chance to see them fight in Far Removed. Plasma weapons felt too powerful and high-energy for Knyadrea, but gunpowder was too familiar. I did some research into coilguns and railguns, deciding that these could serve as inspiration for the kind of firearms that’ll appear in the story. Electromagnetic weapons are not an original concept in sci-fi, but I don’t want to give them so much attention that they pull focus. I am not a fan of guns, but Knyadrea does have technology comparable to 21st-century Earth (ahead in some respects and behind in others), so it makes sense that some would be in the hands of enforcers and rebels.
When it comes to writing, some days are better than others. I almost typed “some segments” just now. That happens when I’ve been in Knyadrea for too long. My dad was involved in a minor car accident, and I have been driving him and other family members around. He is uninjured and his car is fixed now, so all is well again. I am trying to reframe the way I look at multitasking. I’ve always told myself I hate it, that I want to lock myself up in a room and paint or write for the whole day like I did when I was a teenager in the school holidays. You don’t get many such days when you’re working. Maybe my attention span has slipped since my youth, but I am starting to find I hit a wall if I try to write too much in one sitting. That’s not altogether a bad thing. When writing is something I can reward myself with, the ideas come gushing forth, and I don’t let other aspects of life get out of hand.
C B Lansdell 