I unlocked some new writing achievements in September. 

The two biggest wins were:

1. Festive Treats - The Christmas anthology edited by Pigeon Park Press has now been launched. My story, A Partridge in a Tree, appears alongside fifteen other tales. The collection is available for Kindle and permanently free. Get your copy now!

2. Tall Tales - My story, The Queen of Hearts, was performed on Brum Radio on Tuesday as part of the returning Tall Tales series. Hats off to actor Nick Charlesworth for bringing my words to life and thank you to host Philip Ellis for choosing my story as the series opener. The Queen of Hearts is one of my favourite stories that I have written and serves as the opening tale in my collection Breadcrumbs. You can hear the performance on MixCloud and read my original words in Breadcrumbs.

Meanwhile, in other news, I have written another 12,543 words towards my third Nephos novel, bringing the total to 52,548 words. It was a slow month due to various distractions, such as the awesome Paralympics and our first family holiday to Cornwall.

I also performed at Books and Beer 3, a popular spoken word event hosted at The Gunmakers Arms. I read a poem called The Secret of Poy.

And I sent one of my rare author newsletters, which will hopefully become a lot less rare in future. Sign up to receive the next one in your inbox.

Next month, I will be speaking at Book To The Future for the third time with Katharine D'Souza, author of No Place. We will discuss self-publishing in detail, so this is a great talk for aspiring writers. We are fully-booked (yay!) but a few seats will be made available on the day.

I wrote 27,510 words towards my third Nephos novel this month. Boom! I've finally found that accelerator pedal.

This isn't quite up to NaNo standards but it's a vast improvement on every other month in 2016 so far. I now need to keep this pace going. I actually wr​ote 13,989 of those words in just one week (!) which is even beyond NaNo speed. If  every week is like that, this novel will be done in no time.

​Without doubt, the Olympics were a huge inspiration. Team GB's epic success made me want to put in the hours and be the best I can be. It also meant my wife was glued to the TV so I could sneak off and write!

​After adding this word count to my pre-August word count, I have a total of 40,005 words. Worryingly, the story is just warming up, so this might turn into a George RR Martin beast of a novel. This means I will definitely need to use a smaller font in my printed copy!

​In other writing news, the final edits of the Christmas anthology are complete. Festive Treats (recently renamed from Festive Cheer) will be soft-launched in September. Look out for my story.

I am also reading at Books and Beer 3 on Monday 12 September and speaking about self-publishing at Book To The Future with Katharine D'Souza on Thursday 13 October. Hope to see you there!