July 2024 – Mick Canning

A mere ten days after mentioning I thought I was close to finishing the final draft of A Good Place, it is, in fact, finished. This is the second novel I have written that’s set in India, this time in a fictitious hill station in the Himalaya, amongst the English diaspora remaining behind after Independence.

Having discarded two previous drafts, the skeleton of the story is now essentially the plot I visualised way back when I started.

There is a lesson in there, somewhere.

It will shortly go off to a couple of beta readers for their comments, and then hopefully after that it will just be a case of one final edit, then the hard part. I intend to at least have a go at finding a publisher and / or an agent.

But for now, I think I’ve earned a beer.

I’m still here, although you might be forgiven for not realising that.

One or two of you might have noticed, though, that I have been an occasional visitor to your blogs over the last few months, but mostly I’ve kept away from WordPress in that time.

Of course.

Life quite often has a tendency to get in the way of my writing. It gets in the way of most of the things I do, actually.

That’s my excuse.

But I’m still plugging away at A Good Place, my novel set in Northern India about the English left behind after Independence, and am now very close to finishing it. I’m also working sporadically on Echoes and Imaginings Issue 2, now I’ve decided what I want it to be about. It’s gonna take a while to finish, though.

Cos life, you know.

Life getting in the way. What a drag.

But as for posts on here, I just seem to have just run out of ideas for now. It has been rather tempting to post the odd political rant during the last few months, but I don’t do politics on here. It would just make me cross and I’d get into arguments and I don’t want to do that. The point is I haven’t felt I’ve had anything worth writing. And I’m a great believer in that if you haven’t got anything to say, then don’t say it.

So for now, I ain’t saying it.