Well as those of you who’re following the Brandon Sanderson interview, here, will know, a big part of yesterday involved moderating comments. 😀

Which is great—both to see the following that Brandon’s hard work and commitment has generated, and also having the interview I put thought and effort into strike a positive chord for readers. Quite simply, it’s all good.

And don’t forget the giveaway for NZ and Australian readers, which will close at 12 midnight, Thursday 8 December (NZ time), with the winner announced on the morning of Friday 9 (again, NZ time.) You just need to post a comment on the interview to enter.

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In between moderating comments I had quite a busy day on the essential but less glamorous side of the writing life, which involved getting tax forms signed ahead of The Heir of Night being published in France next year. As I said to fellow NZ author Keri Hulme recently: whoever imagined when I dreamed the writing dream that I would become so familiar with the provisions of Double Taxation Treaties!

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But in-between all that, I did manage to get some work in refining my Thornspell-generated short story, which as I said on Sunday is titled Nameless. I don’t know about other writers, but for me the first stage in the creative process is simply “getting the story out there.” So I ‘write like anything’ and get the go-to-whoa of the story into the computer / onto the page. And then I do lots of fine-turning, ie refining—but usually through all that the actual shape of the story doesn’t change that much. It’s more about nuance. (I think I’ve talked about this before in relation to The Gathering of the Lost.)

The final stage is when as author you have to give yourself a stern talking to, stop neverendingly fine tuning until you revise your story out of existence, and “get it out there.”

And we’ll be there very soon with Nameless, I promise!