Penny scribblings: extended edition

I dunno, you leave your blog alone for five minutes and a little brat comes along and trashes it with a pink felt tip! It took me ages to get the place all clean and tidy again. Still, I rather think the naughty girl responsible will be a little more careful with other people’s things in future, if the timid and tearful little apology she made post ‘discussion’ with her Aunty was anything to go by. (It’s amazing what a good talking-to and a sound spanking can do for a mischievous miss’s attitude, isn’t it?)

Anyway, to more adult matters. Re my intention to write more, one of the things I’m keen to have a go at is a longer story: a novella, if not quite a novel. I love writing short stories, but I want to try stretching my wings a bit – I want to try giving my characters, and my prose, a bit more space to play within; see if I can’t manage a bit more depth and realism – and a longer form of course offers those possibilities. It will be quite a challenge, I think, as short story writing is a very different discipline to ‘regular’ story writing: it privileges concision and directness above all else, a compositional factor that doesn’t apply to the novel(la). It’s a bit of a switch, for me at least, to move ‘up’ to this more expansive mode, to get out of the writing habits I have got into, and I hope I can handle looking after a bigger plot of land than I’m used to.

I’ve actually started writing it already, but it isn’t in any kind of presentable shape yet (my writing process is a bit too much on the chaotic unorthodox side for that) so no teasing extracts to show you as yet. I don’t even have a title, so I’m going to use a codename. Let’s call it Project Summer. I’ll post about it every so often if I can and let you know how it’s coming along. If there isn’t a post for a while you’ll know it’s all gone a bit Don Music...

P.S. Oh yeah. It’s going to have spanking in it. Just in case you were worried about that. ;)

P.P.S. It’s my birthday tomorrow and I’ve booked both it and Friday off work and BH might take me here and there for a treat so I might not be around (in an at-my-computer, blogging nonsense, sense) for a bit. Sic transit and all that, but chin up, dear reader!