Weekly Round Up 10th July

Hello on a Monday morning from a rainy Lancashire. Noisy banging from next door has accompanied the last week as my neighbour has removed his roof and the whole of the back wall and is now rebuilding. He did warn me. Apologies for loss of blog last week. I could say I was recovering after a birthday weekend of drink and debauchery, but I’d be lying. I did have some lovely presents including a Funko Tenth Doctor to add to the collection, and the Harry Potter version of Trivial Pursuit. I think a complete rewatch may be necessary before tackling them.

Writing has been pretty slow, but I did get the short story finished in time to meet the deadline thanks to my alpha reader giving it a quick once over. Provisionally, it’s called The Matchmaker. I can only wait now to see if they want it for the contemporary anthology. I’ve attempted to get back into my age gap story. Adam and Jason are beginning to talk to me in the middle of the night, so there’s hope. I didn’t intend it to be a long story, and so far it’s around 5000 words at only two chapters in. I am getting to know them though. When the muse is avoiding me, I’ve started to remove ‘weak’ words from Half Full the 100K+ story of Owen and Jonah. I always start an edit with this then do the first read through checking continuity, repetition and punctuation before I hand it over to a beta to read. It does take me time, however, because I have to leave the MS alone for a while. This week, I’m going to continue the current WIP, I hope.

On the reading front, I haven’t done much except download several books so my TBR list is growing. I decided to have a change and read Poppy Jenkins by Claire Ashton, which I liked but did get a bit fed up about some aspects of the story. I did enjoy it being set in Wales. My current read is The Ruin of a Rake by Cat Sebastian. I very much enjoyed her first two books. I’ve also listened to three of the CDS in The Lives of Captain Jack audio series from Big Finish. I love that I can still hear Torchwood stories and these are attempts to fill in what I would call fanfiction gaps. In this case the four stories cover what happened after Jack came alive again after being revived by Rose, visiting Rose’s estate when she was young and meeting Jackie, her mum, what happened when he was introduced to Alonso – so lovely hearing Russell Tovey, and finally what happened with the two-year memory loss which made him leave the Time Agency.

Box set watching for this week, in between the tennis, has consisted of Supernatural S8 – I do love the Purgatory stuff and Benny, and the first series of Orphan Black which we watched in 3 days. How Tatiana Maslany didn’t win all the prizes, I’ll never understand. Now onto S9 of Supernatural again in between tennis depending on how far Murray and Konta get.

That’s it for now. My Highland Cowboy continues to get some lovely reviews which is wonderful. If I owe you a prize, I’m hoping to get the print copies this week as they are on order. Thanks for all the entries in various giveaways. Have a good week everyone. As usual, this can also be found on my blog.