Edited the first half of the third book of my new series on Friday. On Saturday I put together the Shanville Monthly -- it took a bit longer than usual, because I had to add my October tour dates to it. I'm travelling all around England, Scotland and Ireland, from Brighton up to Dundee!!! If you haven't checked it out yet, click here for all the dates and times. It also has all the latest news, info about an unbelievably cool new competition, and more!! After that, Bas and I went to a birthday party for my cousin Ronan's little girl -- it was her first. We spent a nice few hours there, then Kenny and I went for a few drinks in Limerick, then we all met up a bit later to see a band called Last Days Of Death Country -- I know the lead singer, Pa, and wanted to check them out. They were pretty damn fine!!! If you're interested, you can check out their MySpace page by CLICKING HERE. On Sunday, after a nice lie-in, Bas and I took a couple of my cousins hiking in the hills around Killaloe, a nice spot in southwest Ireland. The weather was crappy, and we got a bit lost (lesson learnt -- don't try to map-read when you have a hangover!!!), but it was good to get out and about rather than just sit around the house all day. Stopped at my favourite Chinese restaurant, the Dragon I, in a village called Patrickswell on the way home -- they never disappoint!!!

Today I edited the second half of the third book of my new series (as I've said here before, the books in this series are short!! I'm going for sharp and punchy, with each book ending on a cliffhanger!). Which brings me up to speed. I now have to plot out what happens next, and I'm still far from 100% sure!!! I've been stringing together ideas over the past few days, and I'm fairly confident that it will all click into place when I sit down with my plans over the next few days -- or at least enough of it to allow me to sketch out the next chunk of storyline. That's usually how it works with me -- I'll spend a lot of time vaguely playing around with ideas, bouncing them off of each other, idly wondering where they lead. Then, when I feel ready to jump in, I sit down and seriously apply myself, and things tend to coalesce nicely. The brain's a bit like a computer -- you can have a lot of different programmes running in the background at the same time. You might be unaware of them while they're running, but that doesn't mean that your brain isn't hard at work! While I don't know exactly where I'm going next with this story, my brain has been chipping away at the ideas for the last several months, so hopefully when I sit down and focus tomorrow, the ideas will flow like water and plotlines will fall neatly into place.

If they don't, I'm scuppered!!!!

But hey -- that's all part of the unpredictable excitement of being a writer!!!!!!