So, yay! Or maybe not. It’s halfway through November and I’m a little over halfway through the required 25,000 words (27,675, to be exact). Not quite at my personal target, but I’m getting there. Or so I keep telling myself.

As promised, here are two new front covers. I’ve included the two because they’re a bit smaller in size… but still pretty cool.

They’re good, right? Of course, while I’ve been writing the novel, I’ve realised it’s more like a dystopian setting. And the people don’t live on the ground. Apparently, a couple of hundred years ago, they built these massive towers and the houses are on top of the towers. In the sky. So… yeah. Literal sky people. And they have an airbus (apparently a cross between a bus and a plane) that gets them from place to place.

What else have I learned about my society through what I’ve written so far? Well, the women far outnumber the men. The Council control whose pairings are approved. And birth mothers don’t take care of their children. Instead, older members of the community (mainly women, called Soul-Mothers) take on and raise the children.

This world was a lot less complicated when it was in my head.

Moving on…

So. Ice Warriors. Yes. I’m still working on it. Unfortunately, my first draft wasn’t very good, so I had to rewrite pretty much all of it. I’m finally on part three… and I have a big notebook, all sparkly on the front, where I’ve been working on the… technically second draft of the novel. And typing it up is meant to be the third draft. But I’m so far behind, I haven’t even finished typing up the first part. And I need some good riddles. The ones I’ve found don’t work.

Inevitably, I’ve found that when I’m sitting there, notebook and pen in hand, I get asked what the story I’m writing is about. And this has happened continually. The problem? Brevity is the soul of wit. But Ice Warriors doesn’t fit neatly into one sentence. Or even two. The last time someone asked me? This is what I came up with:

“It’s a mix between Norse mythology and fantasy.”

Now… that doesn’t tell anyone anything about the story. But if I tried to explain all of the details, I guarantee I’d get a whole load of blank looks. So here are the possible plot points I could pick out:

• Nine former friends come together to save the nine realms.
• Nine former friends are seeking out keys.
• One young woman, who’s trapped in an ice palace filled with corruption, needs to find a way out.
• People are being killed. The deaths mirror murders that happened two decades ago.
• All of the evil in the world is trapped, but something wants to free it.
• Norse gods and humans collide to save the worlds.

All of those are true. But only using one of those doesn’t capture the pure complication that writing Ice Warriors has turned out to be.