Hey, it’s been a little while. I’m sure everyone is feeling it at the moment, how this year is both the longest and shortest year ever. I’ve lost track of time completely. Things that happened in April seem like yesterday, while last week seems like last year.

Writing has been going reasonably well. I think I mentioned before that I was writing a new story, a shorter one that I had hoped would be ready for halloween. The working title is The Vampire. Well it’s probably not going to be ready for halloween. What I thought was going to be a short story has developed beyond that and is much longer than I thought it would be. I just hit 21000 words this morning and feel about half way through or so. The new plan is to put the first chapter up on halloweed and then hopefully the whole story at the beginning of next year by the latest. I’m enjoying this one and as always can’t wait to share it.

I’ve always wanted to write a story about vampires. I used to write a lot of vampires stories in school. I watched Buffy when I was around 10 years old and was always drawn to vampire stories. It’s how I found out about Darren Shan. In fact, To The Other started as a vampire story in 2009. The only reason it changed was due to the amount of vampire stories out around then. Twilight was the biggest thing in the world at that point. Everyone I told I was writing a vampire story had the same look, oh not another one. It’s still always been somethin that I wanted to do, and I’m finally doing it properly.

My other story, which is going to be the longest thing I’ve ever written, and probably will stay that way, is still on the backburner for now. There was some writer’s block that made it harder to write. Once I’ve finished The Vampire I’m going to take another stab at it probably get another chunk done and then start on the next story. I had 2 pretty fleshed out stories in my mind and they will be put down in words sooner or later.

I’ve been reading a fair bit recently, and a real mixture. I will write another post about everything I’ve read in the last few weeks soon, probably next week. I’ve always watched quite a few films lately. Tabby’s favourite actor at the moment, so we’ve been making our way through his films. Logan Lucky was really good. I didn’t know a thing about it before and it flew by. I would recommend that.

I also watched Ad Astra last week. when that came out there was a lot of negativity towards it, at least from what I saw. It put me off seeing it, but at the same time the advert appealed so I wanted to give it a go. I really enjoyed it. A slowburning sci-fi film that grabbed my attention and didn’t really let go for the whole time. I’m not sure what people didn’t like about it. I would recommend it.

For this weekend, we have The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable to watch. I’ve never seen a film by M Night Shyamalan. The ending of The Sixth Sense was spoiled for me years before I was old enough to watch it, and most of his other films just didn’t appeal to me. I did want to see Split, but when I found out it was a sequel to Unbreakable, I needed to see that one first. At least I will finally get to watch Split and eventually Glass. I did watch Wayward Pines, which started off great and then lost everything good about it by the end of season 1. Season 2 was so bad, I never actually finished it. I did read all three books last year, and they are so much better than the tv show.

I’m going to write a post about the books that I’ve read at some point in the next week. For now I’m off.

A quick update. I wrote this post last week and forget to upload it. I’ve watched both The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable now, and loved them both. Knowing the twist in The Sixth Sense doesn’t really spoil the film, it works knowing it. I think it would have been better going in blind, but that’s as hard as not knowing who Darth Vader is. Unbreakable was even better. I loved it from start to finish. It will rank very highly among my favourite superhero films. We have Split to watch this week and then Glass, hopefully next week. I doubt they will live up to Unbreakable though.

Thanks for reading and until next time,

Ashley