Today, I took part in a 'live write' on Facebook with British author Hanleigh Bradley. The concept is simpler than the actual writing part: We were given a picture as a prompt, and then had an hour to write a story together. Here's what we came up with (completely unedited): the first mermaid story either of us have ever written.

Like every day, he was sitting on the pier, his legs crossed, his eyes closed. The waves were crushing against the wooden poles below, and with every wave he could feel the vibrations of the sea. This was the closest he could get to being on a boat. Pathetic, he knew that. The sea called to him, but he couldn't answer the call. Not really. He would sit on the pier, every day, breathing in the moist salty air, imagining that he was sailing across the ocean.

He watched as the wavescrashed against the rocks. The sea held a million mysteries, like the way it could be so rough against the stone steps up to the lighthouse and yet so still not two meters away. He could only imagine what mysteries were held beneath its cloudy surface. A thousand years sailing those oceans and he'd never understand it's secrets and yet here he was completely incapable of exploring even what was in his eyes' sight.

It had all supposed to be so different. The sea was in his blood. He was born on a ship, if you could believe that. His mother gave birth to him in a tiny cabin on a smelly, noisy container ship. It wasn't planned that way, of course, but it happened, and she named him Triton, the messenger of the seas. At first, he'd managed to live up to his name. As a young boy, he learned to sail, and spent most afternoons on the water. When he was older, he joined the navy. But then it all changed. How one second could change an entire life...

Yesterday my upcoming fantasy novel Heart of Time went live on Kindle Scout. You may not have heard about it (heck, I hadn't until a few days ago), so here's an explanation in their own words:

To make it available on Kindle Scout, I had to upload the entire manuscript - quite a surreal feeling, knowing that someone at Amazon might be reading it right now. Two days after I submitted the book, the campaign went live. Now people can nominate the book (all you need is an Amazon account), which will show the people at Amazon that readers are interested in it.

Nobody really seems to know how much nominations and page views count towards the final decision, which is a little strange. But then, Amazon's algorithms are always quite the mystery.