July is hurtling towards us at a breakneck pace, and what does that mean? Sweltering heat? Getting a tan? Exotic travels?

For me, it means another excuse to write a rousing new story! This is the month for July Novel Writing Month, where I'll write a 50,000 word novel in 31 days (that one day's probably gonna be a lifesaver), and I've come up with an absolutely killer idea that I want to do!

It's a story called "The Great Mistakes". It's about a race of faerie-like beings that all live in a grand forest, but they're not all you may expect them to be. They're enormous, measuring between 6 and 8 feet high, they can live to be thousands of years old if they can survive past 20 minutes, they eat like piranhas, devouring a whole elk in a matter of seconds, they can be born with amazing but ultimately useless powers (i.e. being able to change the colour of anything, or making things float, but not make them stop floating), and they fly with these peculiar wings that look just like dandelion seeds emerging from their back. These are the Mistakes.

A Mistake is born every time someone makes a mistake in the world. A mistake is the disruption of normality. There's no such thing as fate, but there is such a thing as the normal course of things. When it gets bent out of shape, no matter how innocuous it may seem, the repercussions of it run deep. Any mistake is an utterly unique quirk that can change the way the universe goes. It's so powerful, in fact, that in the Forest of Eror, it creates life.

"The Great Mistakes" is centered around one Mistake in particular, a woman named Trool (created from a corruption of "Troll"). The story is told from her perspective as she goes about the Forest of Eror, seeing all there is to see, and meeting other great Mistakes along the way. She sees many odd things, like a young Mistake's rite of passage that consists of throwing her off a cliff, an anti-book that can suck the words out of normal books and change them into an indistinct black slurry, or a strange orchard with vines soaring high over her, in which pods containing the newborn Mistakes grow. She does many odd things, like make dresses out of flowers, outwit a trickster Mistake that lives in the lake, or listen to the tall tales of Mistake explorers, setting out into the vast wilds of the Forest.

And I'll keep you in touch with it every step of the way. Let's go make some mistakes!