I have mentioned before how I waste a lot of time wilfing (What am I Looking For) on the net. It is a constant temptation. What starts out as a simple look at my sales figures on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing can turn into a multi-click odyssey in which I scrabble around the whole Amazon site chasing up things that interest me just because they appeared on the also bought list of Death’s Angels. A fact check for my current project can turn into a trail of breadcrumbs which leads to articles on 80’s role-playing games. Sometimes I am not even aware of how these things start. One link simply leads to another and before you know it you’ve gone from the front page of the Guardian to the home page of some obscure Norwegian … [Read more...]
Ebook News
November 28, 2011 By 10 Comments
On Saturday, I sold the one thousandth ebook of Death's Angels. It was a nice milestone to pass. It comes in the first month in which I have sold over a thousand ebooks too. All in all I have sold a couple of thousand books in the Terrarch series and roughly 2400 ebooks in total including short stories and collections. I have also had roughly five thousand downloads of the Guardian of the Dawn since it went free. I started selling ebooks in July and have released one of the Terrarch books roughly every six weeks since then. The last book, Shadowblood only went on sale this month. December will be the first month that the whole series will be available and I am curious to see how it goes. Creating your own ebooks is pretty simple. It's not … [Read more...]
How To Write 10000 Words a Day and Other Recommendations
November 25, 2011 By 2 Comments
I am finally tying up Angel of Fire. I've had one of those rewrites where changing one thing led to changing another which led to changing another and on and on. I've simply not had time to keep up to date with the blog over the past couple of weeks. In a pitiful attempt to actually post something this week, here are a few things I can recommend. First up is Rachel Aaron's guide to writing 10,000 words a day. Yes, you read that right, that's how to write 10K a day, not a week, which is what I aim for. I've looked at this and I have to say that it all seems sound and sensible. I have written 10K a day in my time before old age and RSI took their toll and I recognise the good sense in what Rachel is saying. I don't see myself writing 10K a … [Read more...]
Writing on an Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook
November 18, 2011 By 6 Comments
I often carry my eeePC 1001P around with me when I am travelling or going out to cafes to write (Yes, I really do this! I know it's not cool but I stopped worrying about looking cool a very long time ago.) Worried about Windows security, I replaced the XP installation with Ubuntu Linux 10.10. This has been something of a revelation. Ubuntu is a very light operating system and it boots and runs very quickly indeed even on older Intel Atom processors. It's free and it comes with pretty much all the software you could possibly need to get some work done, including its own capable office suite (OpenOffice in the case of Ubuntu 10.10) and hey, you can even install Scrivener on it. (The Scrivener forum has links to downloads for Linux.) There … [Read more...]
The Fastest Book I Ever Wrote
November 16, 2011 By 2 Comments
Today we have our first guest post. It's from Matt Forbeck, author of the Blood Bowl novels, Deadlands, Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon and many, many more. I've been friends with Matt for more than 20 years. We met in my first week at the old Games Workshop Design Studio in Low Pavement in Nottingham. He had just graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and come to Britain on a 6 month student work visa. He walked in off the street carrying a huge backpack and just asked for a job. I thought this jaw-dropping audacity. And all credit to the management at Games Workshop for their foresight, they gave him one. They knew talent when they saw it. Since we were both looking for a place to stay, I ended up sharing a house with Matt … [Read more...]
Not Here Today
November 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I am still working on the Macharius rewrite. I'll try and have something written for Wednesday. … [Read more...]
Rewriting
November 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I am taking time out from my busy schedule today to announce that I won't be writing a blog post because I am doing the rewrite of Angel of Fire. Oh wait-- I am writing a blog post, in the grand tradition of writers skiving off work everywhere. Right now I am just going through Angel tightening things up. I wrote an action-packed, ork-stomping prologue that frames the story and now I am working my way through the manuscript, taking out some scenes, tightening up others and adding new ones where they are needed to clarify the action. I am doing this in response to the comments of my esteemed editor Nick Kyme and in line with my own feelings, having had a short break from the actual writing over the past few weeks. I've mentioned the … [Read more...]
Software For Writers
November 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
As I have said before I am a sucker for any piece of software that threatens to increase my productivity and I have tried out most of them. However there are some that I have used constantly for years now and I really recommend. Scrivener I’ve doubtless gone on about Scrivener until you're sick of hearing it. So I’ll just say this. It is the best tool for writing novels that I know of. It used to be that Scrivener was only available on OSX. This was my main reason for sticking with the Mac. As of a few days ago, it is available for Windows and even Linux. I can move my work from Mac to PC and back as I feel like it and I am very happy about this. Scrivener is available here. David Hewson has an interesting comparison between the OSX … [Read more...]
Author’s Notes Shadowblood
November 7, 2011 By 4 Comments
Shadowblood takes a break from the Elder Races who featured in the earlier books of the series. Instead, it features a different horror standard; zombies. This does not mean I have moved away from the series Lovecraftian roots, far from it. The walking dead also appear in HP Lovecraft's work, such as Herbert West, Reanimator. I did not start out to write a zombie novel, honestly. The world over-run by armies of the walking dead in Shadowblood is the logical outgrowth of the premise laid down in Book One of the series, that some of the Terrarchs are willing to do anything to hold on to power, up to and including unleashing a magically created plague that causes its victims to rise up from their graves as flesh-eating walking dead. All sorts … [Read more...]
Shadowblood Released
November 4, 2011 By 1 Comment
I was hoping to have the Author's Notes for Shadowblood ready today but I am in Scotland with some business to attend to (and some rain to look at) so that's not going to happen until next week. I don't even have the time to do my usual Friday post for this blog so I am just going to have to content myself with making this announcement. Shadowblood is the fourth book in the Terrarch Chronicles. A magical plague is causing the dead to rise from their graves. An army of zombies is raging across the world under the control of the Dark Brotherhood. They are preparing to summon the Princes of Shadow and bring the whole world under their dreadful dominion. In order to forestall this Rik must master the powers granted by his heritage as a … [Read more...]
In the Meantime, In Between Time
November 2, 2011 By 5 Comments
I am in that strange space you sometimes get into as an author. I am revising one manuscript, preparing another for publication and writing another all at the same time. That seems to happen more and more often these days as I do my work for Black Library, try and get my backlist into print in ebook format and even write a new novel. So what exactly have I been up to? Well, yesterday I killed an ork with a shotgun. OK-- I didn't. Leo, the narrator of The Angel of Fire did. I just watched him do it while keeping my usual lookout for detail. I mean what's it like facing off against an ork? What do they smell like (oddly fungal and acrid, like athletes foot in old socks), what happens when you hit one on the head with the butt of a shotgun … [Read more...]
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