Having gotten side-tracked on Wednesday into writing about the usefulness of the knowledge of our own mortality, I am back to a slightly more cheerful subject today, my plans and resolutions for the coming year. You'll notice that most of my goals are stated in numbers. I'm a great believer in what gets measured gets done and I find setting things down in cold, hard numbers makes them easier to track and achieve. It's much easier to judge the success of I will write 2000 words per working day than I will write a novel this year. The first will fairly inevitably lead you to writing a novel this year if you have any competence in narrative architecture at all. The second allows so much wiggle room you might never start. For example, with the … [Read more...]
What Would You Do If You Had Only Five Years To Live?
What would you do if your doctor told you that you only had 5 years to live? How would you change your life? What would you do differently? Where would you visit? What would you tell the people you love? What hatchets would you bury? What relationships would you try to mend. Make a list of these things. Go do it now. Come back when you’ve written it down. Take a look at your list. You know what you have there? A list of the things that are truly important to you, of your hopes and dreams and aspirations, of the people you love, and what you would like to tell them. You probably have a list of things that you haven’t done but would like to do and maybe, just maybe, might someday. Now imagine that there’s been a mistake. … [Read more...]
Fail To Plan, Plan To Fail or Something Like That
It's that time of the year again. Christmas has come. I've played with (or read) my presents and it's time to get back to some serious work. The space between Christmas and the New Year is usually when I review my goals from the previous year and set my goals for the coming one. This year, because I am lazy and going to have to do this anyway, I am killing two birds with one stone and writing a blog post about it. As long term readers will know I believe in planning and measuring things, in setting milestones and trying to pass them. I do this all the way from the macro level to the micro level. I have a Life Plan, which is basically just a list of all the things I want to do before I die, set down in order of importance. Then, like the … [Read more...]
The Best Laid Plans
I had planned on writing about Tyrion and Teclis today but my new-born son had other plans that trumped my own. He decided last night he really did not want to sleep and if he could not sleep, none of the rest of us would either. I can't remember the last time I went a night without sleep and I've done it twice this week already. Worth it though! Anyway, I am going to spend the rest of today, hopefully, catching up on the rest I missed. My apologies for that. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all. Back next week, the wee man willing. … [Read more...]
The Inquiry Agent Released
I always wanted to write a tough-guy, first person detective story in the style of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammet but it’s a very American form and I never felt confident that I could carry off the setting. Somehow Scotland never seemed quite to fit my vision as a setting for this sort of story. Other people, such as Ian Rankine, have managed it but I never could make it work for me; too close to home for the way I write, I suppose. It was one of those ideas I put on the back-burner while I went my merry way writing sword and sorcery and science fiction. I always figured I would come back to it someday. To be honest, I thought I would eventually do a detective story set in a city like Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar but things turned out a … [Read more...]
Good News
My son William Karel King was born yesterday at 5:44 am. I am not planning on doing much work today as a consequence. I will be doing the happy dance and visiting the lad and his lovely mother Radka in the maternity hospital. In the meantime, if you feel the urge to read something new and King-ian, I shall just mention that my short horror story Carp is free until 12 p.m. Pacific Time Tuesday on Amazon, Amazon UK and all the other Amazons as far as I know. This story is set in Prague and combines Lovecraftian horror, Xmas, absinthe and Bertrand Russell on the subject of turkeys. What more can a reasonable person ask for in a Christmas story? … [Read more...]
Interrogated By Skaven
I was recently captured and interrogated by Skaven. The full horrific results can be found here. … [Read more...]
The Future As Boiled Frog
I am sitting in a cafe in Prague typing this in Open Office Writer on an Asus eeePC netbook running Ubuntu 10.10. I was thinking about working on my old Amstrad CPC 6128 in Edinburgh back in 1986 and the fact that the future has come like that famous frog, the one that doesn't notice it is being boiled alive because the water around it is being heated so slowly. It's small changes here, small changes there and then without ever really realising it, you are living in a science fiction world. I think of this netbook as being an underpowered cheap machine but it is monstrously more powerful than the CPC 6128 I wrote my first stories on. I mean it has something like 10000 times as much RAM, the processor is many orders of magnitude more … [Read more...]
The Cost of Kindle Select
I checked my balance on Smashwords this morning, as I do intermittently—Smashwords does not have anything like the real-time reporting of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing so it is not nearly so addictive. I am not sure I completely understand Smashwords arcane system of accounting but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I am owed roughly $150. That’s not a great deal for a 5 month reporting period but it’s all extra money, most of it earned in the past three months. That got me thinking about Amazon’s Kindle Select program and its exclusivity clause, the one that says you cannot sell your books anywhere else, not even your own website. It made it real to me that there is an actual cost to joining the program. In my case, … [Read more...]
Manic Monday
Blood of Aenarion, my first new Warhammer novel in more than eight years, has just been released. I had planned a long post for today about the writing of the book, which was something of an epic in itself, involving travel across Europe and Asia, visits to exotic and glamourous locations and my discovery of a shrine to Slaanesh in that most likely of places, Thailand. I kept a diary of the trip and the process of writing and took photos to document my journey. Unfortunately, in one of those clear demonstrations of the law of unintended consequences, I upgraded my computers hard drive and operating system and for some reason the files I need access to don’t show up in Spotlight on my Mac anymore. I am sure I will find them soon, … [Read more...]
The Small, Nagging Voice
Yesterday I finished the first draft of my Kormak novel, Mask of the Necromancer. I did it ahead of schedule, just carried along by the flow of the writing. You’d think I’d be happy, but no, being a writer and a neurotic, I’ve found a way to make myself unhappy about this. Since I believe in spreading the misery, I thought I would share my method with you. This week I made a commitment to write 3000 words a day, 50% more than I normally would. Mostly this was a result of reading Rachel Aaron’s 10K a day article and recognising the truth of it. One of the big changes I made to my work routine was to set Freedom for one hour instead of 30 minutes, which is normally how long I write for to avoid RSI problems. When I was younger I used … [Read more...]
E-Books: The Content Wars Begin
When I signed into my KDP account today there was a new banner right beside the logo announcing KDP Select and showing a link to the details of the new program. (For those of you who do not know the acronym, it stands for Kindle Direct Publishing and it’s the arm of Amazon that lets me distribute those ebooks you see in the right hand column of this blog.) The basic information is interesting. In return for going exclusive with Amazon for 90 days you get access to some bonus features. You can make your book free for 5 days out of 90. (This is a bigger deal than it seems since free can be an important promotional tool and it is very difficult to get your book to go free on Amazon without jumping through a lot of hoops. This is particularly … [Read more...]
First Impressions: Scrivener for Windows
I am just settling in to my first week of actual real work using Scrivener for Windows. I’ve written my last six books either wholly or partially in Scrivener for the Mac but over the past couple of years I have found myself drifting away from Apple’s machines and onto Windows and Linux. Scrivener was pretty much the only thing keeping me on OSX and I am wondering whether the Windows version will make it possible to cut the cord. I am approaching all this with some trepidation since I am paranoid about things like losing work because of software bugs. Such things mean a very real loss of time and income. Nonetheless I have decided to bite the bullet and work solely in Windows for a month. It’s early days yet so all I can give you … [Read more...]
Lion Thoughts
So I finally got round to installing Lion a couple of weeks back and now I am going to give you my belated review. Everybody else upgraded about six months ago but what the hell-- I am not much of an early adopter. In case you want the edited highlights-- I basically like it, I find most of it an improvement and some of it just a little weird. Of necessity this will be quite limited since I don't use all of the new OS's features and am in no way qualified to comment on them. This is the first OS upgrade I have ever bought directly over the net. I bought it through the App Store and I have to say it all went impressively smoothly. There were no problems with the download and installation. For the price you get to upgrade on all of your … [Read more...]
The Age of Re-Reading
I am at an age now where I find myself more likely to re-read books I loved when I was young than to seek out new authors. I am not sure exactly why. I suspect that it is because when I was young I read everything much less critically which gave the love a chance to grow. These days I read with a more jaundiced eye particularly towards people working in my own genres. I am much more aware of the tricks used and am much more easily bounced out of my willing suspension of disbelief. I do not for a moment believe that writers working today are less skilled than the ones I used to read, I can actually see that in some cases they are much more so. It's just that these days I set the bar much higher. That's my theory anyway. Of course, there are … [Read more...]
