Bones of The Old Ones Contest

Goodreads is hosting a giveaway of Howard Andrew Jones‘ new book, The Bones of the Old Ones, the sequel to his masterful Arabian Night’s sword and sorcery adventure, The Desert of Souls; a book I liked so much I blurbed it. The three winners will each receive a signed hardback copy of The Bones of the Old Ones as well as The Desert of Souls. Head over to Goodreads and sign up. Winners will be announced on December 19th.

Evernote Clearly

As long-term readers of this blog will know I use Evernote a lot. It is my go-to program for storing ideas and web clippings. I also keep travel documents such as e-tickets in it and maps of places I am visiting and all sorts of other stuff. It has many advantages – it is cloud-based and it synchronises all of your notes and clippings to any computer or phone that you have the Evernote app installed upon. This makes it an invaluable notebook-substitute for any writer. It is free an it runs on most PC and mobile phone operating systems.  Read more…

Notational Velocity

Notational Velocity is a very simple-looking but surprisingly sophisticated little program for the Mac. It is intended to allow you to make and track notes very, very quickly. You just open it and start typing, rather like you would type in the search box in Google or Spotlight in OSX. What you type will bring up a list of the notes you have already written containing what you’ve typed. If you hit enter, it will turn what you have typed in the search box into the title for your new note, and move your focus down into the note body Read more…

Skyfall

On Saturday Radka and I went to see  Skyfall, the latest James Bond film. I enjoyed it. Daniel Craig’s 007 was physically convincing and seems to me to be closer to Ian Fleming’s original concept of “a blunt instrument employed by a government department” than any previous Bond (even Connery’s, who was just too charming), the locations were stunning, the ladies were beautiful, the stunts astonishing. In short it was pretty much all I could want or expect from a Bond movie. Javier Bardem’s villain, Silva, was both camp and frightening, a combination that is difficult to pull off but Read more…

Black Library Weekender: the Report

So I am finally recovered enough to report on the Black Library Weekender. I had a fantastic time and would just like to say a big thank you to everyone, fans, fellow authors and Black Library staff who made it such a pleasure. The hotel was very pleasant and, I was surprised to discover, not too far from the neighbourhood in which I used to live when I worked for GW in Nottingham. En route from the airport I passed my old chip shop and local pub as well as the corner shop where I used to buy my newspapers. Read more…