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 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 Read more…
Freedom
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 Read more…
Ebook News
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 Read more…
How To Write 10000 Words a Day and Other Recommendations
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 Read more…
Writing on an Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook
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 Read more…
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