The E-book Experiment: Year One

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On 7th July 2011 I uploaded my first e-book to Amazon. It went live on the 8th. I was curious as to how it would go. 6 months ago I published the data I had collected over the previous few months, and said I would report back again in six months. Six months passed. I was flattened by flu on the anniversary date but I took a snapshot of my sales with the idea I would write them up as soon as I felt better. Other factors lengthened the delay. More illness, deadlines and a holiday without access to the Internet intervened. Read more…

The Curse of Nurgle, Reviews And Other Things

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Last week I was struck down by the curse of Nurgle, a daemonic plague which resulted in me wheezing and gurgling and my voice becoming considerably deeper and huskier. I’ve been scaring people round the house by sounding like a Scottish Darth Vader. The end result of all this was that not much got done. There was no blog post for the first time in over a year and I am yet further behind with my deadlines. I am off to Nottingham for  the Warhammer 40,000 Doubles Tournament this weekend and then I shall be in Scotland for a long-booked Read more…

Another Absence Note

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I was hoping to finish my epic series of posts about the writing of Blood of Aenarion this week but real life intervened in the various ways it does. I am off to London for the David Gemmell Legend Awards today so I won’t have the time now.I shall return next week!

Writing Blood of Aenarion (Part Four)

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I am sometimes an idiot. Last time I was talking about how I came to the solution of how the Elves of Ulthuan figure out N’Kari’s plan. I fully intended to discuss that in this post then I realised it was, in fact, something of a huge spoiler so, apologies if I got your hopes up. I won’t be doing that today. Instead I shall  talk some more about the process of writing  Blood of Aenarion. Hopefully I will get to the end of this saga before this series of posts becomes longer than War and Peace.  Having solved most of Read more…

Writing Blood of Aenarion (Part Three)

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So there I was trying to decide whether to junk yet another opening. If you’ve read the book, you already know I didn’t and you also know why. The solution to the problem was pretty simple. It had already been established (in Daemonslayer, for example, and in the Daemons of Chaos book which was causing me so much trouble) that daemons can return from the dead. You can’t ever really kill them, only destroy their body. When this happens they are banished from mortal reality for a time until they can take a new form. All I needed to do was Read more…

Writing Blood of Aenarion (Part Two)

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After realising I was going to have to start all over again, I read and re-read the descriptions of the twins conflict with N’Kari and considered my options. This was not going to be an easy story to write. As things were stated it took place at the Shrine of Asuryan. There were no encounters between the twins and the Keeper of Secrets prior to that point as the daemon rampaged around Ulthuan slaying the heirs of Aenarion. I realised that this was going to be a difficult tale to structure because the heroes and their main antagonist only meet Read more…