The Hundredth Post

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Back in the 80s my brother sold insurance. He occasionally attended sales conferences and sometimes came back with motivational books. One day, bored, with nothing better to do, I read one. It started a life-long habit of reading books about selling and the life of a salesman. In case you are wondering what possible relevance any of those could have to the life of a writer, let me just point out that writers and salesmen have more in common than you might think. Both writers and salesmen need to be self-starters. There is usually no one else around to motivate Read more…

The E-Book Experiment: 6 Month Report

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When I started my e-book experiment I decided I would wait six months before passing any judgements. That would be a long enough period to collect some data and see how the whole thing worked for me. You hear all sorts of contradictory reports about e-publishing but I’ve always liked to collect empirical evidence for myself, rather than listen to who shouts loudest on the internet. I decided I was just going to release the backlist I had and work on projects that interested me in the gaps between my work for Black Library. Well, six months have passed so Read more…

Changing Habits

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I am a creature of habit. I like to do the same things in the same ways. I don’t think habits are of necessity bad things. They can be either good or bad, depending on the habit and the circumstances. The habit of smoking 60 cigarettes a day I once had was undoubtedly a bad one. The habit of writing 2000 words a day has done my life and my career no harm at all as far as I can tell and it has provided a number of positive benefits. Scientists think we have habits for a reason. They save Read more…

David Gemmell Legend Award

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Somehow, in all the baby-related excitement I managed to forget to mention the fact that Blood of Aenarion is on the Long List for the David Gemmell Legend Award this year. At any other time in my life this would have been huge news but with the arrival of young Will, it just kind of flickered across my awareness and got lost at the back of my sleep-deprived brain. I had an email from the good people at Black Library reminding me about the Award yesterday so I thought I would mention it today. For the two of you who Read more…

Coming Up In 2012

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I hope you all had a pleasant New Year and find yourself in fine fettle today. In Chez King we saw in New Year playing Ivanhoe while the City of Prague laid on a fine fireworks display outside our window and baby William lay asleep in his cot. Now the holidays are over and it’s time to settle down to getting some work done in 2012. There a few exciting things coming up this year. This month I will be releasing Sky Pirates. This is my Edgar Rice Burroughs inspired, Dying Earth fantasy novel, featuring, you guessed it, sky pirates. Read more…

2012: The Plan

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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 Read more…