Prepping Ptolus

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It’s been just over 34 years since I first encountered D&D. I can think of few things that have changed my life more. It got me interested in reading fantasy again at a time when I was slowly drifting out of it and it led indirectly to my involvement with Games Workshop and my present career. In a world where World of Warcraft exists, it’s hard to convey exactly the impact that getting involved in D&D had back then. A generation and a half has grown up with access to movies with astonishing special effects, video games and the Internet. Read more…

The Day of Rest

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First up apologies to the people who commented yesterday but whose comments did not get moderated till today. This happened because I take Sundays off. I don’t touch my computer unless it’s a real work emergency and the only writing I do is with a pen and paper. I don’t go near a screen unless to watch a little TV. The only gadget I make an exception for is my Kindle and that is basically because all I can do on it is read. I started doing this because my RSI and computer related health problems got really bad and Read more…

Malekith

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So how do you go about portraying a Dark Lord? Tolkien keeps Sauron off-stage for the whole of the Lord of the Rings. (One reason I have heard for this is that he knew Satan was the most compelling character in Paradise Lost and he did not want Sauron to be the same in his great trilogy. I don’t know whether that is true but it certainly sounds plausible.) The easiest way to deal with Malekith in the Tyrion and Teclis books would have been to do the same thing, just make the Witch King a vast, implacable presence and leave it at Read more…

The Tech Roundup

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It’s a big week in tech for me. Asus and Acer have just announced their new ultrabooks, Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) is due any day now and, perhaps, most importantly Literature & Latte  have (sort of) announced a release date for Scrivener for Windows. First up, the ultrabooks. I have long lusted after some version of the MacBook Air. It seems to be just about the perfect size for a travelling laptop to me. Somehow I can never quite make myself pull the trigger though. £1000 is a lot of money and to tell the truth I have been less Read more…

The Waiting Game

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If you’re a writer you spend a lot of time just sitting around waiting. You wait to see whether your book has been accepted or rejected. You wait to see what your editor has to say about your work. You wait to see whether a project gets approved or you have to go back to the drawing board. Once you finish a project, you often sit around waiting for feedback. That is what I am currently doing now–waiting to see what my editor has to say about The Angel of Fire. Sometimes when I finish a book I need a Read more…