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. That provoked a fit of nostalgia, I can tell you. The convention itself was small, intimate and conversational. I spent a lot of time just chatting away to people in the bar and dining room. The venue was just the right size for … [Read more...]
Ten Thousand
On Saturday evening, some time between 10 pm and 11 pm, I sold my 10,000th e-book. That may not seem much in the grand scheme of things but if you consider the fact that my e-books are essentially put together by my wife and myself in our living room and have been on sale for roughly eight months, you can see why I consider this an achievement. For those of you interested in the actual breakdown of numbers, they were (as of 11:20 pm on the 10th of March): Death's Angels: 3607 The Serpent Tower: 1845 The Queen's Assassin: 1625 Shadowblood: 1418 The Inquiry Agent: 680 Sky Pirates: 84 Assorted Short Stories: 741 As you can see the vast majority of sales (8495) have been in my Terrarch series. Since December I have been averaging well … [Read more...]
Order Out of Chaos
So the end of the month is sneaking closer and I am still working away. As I mentioned at the start of the month, I planned on writing 2K of new fiction every working day this year as well as revising work for publication. I also mentioned that I was having trouble settling down into a routine. (New babies and lack of sleep tend to have that effect!) Of late, I have been plagued by the flu and persecuted by the Machine God as well. However, in spite of all this, I have started to get the feeling that my goals for this year are at least possible. I am settling down into a new method of working, which is just as well, because I need to. I begin each day by revising what I wrote the work day before. (Obviously this means that on Monday I … [Read more...]
The Hundredth Post
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 you. Both live in worlds where the possibility of rejection arises daily, and both need to be able to keep going in the face of that rejection. Both have jobs where they are entirely … [Read more...]
Fail To Plan, Plan To Fail or Something Like That
It's that time of the year again. Christmas has come. I've played with (or read) my presents and it's time to get back to some serious work. The space between Christmas and the New Year is usually when I review my goals from the previous year and set my goals for the coming one. This year, because I am lazy and going to have to do this anyway, I am killing two birds with one stone and writing a blog post about it. As long term readers will know I believe in planning and measuring things, in setting milestones and trying to pass them. I do this all the way from the macro level to the micro level. I have a Life Plan, which is basically just a list of all the things I want to do before I die, set down in order of importance. Then, like the … [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 a moment believe that writers working today are less skilled than the ones I used to read, I can actually see that in some cases they are much more so. It's just that these days I set the bar much higher. That's my theory anyway. Of course, there are … [Read more...]
Gamesday Report
So that was my first Gamesday in eight years. It was a lot of fun and a lot of travel compressed into a very short time. We flew into Manchester and took a train to Nottingham and checked into the hotel. I dropped in to the Studio, said hello to a few people and recorded an extract from Blood of Aenarion to be broadcast sometime on GW TV. I also picked up a couple of author copies of Blood of Aenarion which is a very beautiful looking book indeed. In the evening we went out to dinner and visited Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem. Well you've got to, haven't you, when you're in Nottingham for the first time and my family were. Saturday saw us en route to Birmingham NEC and me in the hall signing books in the company of Dan Abnett, Graham McNeill, … [Read more...]
The Queen’s Assassin
When I was about nine years old a group of local lads threw me into the deepest part of the Marine Lake, a huge man-made pool made by damming off an area of the harbour with a massive concrete breakwater. I had not yet learned to swim. It was sunny. The sky was blue. My mouth was filling up with salty water. I was trying to shout for help while flailing around in water too deep to stand in. It washed over my eyes and blurred my vision. The concrete ledge was covered with broken barnacles that ripped my hands bloody as I tried to pull myself up. The kids who had thrown me in watched me scrabbling away and laughed. They did not realise I was drowning in front of their eyes. Eventually, after what seemed like ages to me, but which could only … [Read more...]
Living In Writer’s Time
Just like deadlines some special occasions sneak up on you. It's Gamesday in a couple of weeks and Blood of Aenarion is going to be released there and yet somehow, while wittering on about writing and Macharius and short stories, I have forgotten to talk about it. You're probably wondering how that is possible. I mean it is a major hardback release with the most astonishingly beautiful cover and it features some of my favourite characters ever. It's also my first new book for Black Library in what-- 8 years? (Bloody hell!) How did this escape my notice? The secret, young padawan, is that, like most writers, I live in a different timestream from the one you see. Most people connect to writers through their books and they can only do that … [Read more...]
What to Do When You Don’t Feel Like Writing
Yesterday, I felt really slow of mind. I was tired after being woken in the middle of the night by an incredible thunderstorm. The day was very hot and sticky and I really wanted to be outside. My RSI was playing up. There were men working with loud power tools in my building. I did not feel inspired in the slightest. I did not want to write. I found myself planning a blog post about it then I thought this is stupid and I went and did some writing. What is my secret technique for doing this? I opened up my word-processor, looked at what I had written the day before and began to edit it. Once I had finished doing that, I kept typing a new scene. I didn't stop to wonder whether it was any good. I just wrote it. Once I had finished I went … [Read more...]
Priorities For Writers
There’s a famous story about the management consultant Ivy Lee and Charles Schwab, president of Bethlehem Steel (then, at the start of the 20th century, the biggest steel company in the world). Lee gave Schwab a tip for increasing his productivity and told him to try it and pay him what he thought it was worth once he had tested it. The tip was this: Make a list of what you need to do at the start of each day in the order of importance of the tasks that need to be done. Work your way down the list, finishing each task and then moving on to the next one. In this way you will at least get the most important things done. Schwab tried it for a week and then sent Lee a cheque for $25000, (at least a quarter of a million in today’s money.) I … [Read more...]
Guardian of the Dawn
Guardian of the Dawn is my personal favourite of all the sword and sorcery short stories I have written. I can still remember sitting down one evening at the table in the living room in our old shabby flat in Modrany and starting to write it. It came out of nowhere as many stories do. I began in the middle, with Kormak in the forest about to confront the elder world demon. It was a scene that surprised me with its odd echoes of Kipling in the language used and a formal structure of challenge and response between man and monster. I thought I was going to do Beowulf and Grendel. I ended up with something like a confrontation between two samurai. It pleased me no end. Of course, there were some questions. Who was this knight dispatched into … [Read more...]
The Arithmetic of Writing
If you’ve read many of the posts on this site, you already know what I’ve been doing today. I’ve been taking stock of the month that just passed and I have been deciding what I need to do this month. At the start of each month I'll note what actually got written as opposed to what I said I would write at the start of last month. If the targets were not met, I will try and work out why and do better in the coming month. I spend a lot of time on this sort of thing. I believe the old business management saying that what gets measured gets done. So what’s going to get done this month? It’s pretty simple actually. I will (hopefully) be finishing the first draft of The Angel of Fire. At the moment, I am at 74000 words, ahead of my … [Read more...]
So Here We Are In E-Book Land
It’s been an interesting weekend. Like every other proud publisher of a Kindle book I have done more than my share of checking my sales figures. I am pleased to report that I have sold an average of two books a day since Friday. Pleased, I hear you cry? Two books a day does not sound like a lot, Bill. Particularly not for a bestselling Warhammer writer like yourself. It’s not a huge amount, true. But if you consider my publicity and marketing has consisted of an email to 4 of my test readers thanking them for their help and one tweet to my 6 twitter followers alongside an announcement on this blog (which I had blocked to search engines until Friday), I can safely say I am happy with the results. And I can equally safely say I … [Read more...]
Dropbox
Of course, you've heard of Dropbox. It's a simple idea but it's a game changer. It's a piece of software that creates a folder. It stores anything you put in that folder in the cloud and on every computer on which you have installed Dropbox and it keeps all of these different folders in sync when the computer carrying them is online. It's so useful I have set it as the default save location in my Wordprocessor. It deals with the vexed problem of backups by ensuring that I have the file in Dropbox on that computer, on any machine I log in on later and in the cloud. I can access the files through the Dropbox website. That said, I don't rely on it for all my back up needs. I also use Time Machine, Back in Time and their ilk. I store … [Read more...]
