In the Meantime, In Between Time
I am in that strange space you sometimes get into as an author. I am revising one manuscript, preparing another for publication and writing another all at the same time. That seems to happen more and more often these days as I do my work for Black Library, try and get my backlist into print in ebook format and even write a new novel. So what exactly have I been up to? Well, yesterday I killed an ork with a shotgun. OK– I didn’t. Leo, the narrator of The Angel of Fire did. I just watched him do it while keeping Read more…
Angel of Fire Delivered
I have just sent The Angel of Fire in to Black Library. It’s my first 40K in a long time and it’s my first ever book written for Black Library in the first person singular. It was a lot of fun and a very different experience looking at the 41st Millennium from the point of view of an ordinary soldier rather than that of a Space Wolf. I am now waiting for feedback from my esteemed editor Nick Kyme at Black Library and soon, I hope I will be making the necessary revisions and pushing on to the second book in the Macharian Crusade Read more…
Death’s Angels: the 99 Cent Experiment
Financial alert: this post talks about money. If you are one of those people who get offended when writers talk about finances, look away now! Some of you may remember that a month ago I dropped the price of Death’s Angels to $2.99 to see if it had any effect on sales. The basic theory was that the more people who read the first book in the series, the more would be likely to read the second and the third and so on. The Terrarch books are an ongoing narrative; they have an epic storyline that progresses rather than just being Read more…
Lawrence Block on the Renaissance of the Short Story
Over on his blog the great Lawrence Block is talking about short stories. He thinks that ebooks might be the salvation of the form. If you’re interested in the short story I urge you to go ahead and read what he has to say. Block is, in my opinion, one of the greatest living writers and the very definition of what it means to be a professional. What he has to say is always worth hearing. I’ll still be here when you get back. When I was starting out a quarter of a century ago, I wrote a lot of Read more…
What Do Angels Have To Weep About?
Two weeping stone angels guarded the entrance to the tomb. Their features were weathered which just made them look even more mournful. I wondered what it was angels had to weep about? Priests say it’s the sins of mortals but none of the angels I ever talked to cared much about our sins. They were more concerned with their holy war. There in one paragraph is the reason I love writing fantasy. It starts with a concrete description and progresses to a throwaway line from a bitter, disillusioned man who has lost his faith then, in the last couple of Read more…
The Best Laid Plans
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley. I expected to be on a train to Berlin Hauptbahnhof, family in tow, right about now; this to be swiftly followed by four days of swanning around the capital of Germany, visiting museums, eating in nice restaurants, seeing friends and doing all the usual tourist stuff. Instead I am staring at the screen of the monitor in my office in the (admittedly delightful) city of Prague musing on the vagaries of life. How did it come down to this? Yesterday, Nurgle struck down my son Dan with some sort of Read more…
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