A Cold and Lonely Place Released
A Cold and Lonely Place, the latest Kormak short story, is now available. Here’s the blurb. To the world at large, he is a mercenary and assassin, a brutal killer with a deadly blade. In reality Kormak is a Guardian, one of an ancient order sworn to protect humanity from the servants of the gathering darkness. Grimhaven holds a fatal secret as any visitor discovers too late. On a dark autumn evening, as the full moon glares down on the village, a stranger arrives, a man called Kormak, on a mission to uncover what happened to a friend Read more…
The Advantages of Markdown
I was going to review the writing app Ulysses 3.1 today but David Hewson saved me the bother. If you’re interested I suggest you take a look at David’s thorough and fair review. I’ll just add that, as an owner of Ulysses 3 and its previous versions, I agree with everything that David says. For those of you who want an edited summary, Ulysses 3.1 is a text processing program that uses Markdown as its basic file format. It has some very clever ways of storing your writing either on your computer or in iCloud. It makes it very easy Read more…
Taker of Skulls Released
That’s the fifth book in the Kormak series, Taker of Skulls, released. It’s a rip-roaring adventure in which our bold monster hunter is dispatched on a potential suicide mission among the ruins of the once-great dwarven civilisation of the Kingdoms of the Sun. The book features demented hordes of mutant goblins, survivalist dwarves and one of the most terrifying Old Ones Kormak has ever faced. Taker of Skulls is available amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. It may be available on Apple’s iBookstore by the time you read this but, as ever, Apple are a law unto themselves. As Read more…
Best Books For Writers 2013
Just to be clear this is not my list of the best books for writers released in 2013. This is my list of the best books I read this year. Looking at the list I realise that I prefer technical books about methods and process, nuts and bolts, rather than motivational books and those that talk in terms of art. Please keep that in mind as you go through my choices. Sitting down to write this made me think about the way publishing has changed in the past few years. Even in the first decade of the 21st Century, a Read more…
How to Format Your Novel For Kindle, Nook, the iBookstore, Smashwords and CreateSpace in One Afternoon
Way back in the summer on Kindleboards and in other places I kept reading about people laying out their print books for CreateSpace using Scrivener. Long term readers of this blog will know that I can’t praise Scrivener enough. It is the single best program for long form writing I know. Now it seemed Scrivener’s utility had expanded into an entirely new arena. I knew it could create ebooks easily and well, but print books? I have always used Word, or if the need arose, InDesign for that. Being the sort of man that I am, I thought I should investigate the possibilities. Read more…
Radio Archives
I got into pulp in my teens by way of Sword and Sorcery and the great Weird Tales authors; Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft. This was back in the early 70’s when there was very definitely a pulp renaissance under way. I am not entirely sure why that was. I suspect that there was probably a generation of people working in publishing who were as nostalgic for the comfort reading of their youths as I now am for the comfort reading of mine. It probably didn’t do any harm that there were vast stocks of Read more…
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