New Year Resolutions
Happy New Year! Last year was not a good one for my blogging. I managed a total of only eight posts. There were a number of reasons, some good, some bad,none of which I particularly want to go into. This year I will hopefully have more free time on my hands and a bit of that will be dedicated to the blog. I’ve been reading Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work and I liked some of the ideas in it a lot. Kleon recommends sharing something about your work every day, even if what you have to say is very short. Read more…
The Wizard of Lemuria
The fantasy community has always had a schizophrenic response to Lin Carter. Mention his stint as the editor of the justly renowned Ballantine Adult Fantasy series and you’ll hear plaudits (from readers of a certain generation at least.) Carter was the man responsible for bringing a bunch of neglected classics back into print. He had a hand in kickstarting the great fantasy boom of the 1960s. Mention his own fantasy writing, on the other hand, and you’ll be greeted with much shaking of heads. It has to be said that the head-shaking is, for the most part, justified. The overwhelming Read more…
A Wizard of Earthsea
I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea again recently when I was on holiday. I have read it every few years since I first came across it in the children’s section of Stranraer public library at the end of the 1960s. I encountered it in my first surge of enthusiasm for SF and Fantasy. Indeed it was probably responsible for it. I am convinced it is one of the enduring classics of 20th Century fantasy. It has stood the test of time and repeated rereading. No matter what decade of my life I have read it in, I Read more…
Microsoft Surface Pro 3
I picked up even Microsoft Surface Pro 3 at the airport duty-free store on my way back from Scotland. That was a few weeks ago. The madness of National Novel Writing Month prevented me from blogging about it. I’ve had the machine long enough now to give my first impressions. The Surface Pro is Microsoft’s flagship product for Windows 8, a hybrid of tablet and laptop. It looks like a big tablet with a magnetically attached tear-off keyboard screen cover. (You need to buy this separately.) It runs Windows 8.1 on a full Haswell processor. Microsoft bills it as being Read more…
NaNoWriMo Endgame
At 16:50 yesterday I completed the first draft of my novel for NaNoWriMo. When it was validated it came to 50,039 words. It was not all plain sailing. The last section was written while I suffered from a very bad flu. Just to complicate matters when I reached about 43,000 words I realised that my outline was going to be useless as a guide to completing the book. I originally thought that the murder mystery plot I was using was going to be a short introduction to the quest adventure. There I was 80% of the way through and the Read more…
Free Stuff for NaNoWriMo
I should have known it was all going to go horribly wrong the moment I got on the plane. It wasn’t just the person on the left of me was snuffling. The person on the right was as well. As was the person in front of me and the person behind. As we took off the sounds of coughing and sneezing drowned out the engines. I could practically feel the cloud of unhealth settle on me. Father Nurgle has blessed me once more. There was not a lot of NaNoWriMoing done last week. As of yesterday I had completed 36522 Read more…
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