Your Moods Are Your Enemies
Your moods are your enemies. At least they are if you are writing. This is something you should always bear in mind if you want to write professionally. There are people who say they can only write when they feel inspired. I think they are making a mistake. Here’s why. Your mood has nothing to do with what you write. The way you feel has very little to do with the way you put sentences together. It’s about the way you feel, end of story. The two things are not connected. The way you feel about what you have written Read more…
Building a Hive
What does the future smell like?
I spend a significant chunk of my working life thinking about this. To write fiction set in the 40K universe (or any other) you need to know how things look, sound, feel and smell. You need to convince your readers of the reality of the world your characters are moving through. You need to stimulate their imaginations with small, telling details that help them to believe in the place. You need to be able to describe how things feel, how they smell, how they sound if you are going to conjure up vivid images in their minds.
Games Workshop’s artists and sculptors have given us a very good idea of what the 41st Millennium looks like, but for the rest of it, you have some work to do.
Right now I am writing a story set in the Hive city of Irongrad; a vast, multi-layered urban mountain with the population of a modern country. I need, at least in my imagination, to walk its streets, and come back with a description that convinces. It’s a form of intellectual time and space travel. Once that’s done I need to be able to relate what I find to physical stimuli that readers can grasp.
How do I do that? Read more…
So What About Warhammer and Writing Then?
I know, I know it says Warhammer, Writing and Whatever Else Is On My Mind in the tagline above, and you come here and there’s damn little about Warhammer or writing for that matter and a lot about operating systems and software and work habits instead. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about Warhammer or writing. It’s just at the moment I am deep in writing a Warhammer book and that pretty much guarantees it won’t be something I want to talk about. At this stage of writing a book, the last thing I want to do Read more…
The Angel of Fire
I thought I would say a little about the work in progress today. The Angel of Fire is a story of the Imperial Guard during the Macharian Crusade. It follows three friends, Leo, Anton and Ivan, part of the crew of a Baneblade, who by a series of strange accidents and the occasional bit of heroism end up saving the life of Macharius himself. It also involves huge armoured battles, urban combat in the streets of a Hive and a particularly nasty bunch of pyromaniac Tzeentch cultists. It’s been a lot of fun to look inside the 41st Millennium from Read more…
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