Sweet Sixteen
So yesterday I hit 16 posts this month, precisely twice as many as I managed in all of last year. I’m going to give myself a hearty pat on the back for that. I’ll also confess I am a bit stuck for something to write about today so I am just going to talk about recent developments in my writing and travel plans. Bear with me, I am new to this daily blogging thing. I was very surprised to discover my military SF novel seems to have taken on a life of its own. I sat down to write a Read more…
Blizzcon 2015
I am just back from Blizzcon, brainstunned with jetlag, so this will probably be pretty incoherent. I was there to help promote Illidan, my upcoming World of Warcraft novel, due in March 2016. Number one son, Dan, came along. Having accompanied me through the depths of Black Temple and across the wastes of Outland while I was doing my research for the book, it seemed only right that he brave the depths of Anaheim Convention Center with me. We flew into LAX on Wednesday evening and spent Thursday wandering around, locating the convention centre and basking in the blue skies Read more…
Improving Writing Workflows
I changed my workflow a lot this year. The most important alteration was that I started using markdown as much as possible. I’ve talked about the advantages before so I won’t go into them again here. I’ll just say that I love the way I can work anywhere on anything when I am using it. I am using Scrivener less. I know, I know– me saying that is one of the signs of the End Times. In the past I used Scrivener for pretty much everything I could. But all is flux as Heraclitus once said. My workflow is now Read more…
Ocean of Fear Author’s Notes
With my usual relentless lack of efficiency I have finally gotten round to writing up the author’s notes for Ocean of Fear only two months after the book was released. Here they are now. The tortured girl is dying, slowly and in agony. The brooding stranger who has come across her broken body by the side of the path listens to her tale of murder and rapine with mounting rage. As the girl passes, his wrath explodes. “Men shall die for this,” he says. And you, the reader, know they will. For the stranger is Solomon Kane, the puritan adventurer Read more…
Read Stealer of Flesh Free Online
You can read the first book in the Kormak Saga free online here. This is a result of my project to archive all of my books in markdown format for easy future reference. To create it, I found the original production copy of Stealer of Flesh, converted it to markdown then to HTML and uploaded it to the site. Unfortunately, the process of creating my archive was not quite as simple as I had hoped. First of all, my various ebooks were scattered all over the place in different formats usually Word or Scrivener. I had to find them and do 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…
^