And The Winner Is…
I have once again been struck down by Nurgle who has visited upon me yet another of his plagues. Overwhelmed by wheezing, sniffling and feverishness I decided to let the Writing Fantasy Heroes contest run another day. I have risen from my sickbed and with the aid of the D&D random die roller, chosen a winner. All of the entries were excellent and I’d like to thank everybody who took part. And now, without further ado, I fumble with the envelope while the orchestra performs a drum roll, and then I reveal that the winner is Damon Richard. Congratulations, sir!
Writing Fantasy Heroes: Tyrion
It’s Writing Fantasy Heroes week here so I thought I would chip in with my two cents worth about one of fantasy heroes I have worked on recently. I’m going to use Tyrion, one of the two main characters in my ongoing High Elf trilogy, as an example. This process of developing Tyrion was a little different from creating a character from scratch, since Tyrion already exists as part of the Warhammer universe. What I’ll be talking about is how I put flesh on his bones and hopefully turned him into a well-rounded and complex character as well as a believable hero. Read more…
Nice Review of Stealer of Flesh
There’s a very nice review of Stealer of Flesh here by someone who clearly understood what I was attempting. It’s attached to a short essay about the structure of fantasy novels which is worth your consideration as well.
New Cover For Guardian of the Dawn
As you can probably tell, I have been sprucing up the Kormak ebooks recently. Here is the lovely cover that the talented Clarissa Yeo over at bookcoversale.com did for the short story Guardian of the Dawn. If you’re interested, you can read the whole story for free here. The Author’s Notes are here.
A Map Of Kormak’s World
So finally the Kingdoms of the Sun have what all serious/series fantasy worlds seem to need– a map. This beautiful one was done by Chazz Kellner using Campaign Cartographer 3. (Thanks Chazz!) It’s an enormous improvement on the vague sketches and lists of names that I produced when I first started writing the stories. The distances are accurate and I now have a much clearer idea where everything is. It’s been a fascinating process watching bits of background from my published books, my notes and my half-completed short stories take shape. I’ll be adding this map to the latest version Read more…
Anatomy of an E-Book Sale
I just bought an e-book, Yesterday’s Spy, by Len Deighton. So what, Bill, I hear you cry– you buy ebooks every day. Most of us do. What’s there worth writing a blog post about in that? Well, it’s a process I usually do unthinkingly and today I actually analysed it on the level of both my intellectual processes and the mechanisms of sale. (Forgive me if what I am going to say sounds entirely obvious, but sometimes it’s worth thinking about the obvious.) Here’s what happened. This morning I was reading an article on Slate about how Len Deighton wrote Read more…
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