Freedom
I have mentioned before how I waste a lot of time wilfing (What am I Looking For) on the net. It is a constant temptation. What starts out as a simple look at my sales figures on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing can turn into a multi-click odyssey in which I scrabble around the whole Amazon site chasing up things that interest me just because they appeared on the also bought list of Death’s Angels. A fact check for my current project can turn into a trail of breadcrumbs which leads to articles on 80’s role-playing games. Sometimes I am not Read more…
How To Write 10000 Words a Day and Other Recommendations
I am finally tying up Angel of Fire. I’ve had one of those rewrites where changing one thing led to changing another which led to changing another and on and on. I’ve simply not had time to keep up to date with the blog over the past couple of weeks. In a pitiful attempt to actually post something this week, here are a few things I can recommend. First up is Rachel Aaron’s guide to writing 10,000 words a day. Yes, you read that right, that’s how to write 10K a day, not a week, which is what I aim Read more…
Writing on an Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook
I often carry my eeePC 1001P around with me when I am travelling or going out to cafes to write (Yes, I really do this! I know it’s not cool but I stopped worrying about looking cool a very long time ago.) Worried about Windows security, I replaced the XP installation with Ubuntu Linux 10.10. This has been something of a revelation. Ubuntu is a very light operating system and it boots and runs very quickly indeed even on older Intel Atom processors. It’s free and it comes with pretty much all the software you could possibly need to get Read more…
The Fastest Book I Ever Wrote
Today we have our first guest post. It’s from Matt Forbeck, author of the Blood Bowl novels, Deadlands, Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon and many, many more. I’ve been friends with Matt for more than 20 years. We met in my first week at the old Games Workshop Design Studio in Low Pavement in Nottingham. He had just graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and come to Britain on a 6 month student work visa. He walked in off the street carrying a huge backpack and just asked for a job. I thought this jaw-dropping audacity. And Read more…
Rewriting
I am taking time out from my busy schedule today to announce that I won’t be writing a blog post because I am doing the rewrite of Angel of Fire. Oh wait– I am writing a blog post, in the grand tradition of writers skiving off work everywhere. Right now I am just going through Angel tightening things up. I wrote an action-packed, ork-stomping prologue that frames the story and now I am working my way through the manuscript, taking out some scenes, tightening up others and adding new ones where they are needed to clarify the action. I am Read more…
Author’s Notes Shadowblood
Shadowblood takes a break from the Elder Races who featured in the earlier books of the series. Instead, it features a different horror standard; zombies. This does not mean I have moved away from the series Lovecraftian roots, far from it. The walking dead also appear in HP Lovecraft’s work, such as Herbert West, Reanimator. I did not start out to write a zombie novel, honestly. The world over-run by armies of the walking dead in Shadowblood is the logical outgrowth of the premise laid down in Book One of the series, that some of the Terrarchs are willing to Read more…
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