2012: The Plan

Having gotten side-tracked on Wednesday into writing about the usefulness of the knowledge of our own mortality, I am back to a slightly more cheerful subject today, my plans and resolutions for the coming year. You’ll notice that most of my goals are stated in numbers. I’m a great believer in what gets measured gets done and I find setting things down in cold, hard numbers makes them easier to track and achieve. It’s much easier to judge the success of I will write 2000 words per working day than I will write a novel this year. The first will Read more…

Fail To Plan, Plan To Fail or Something Like That

It’s that time of the year again. Christmas has come. I’ve played with (or read) my presents and it’s time to get back to some serious work. The space between Christmas and the New Year is usually when I review my goals from the previous year and set my goals for the coming one. This year, because I am lazy and going to have to do this anyway, I am killing two birds with one stone and writing a blog post about it. As long term readers will know I believe in planning and measuring things, in setting milestones and Read more…

In the Meantime, In Between Time

I am in that strange space you sometimes get into as an author. I am revising one manuscript, preparing another for publication and writing another all at the same time. That seems to happen more and more often these days as I do my work for Black Library, try and get my backlist into print in ebook format and even write a new novel. So what exactly have I been up to? Well, yesterday I killed an ork with a shotgun. OK– I didn’t. Leo, the narrator of The Angel of Fire did. I just watched him do it while keeping Read more…

The Waiting Game

If you’re a writer you spend a lot of time just sitting around waiting. You wait to see whether your book has been accepted or rejected. You wait to see what your editor has to say about your work. You wait to see whether a project gets approved or you have to go back to the drawing board. Once you finish a project, you often sit around waiting for feedback. That is what I am currently doing now–waiting to see what my editor has to say about The Angel of Fire. Sometimes when I finish a book I need a Read more…

Angel of Fire Delivered

I have just sent The Angel of Fire in to Black Library.  It’s my first 40K in a long time and it’s my first ever book written for Black Library in the first person singular. It was a lot of fun and a very different experience looking at the 41st Millennium from the point of view of an ordinary soldier rather than that of a Space Wolf. I am now waiting for feedback from my esteemed editor Nick Kyme at Black Library and soon, I hope I will be making the necessary revisions and pushing on to the second book in the Macharian Crusade Read more…