Today I am pleased to have a guest post by Jason M Waltz, the publisher of Writing Fantasy Heroes and many other fine works via his company Rogue Blades Entertainment. Jason and I have crossed paths in numerous sword and sorcery forums and and his knowledge of and his sincere love for the genre have always impressed me. I am really happy to have him here talking about his latest project, a book with a stellar lineup of contributors which is certainly worth the attention of the writers among you as well as anyone who is simply interested in how the fantasy genre is written. There will even be a chance to win a copy of the book itself. Anyway, without further ado I'll hand you over to Jason... Howdy all! I want to begin by … [Read more...]
Celebrate!
I was watching my nine month old son this morning. He has just taught himself to stand by grabbing the struts of his cot and pulling himself upright. When he achieves this, he burbles and howls with happiness, does a little staggering dance and raises his hand in the air like a footballer who has just scored the winning goal in the last seconds of a World Cup final. He is clearly very happy indeed with the achievement of standing upright. Needless to say, I don’t feel (or behave) the same way when I drag myself from my bed and plant my feet on the floor in the morning. Achieving the vertical does not fill me with glee the way it does young Will, although I most likely felt the same way about it back in the day and just cannot … [Read more...]
Writing Blood of Aenarion (Part Three)
So there I was trying to decide whether to junk yet another opening. If you've read the book, you already know I didn't and you also know why. The solution to the problem was pretty simple. It had already been established (in Daemonslayer, for example, and in the Daemons of Chaos book which was causing me so much trouble) that daemons can return from the dead. You can't ever really kill them, only destroy their body. When this happens they are banished from mortal reality for a time until they can take a new form. All I needed to do was posit that N'Kari did this before the Battle of the Island of the Dead. Given the fact that this was at the height of the first and greatest Chaos incursion, when the Winds of Magic blew most strongly and … [Read more...]
Year One
Exactly one year ago today I started writing this blog. Not many people noticed because I did not allow it to be picked up by the search engines for some time after that. I had tried maintaining a blog on several occasions in the past and always given up after a few posts. I wanted to see if I could produce posts on a regular schedule before risking public failure again. I wrote a few, decided it was not too difficult and pushed on. The very first post I wrote was a very short response to seeing Game of Thrones. I followed this up with a number of posts about Linux which I was seriously considering moving to for work purposes. Over the year I have had roughly 37000 hits and seem to have settled down to getting about 4000 to 5000 hits a … [Read more...]
What To Do When You Don’t Feel Like Writing Redux
I was planning on writing a long post about magic and military fantasy this week when reality intervened. I was recently put on medication for diabetes and my metabolism still seems to be adjusting to it. I've had to make some dietary changes as well which are not helping. A lot of the day I feel pretty slow, particularly just after I have taken the tablets in the morning. It's not exactly conducive to writing either fiction or blog posts. Under the circumstances there is only one thing to do: learn, adapt and roll with the punches. I've spent the past couple of weeks watching my body's responses and I've reached a few conclusions. I am slowest in the morning, almost normal in the afternoon and early evening and then I slow down again when … [Read more...]
The Casebook of Jack Brodie
Much to my surprise my Victorian detective novel, The Inquiry Agent, has reached the top 10 in the Kindle Historical Mysteries and British Detective categories on Amazon.com. It was in fact very briefly number 1 in both and is, as of the time of writing, in the Top 100 Mysteries. I would like to do something to encourage you all to rush out and buy a copy (or at least give you some idea of the style) but unfortunately the terms of Amazon's Kindle Select program forbid me from reprinting any of it here. I am therefor going to post a couple of extracts from its sequel, The Distressed Lady, one of my many works in progress. For those of you who don't know anything about my alternative career as a mystery writer, don't worry, so far you have … [Read more...]
Back To The Crusade
My current 40K novel, The Fist of Demetrius, is starting to shape up. I am about 25000 words in. An ominous cloud of intrigue looms over Macharius as he reaches the absolute zenith of his power at the height of the Crusade. The Dark Eldar are moving across the event horizon. Multiple conflicts loom, with the xenos, with ambitious generals and corrupt Imperial politicians. Macharius ,although he does not know it, is about to experience the pivotal event of his life, a confrontation with something that will turn him from the golden reflection of Alexander the Great into the dark, ruthless fanatic we know from the background texts. Slowly, a bit at a time, a book is coming into being. It's fun to watch and at the same time frustrating, … [Read more...]
High Elves, Dark Elves, All Elves
Central to the struggle in the Tyrion and Teclis trilogy is the conflict between High Elves and Dark Elves. We all know what that means, don't we? High Elves are glittering and noble, proud and good. Dark Elves are decadent and wicked, drugged out and crazy, given to torture and malice. They are as different as two peoples can be, aren't they? Actually, I don't think so. I think they are exactly the same people. They are just the products of two very different societies. I believe that in every High Elf is a potential Dark Elf, and in every Dark Elf there is the seed of a High Elf. Consider this. They were all one people once, before the coming of Chaos, before Aenarion and the Godslayer, before Morathi and Malekith. There once were only … [Read more...]
Sky Pirates Released
I can remember the exact moment when I got the idea for Sky Pirates. I was reading one of Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian books, The Gods Of Mars. I came across his descriptions of the savage green men and, of course, I thought of orcs. For some reason, from then on the idea of Burroughs Green Men and orcs became conjoined in my mind. My brain was filled with the idea of orcish hordes rampaging across the desiccated landscapes of a dying world not unlike Barsoom. Thuvia, Maid of Mars is one of the very first SF novels I can remember reading as a small kid. I can still picture the cover (by Bruce Pennington I think) in my mind. It had a very scantily clad Thuvia and a Thark on it. It made a lasting impression on me. There's something very … [Read more...]
Order Out of Chaos
So the end of the month is sneaking closer and I am still working away. As I mentioned at the start of the month, I planned on writing 2K of new fiction every working day this year as well as revising work for publication. I also mentioned that I was having trouble settling down into a routine. (New babies and lack of sleep tend to have that effect!) Of late, I have been plagued by the flu and persecuted by the Machine God as well. However, in spite of all this, I have started to get the feeling that my goals for this year are at least possible. I am settling down into a new method of working, which is just as well, because I need to. I begin each day by revising what I wrote the work day before. (Obviously this means that on Monday I … [Read more...]
The Hundredth Post
Back in the 80s my brother sold insurance. He occasionally attended sales conferences and sometimes came back with motivational books. One day, bored, with nothing better to do, I read one. It started a life-long habit of reading books about selling and the life of a salesman. In case you are wondering what possible relevance any of those could have to the life of a writer, let me just point out that writers and salesmen have more in common than you might think. Both writers and salesmen need to be self-starters. There is usually no one else around to motivate you. Both live in worlds where the possibility of rejection arises daily, and both need to be able to keep going in the face of that rejection. Both have jobs where they are entirely … [Read more...]
The Best Laid Plans
I had planned on writing about Tyrion and Teclis today but my new-born son had other plans that trumped my own. He decided last night he really did not want to sleep and if he could not sleep, none of the rest of us would either. I can't remember the last time I went a night without sleep and I've done it twice this week already. Worth it though! Anyway, I am going to spend the rest of today, hopefully, catching up on the rest I missed. My apologies for that. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all. Back next week, the wee man willing. … [Read more...]
The Small, Nagging Voice
Yesterday I finished the first draft of my Kormak novel, Mask of the Necromancer. I did it ahead of schedule, just carried along by the flow of the writing. You’d think I’d be happy, but no, being a writer and a neurotic, I’ve found a way to make myself unhappy about this. Since I believe in spreading the misery, I thought I would share my method with you. This week I made a commitment to write 3000 words a day, 50% more than I normally would. Mostly this was a result of reading Rachel Aaron’s 10K a day article and recognising the truth of it. One of the big changes I made to my work routine was to set Freedom for one hour instead of 30 minutes, which is normally how long I write for to avoid RSI problems. When I was younger I used … [Read more...]
Ebook News
On Saturday, I sold the one thousandth ebook of Death's Angels. It was a nice milestone to pass. It comes in the first month in which I have sold over a thousand ebooks too. All in all I have sold a couple of thousand books in the Terrarch series and roughly 2400 ebooks in total including short stories and collections. I have also had roughly five thousand downloads of the Guardian of the Dawn since it went free. I started selling ebooks in July and have released one of the Terrarch books roughly every six weeks since then. The last book, Shadowblood only went on sale this month. December will be the first month that the whole series will be available and I am curious to see how it goes. Creating your own ebooks is pretty simple. It's 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 for. I've looked at this and I have to say that it all seems sound and sensible. I have written 10K a day in my time before old age and RSI took their toll and I recognise the good sense in what Rachel is saying. I don't see myself writing 10K a … [Read more...]
