Guardian of the Dawn
Guardian of the Dawn is my personal favourite of all the sword and sorcery short stories I have written. I can still remember sitting down one evening at the table in the living room in our old shabby flat in Modrany and starting to write it. It came out of nowhere as many stories do. I began in the middle, with Kormak in the forest about to confront the elder world demon. It was a scene that surprised me with its odd echoes of Kipling in the language used and a formal structure of challenge and response between man and Read more…
The Arithmetic of Writing
If you’ve read many of the posts on this site, you already know what I’ve been doing today. I’ve been taking stock of the month that just passed and I have been deciding what I need to do this month. At the start of each month I’ll note what actually got written as opposed to what I said I would write at the start of last month. If the targets were not met, I will try and work out why and do better in the coming month. I spend a lot of time on this sort of thing. I believe Read more…
Your Moods Are Your Enemies
Your moods are your enemies. At least they are if you are writing. This is something you should always bear in mind if you want to write professionally. There are people who say they can only write when they feel inspired. I think they are making a mistake. Here’s why. Your mood has nothing to do with what you write. The way you feel has very little to do with the way you put sentences together. It’s about the way you feel, end of story. The two things are not connected. The way you feel about what you have written Read more…
Building a Hive
What does the future smell like?
I spend a significant chunk of my working life thinking about this. To write fiction set in the 40K universe (or any other) you need to know how things look, sound, feel and smell. You need to convince your readers of the reality of the world your characters are moving through. You need to stimulate their imaginations with small, telling details that help them to believe in the place. You need to be able to describe how things feel, how they smell, how they sound if you are going to conjure up vivid images in their minds.
Games Workshop’s artists and sculptors have given us a very good idea of what the 41st Millennium looks like, but for the rest of it, you have some work to do.
Right now I am writing a story set in the Hive city of Irongrad; a vast, multi-layered urban mountain with the population of a modern country. I need, at least in my imagination, to walk its streets, and come back with a description that convinces. It’s a form of intellectual time and space travel. Once that’s done I need to be able to relate what I find to physical stimuli that readers can grasp.
How do I do that? Read more…
A New Hope
So the great e-book experiment thunders on and my sales have risen to an average of 3 a day. The sunlit uplands of selling 1000 books a year sweep into view. This makes me very hopeful and not just about the prospect of my rent getting paid. It makes me hopeful for publishing and genres I love and for lots of new and experimental writing in general.
I know — you’ve heard that self-published e-books are the death knell of good writing. Without the gatekeepers of mainstream publishing aren’t all lovers of literature doomed? How can I be hopeful as the mongol tide of sub-literate, self-pubbed scum rapes and pillages its way across the pristine landscapes of mainstream publishing and sets fire to the ivory towers of excellence?
Glad you asked. As part of that mongol tide I would like to thank you for the opportunity of giving you my answer. Read more…
So What About Warhammer and Writing Then?
I know, I know it says Warhammer, Writing and Whatever Else Is On My Mind in the tagline above, and you come here and there’s damn little about Warhammer or writing for that matter and a lot about operating systems and software and work habits instead. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about Warhammer or writing. It’s just at the moment I am deep in writing a Warhammer book and that pretty much guarantees it won’t be something I want to talk about. At this stage of writing a book, the last thing I want to do Read more…
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