Shadows of the Apt

Not to be confused with SF series by either Stephen Donaldson or Peter F. Hamilton.
And, yes, they say make your blog entries short and pithy, but when I get my rant on it's hard to stop, Explains why the books tend to break the 200,000 word barrier, certainly.
And before I start, the Shadows of the Apt Wiki […]

Something different today as I talk about someone else's writing for a change and interview author Janine Ashbless. Janine wrote me the short story, The Scent of Tears, written — under another name — for this site, a strong story whose elements (with Janine' s approval) are actually feeding into the main series plot as we speak.
Janine already has a body […]

Contains some spoilers for book 4 and later.
Brief diversion on the writer's art to look at these two characters, a brace of Beetle-kinden politicians. Unprepossessing stuff, surely.
However, what the two of them, bitter rivals as they are, demonstrate is the ability of characters to get completely out of control. Along with many writers, I've often gone off on […]

It is with trembling hands that I type: the first draft of book 9, "War Master's Gate" (1), is finished.
I'm not going to lie to you, it's been a rough ride. I'm slick with blood up to the elbows, and my normal protests that the story unfolds of its own momentum, with minimal fiddling from me, are […]

Mark Charan Newton, author of the excellent Legends of the Red Sun series has a clip and a muse on the great question almost every author gets at one time or another (1): Where do ideas come from.
That got me thinking. Technically, my published long fiction to date represents only a single set of initial ideas — that's the […]

As a special note for those who are hoping for publication in the fantasy/SF genre(1), Tor UK have got together with Sci Fi Now to bring you a grand competition in which the prize for the winner is… just that: a book deal.
Read more about the competition here - they're looking for a synopsis plus three chapters by 20^th August. […]

So…
I'm standing in a block of perhaps twenty men and women forming a compact fist at the centre of the battle-line. Around us, our fellow countrymen make the numbers up to a couple of hundred, arrayed behind and to either side of us with an order that few of our allies can match. The front rank are shieldmen […]

Well! Less than a month til the release of Dragonfly Falling (1). Another story soon, this time to do with the Moth-kinden, or sort of. Hopefully also a little reference piece on art and literature in the Lowlands. We'll see (3).
However, I acquired some new reading material this Christmas, and I wanted to share a couple of quotes with you, one […]