You have probably seen this link by now, at least if you live anywhere near my corner of the Social Mediadrome. The response has been pretty much what you might expect, with people essentially picking it up, carrying it to a big stack of wood and setting fire to it. Lynn Shepherd has been villified, accused […]
So, genre and gender is still making the SFF industry look ridiculous, now sufficiently so to catch the derisive attention of reporting well outside the genre, and at the same time as the ripples from that farrage(1) were still crossing the water, (NK Jemisin has a good take on it here) we got Foz Meadows' report that […]
I try to let plot, world and characters develop as organically as possible. One major upshot of this is that bit-part players, conjured into existence to fill a momentary need of the narrative, can take on a life of their own. If a niche arises for them, they can take on real lives of their own. Here are […]
TIme for something relatively trivial. I like MMORPGs. They're the game genre I've spent most time playing for the last seven or eight years, with occasional excursions for Skyrim, Portal 2 and a few others. When I started off there was a small number of them (1) and I played just the one. Now there seem to be hundreds and […]
Super Secret Project Zeta Go! I am very glad to announce that Tor UK have picked up a brand new novel of mine, as they announce here. This is in addition to Guns of the Dawn (1) and the new series that will start with The Tiger and the Wolf. As you'll note, the new book is […]
Shotgun Linkstorm is most definitely my new band name. Anyway, dragging myself from the hibernation pod for another year I discover it's 2014. It's way too early in January to expect anything coherent so: Super Secret Project Zeta I will most definitely have some news on this, probably even next week. It's very exciting. To me, […]
Or, time for a brief glance backwards. It's been a mixedsort of year. A lot of people I know have had a rough time of it for various reasons — illness, personal problems and the vicissitudes of the writing game amongst them. The industry has lost a lot of people. It has been something of a subdued year all told. On the plus […]
I did get through a metric crapton(1) of books this year, and a lot of them were very good. I'm not going to do a 'best of', but I want to flag up a few reads that people might not have come across, and that I think deserve some attention. If you're looking for a good, solidly written book with a different […]
"Everyone in fantasy books is always resorting to the "old magic". Why isn't the new magic better? That's what I want to know," said Obi-Jon (@jonthepo0le) on Twitter, possibly not expecting to get taken up seriously on it. My knee-jerk answer was "because then it would be science-fiction." (1) Wouldn't it? Okay, let me expand briefly […]
Well last post was Weighty and Meaningful, and today's is decidedly short on any kind of serious import. It also contains mild spoilers for Thor: The Dark World, though nothing that isn't covered in the prologue section. So, Malekith. I've read a number of reviews so far about Thor 2. I really enjoyed the film — and […]
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