Keen-eyed readers may have noticed that Heirs of the Blade brings in a number of characters previously seen in the short stories on this site. This is obviously because of my immense skill in foreshadowing and plotting ahead and not at all because several of those characters just wouldn't leave me alone until they got a serious […]
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 Eye of the Beholder fond mockathon I did a while back started the memories flowing regarding computer RPGs (of the single rather than the MMO (1) variety) that I've had fun with. Now Fantasycon's gone and the Reading and London signings are still coming up, here are a few that I recall having some real fun with back […]
Last week, the BBC debuted a somewhat delayed sequel to Walking With Dinosaurs, Planet Dinosaur (1), and lo! Thumbs up! (3). Dinosaurs were always a big thing for me — starting at the age that kids normally start liking dinosaurs and never really going away. There was probably a crisis point somewhere along the way which might have […]
… anyway … Hmm, Ok, so I wasn't unqualifiedly in love with the movie, but Bob "Movie Bob" Chipman, whose opinions I normally chime with, says here: "Nobody really seems to give a damn about Conan the Barbarian" which would be a terrible thing to be true. It would be the death of a lot of potential fantasy films in […]
In which I continue watching films as a pretext for making awful puns in the title. And yes, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers for the new Conan film. I have been heard to say that before Peter Jackson made Fellowship (1) there wasn't a fantasy film out there that you could cite as a good film without then going on to say […]
Yuk. Puns. Ah well. Anyway, cutting the day job down to four days a week has meant that this thing called the cinema (1) has re-entered my life. Experiment has taught that I can actually go into Leeds, get a big ol' slab of writing down in the coffee shop of my choice, and also take in a movie. As […]
In which I am the victim of racist abuse. I over-dramatise, certainly. It wasn’t aimed at me specifically. The jackbooted ghost of Moseley didn’t kick in my door at midnight. However, hearing the phrase “They should all f*ck off where they came from” used to close some oratory on the scurrilous nature of those Eastern European […]
Time for another soundtrack, this time the musical stylings of Khanaphes. Track 1 — Overture (A Distant Sadness, from Battlestar Galactica Season 3 by Bear McCreary) Track 2 — Che Voyaging (The Bunker (Reprise), from Shadow of the Vampire by Daniel Jones) Track 3 — Che and Thalric (The Lonely Voyage, from Shadow of the […]
Just a very brief note to say that, if you are replete with Kindle-owning (1) friends who haven't yet met the insect-kinden then Pyr/Prometheus have a limited time promotion on, with Empire going for just $1.99. Then they can buy the rest full price, damn them :). (1) Kindling? Can you gerund it?
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