Way way back in the early 1990's I was at university and I was running an RPG campaign using a horrible mishmash home-grown system I had slung together. The setting was a place called the Lowlands. Instead of elves and dwarves, it was populated by a pack of oddities known as the insect-kinden. There was a Beetle intelligencer called Stenwold, a Mantis Weaponsmaster […]
Soooo, we've got to that hilarious third act section of book 10 where I keep getting these fantastic ideas about stuff I absolutely have to include, only that means I would have to rejig the entire end third of the plot to fit in this, by now, irresistible idea. So, spent considerable time faffing about with my chapter […]
Alt Fiction last weekend — and 2 cons on the trot is a bit wearing on body and soul, especially when I managed to clock a 20 hour day on the Saturday. The early start was the fault of the remarkable time it takes to get from Leeds to Leicester — longer than it does to hit London somehow. […]
Eastercon write up will come soon, but following on from a comment a few posts ago — happy Easter! And in general celebration I do indeed give you an Easter Egg, being deleted scenes from Heirs of the Blade. In the original version there was quite a digressive subplot near the beginning involving Tynisa, Gaved and an old enemy, […]
Not a plug for Paul Cornell's "Saucer Country" but instead the first breath of wind that heralds the arrival of The Air War. As pointed out by Mark Guest in a comment to the last post, the 8th book of Shadows of the Apt will be out 2nd August, meaning I should start thinking about signings for around […]
I've read it's bad practice to blog about how the writing is going, but book 10, man. Seal of the Worm. I had Air War and War Master's Gate pretty well plotted beforehand — the process was quite tight, quite blow by blow. I tend to not set pen to paper (1) until I've got a good […]
OK so: the good people from fantasy-faction.com were good enough to collar me for an interview, focusing on the challenges offered by short stories, which interview will presumably be up on their site some time soon, and on the Saturday evening there was a Gollancz (/Orbit?) party that was crammed full (literally) of Names (not literally), […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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