Plot early, plot often

In the ‘good news’ category: the steampunk thing, now tentatively entitled ‘Firebrand’, is chugging closer to being finished in first draft. So then it’ll be time for the second draft and then to send it off to the various people who have very kindly offered (and in Jasmine’s case, been begged) to beta-read it, and […]

Saturday snippet: Firesmoke Soup

One of these days I will be organised enough, and get up in time, to do Six Sentence Sunday like Jasmine Ahern does – I always enjoy looking through the posts and seeing the excerpts from so many different kinds of books. Until then, here is a quiet moment with Kallisty’s bandits. The viewpoint character […]

I write long books.

Today I realised that Kallisty’s uncle Hawkwood Prime is played by Sir Patrick Stewart, which (a) explains why he’s managed to persuade so many people to marry him, and (b) is going to be a serious impediment to killing him off if I find the plot requires that. Today’s writing also featured one of the […]

Hawkwoods

After a day of writing which felt like wading through treacle, I now have some idea what stupid thing the Hawkwoods are going to do next. Trust me, compared to yesterday this is progress. I keep reminding myself that last time I managed to bring the ravening multi-headed plot-beast over the finishing line without too […]

covers head, anticipates brickbats

So, it’s looking like Heavy Ice might turn out to be another duology. I’m sorry, people – it seems like my natural writing length is the ‘too big to fit into one book, not big enough to be a trilogy’. It’s not the usual ‘sod off, characters / plotlines who wish to show up late […]

Bizarre spam comments I have had lately

Viagra dire event warning tag Reminder that this is not the Existential Flame War. You may be entirely perfect. That’s nice. I still use too many semi-colons, though. Various spam promoting French rappers Seriously, give it up. I’m not going to promote French rappers. My knowledge of French popular culture stops at Francis Cabrel. And […]

Random assortment

I like websites that log you in and keep you logged in. I get mildly annoyed about websites that expect you to log in every day, but I realise they’re doing it for security reasons. But websites that keep you logged in for a long but unspecified length of time and then randomly log you […]

Stumbling Through Paradise

Well over a decade ago (actually, it might be coming up on a decade and a half) a friend read the Unpublishable Novel About Roleplayers and said ‘You write grand sweeping landscapes and then have characters stumbling about in front of them saying ‘um’ and ‘bugger”. I am glad to report that Heavy Ice is […]

Two Chapter Elevens

So, at present I have two chapter elevens, an idea persistently poking me in the back of the head for the next Requite book (and I wasn’t even planning to write a next Requite book, I was planning to do something else) and everyone I know who writes normal-sized books has finished one, or possibly […]

It’s Not A Trilogy*

So, I was out having coffee with a friend today and she mentioned that her husband hadn’t bought my books because he thought they were a trilogy, and he doesn’t like buying the first two books of a trilogy and then having to wait for a third. Now, it’s entirely reasonable for people not to […]