An excerpt from the steampunk side project

Which is still growing like a weed. When I arrive back at the house, the second post has come and brought with it a copy of Larch’s Monthly Magazine and a couple of letters. One is from Micah Ellrington’s wife, and is concerned entirely with one of her children having the whooping-cough. This cheers me […]

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 […]

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 […]

Any old irony

There may be a deleted scene later: I want to be able to fit it into the book, but most of what it does has already been done elsewhere and it’s not really progressing the plot. Alternatively I might asset-strip it and use the bits elsewhere. Being a writer: not unlike being a rag-and-bone man, […]

Action scenes

Today I am continuing to write an action scene in which my characters fight something not a million miles from a Final Fantasy Malboro. This would all be so much easier if I’d never read any tentacle porn fanfic.

How To Be A Writer

This is an amazing post by M. Molly Backes about how to be a writer. The condensed version is: you write. But read the full version anyway, because it’s worth it. I have to say how grateful I am that my own parents practiced benign neglect when confronted with a child who was interested in […]

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 […]

The Rights Of The Reader

A friend sent me a link to this great post about Daniel Pennac’s book The Rights Of The Reader. I wish I’d had this book and the poster that comes with it when I was nine, or even when I was nineteen. Heck, I’m thirty-nine and I’m still going to buy the book. This is […]

Good Thing, Bad Thing

Bad thing: realising that the plot took a wrong turn about sixty pages back. Good thing: at least now I can fix it, rather than staring at the book thinking ‘This is crap! I can’t get on with this book because something’s wrong with it, and I can’t start a different book because my brain […]