A sequel of unfortunate events

I always like it when books have authors’ notes reading ‘This book was a pain in the backside to write’ because it makes me feel like I’m not alone and it gives me hope that they managed to finish a book so there’s no reason why I can’t do the same. At present Heavy Ice […]

Caught in a non-romance

OK, so the first two books had a strong romantic thread running through them. Because I love romance novels and I’m not ashamed to admit it, and I wanted to write SF with the same kind of immersive attention to the characters’ feelings for each other – the same clause in the contract between writer […]

oh, writing.

So, my heroine Kallisty is trying to be helpful by pointing out to one of the second-tier characters that hero Quint fancies men, since she is under the mistaken impression that said second-tier character fancies Quint. And I had to hedge her remark about with a couple of sentences to make sure that it was […]

iNnes

Well, it looks like Lulu have got moving on the ‘we only do ebooks in PDF format’ problem while I wasn’t paying attention – I got an email this morning saying that they’re making a push to include their books on the Apple iBookstore in ePub format, and if I didn’t want The Maker’s Mask […]

And today we have management of infodumps

I am fiddling about with the most recent chapter of Heavy Ice, in which the characters finally have five minutes where they’re both conscious at the same time and no one’s trying to kill them, and are therefore sitting down and asking each other awkward questions. It’s not going well, because there are a lot […]

Cool

Quite a lot of self-published books are, y’know, cool. They’re set in post-apocalyptic Singapore, or their selling point is ‘Steampunk is sexually transmitted!’ [1] or they have their finger on the blue throb of the zeitgeist’s pulse in some other way. I admire that. The thing is, mine aren’t. The best I can really do […]

Writing and Gaming: They’re Different

I write, and I also run games. [1] The writing came first, but only because up until I went to university a combination of geography and lack of social skills meant that I didn’t know anyone else who was interested in RPGs and wanted to do anything more complicated than ‘I hit the orc’ / […]

Britain After Rome

I am reading Robin Fleming’s Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 – 1070 and really enjoying it. Part of this is because it’s full of descriptions of clothing. But most of it is that I am hugely attracted to reading about cobbled-together, makeshift societies, and to the details of trade webs and burial […]

Rewriting

Today I am rewriting a scene that was doing two things badly in the hope that I can get it to instead do one thing well. Part of the problem was that the viewpoint kept shifting from tight third person to omniscient, which is never a good sign. Fortunately I find rewriting a lot easier […]

Things I have achieved today

Finally worked out where one of the damn flashbacks fits into Heavy Ice. Yay! Including flashbacks is like starting one of those novelty three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles: it’s only a good idea if you have a very clear idea of what the finished edifice will look like, which I generally don’t. November is coming, so good […]