Tag: Writing
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Dark Feathered Hearts Out Now…
The Book of the Colossus is now complete with the final volume – Dark Feathered Hearts. “You shut us down in the darkness, you skin people oh so bright beneath your lovely skies. You buried us among the filth and the poison and the old machines and the chemicals.” Max and Abby race against time…
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Dark Feathered Hearts Concept Art
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Why Terry Pratchett is not Great Literature
Jonathan Jones wrote an article in The Guardian in which he stated that he had never read Terry Pratchett and had no intention of doing so because the discworld novels lacked literary merit, unlike Jane Austen’s books. It had all the hallmarks of a throwaway space filler deliberately designed to whip up controversy and the…
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Paperback AntiHelix and a Goodreads giveaway!
The paperback version of AntiHelix is now available from Amazon. Above you can see it next to the first two books in the series with their new covers!. I’m now cracking on with the final volume. I’ve also set up a giveaway on Goodreads, so if you click on the link below you might have a chance…
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Midori Traveller’s Notebook
A couple of years ago I wrote a post on my quest to find the ideal notebook. I’d grown tired of jumping from one PDA to another – first PalmPilot, then a Sony something-or-other and then iPhone/iPad, losing data, notes and contacts along the way. I realised, looking at my shelves, that I had diaries…
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AntiHelix, nuts and bolts and a writer’s workflow
I’ve finished the first draft of the third volume in the Book of the Colossus quadrilogy, AntiHelix, and put it to one side for a month to pickle. It stands at just over 129,000 words which is the longest piece of work I’ve written so far (though I’ll hack it back to 120,000-ish). I thought…
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Back to the PC
The PC vs. Mac debate has been raging for so long and so much of it is wrapped up in pointless sabre-rattling between shouty geeks that I had a good long think before writing this. In the end I thought it might be of use to some writers who have become disenchanted with Apple and…
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Ragged Claws available on March 16th!
Max and Abby are trapped in the city of Interosseous where the inhabitants navigate through the treacherous streets using the giant faces in the sky. If humanity is to survive Max must contact the Machine Men who live in the Heart and Mind of the Colossus. But the way onward is a deadly maze…
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Olivetti Lettera 32
A Happy New Year to everyone! This is my one hundredth post and I thought I’d follow tradition by talking about what Santa brought me for Christmas. When I was eight years old, and a precocious little sod, I filled a couple of reporter’s notebooks from W. H. Smiths with a ‘novel’. My dad was…
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Dark Fantasy: is it suitable for the servants?
This week’s post is a guest article by Jane Dougherty, the author of the wonderfully grim fantasy novel The Dark Citadel. First in a series, it tells of a future religious/fascist dystopian society sheltering beneath an immense dome, around which prowl demons and creatures of legend. It’s refreshingly sinister and pulls no punches in its…
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Visualising Ragged Claws in 3D
The first draft of my next novel and sequel to Thumb, Ragged Claws, is now finished and tucked safely in a drawer for a month. It’s hard not to keep re-reading and tinkering, but I know from experience that if you’re not careful you end up reading what’s in your head, not what’s in the…
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Concept art for Thumb
In the Wastelands at the end of time stands a house that contains the secret to humanity’s survival.