So, now that I’ve tested out my remarkable wimpiness against the process of getting a tiny tattoo, I’m ready to launch out on something a bit more serious. I gave the bloke at the studio my picture of the Bewcastle Cross
and asked him to turn it into a design that could actually be tattooed on. While I was asking for the impossible, I also mentioned that I would like it to go around the cross on my shoulder. He measured how much space there was on my arm and came up with this:
which I think is brilliant. I’m pretty certain that no one else in the world will have one like this 🙂 So now it’s just a matter of saving up for it. No one told me that the major sacrifice involved in getting a tattoo would be financial. But I think I can justify the outlay to myself if have it for my birthday. (Which happens to be less than a month away.)
I will have to post this on a Thursday. Slightly embarrassing though it is, here is an excerpt of the first ever novel I actually finished. I hit on the cunning plan of telling lots of short stories – because I knew I could finish a short story – and then linking them together to create one larger tale. It helped that I set this in the oral culture of early Anglo-Saxon England, where it would (I thought) be quite in character for people to stop whatever they were doing at intervals in order to tell each other illustrative stories.
Nowadays I suspect this is not a great way of maintaining narrative flow, but hey, I was 18 and had never written a novel or read a ‘how to write’ book. Possibly it shows.
Wildfire.
Chapter One.
The Tale and the Teller
Read the rest of this entry »
I think it’s a result of having finished Under the Hill and sent it off on its first stage in the submissions process, but last week I found myself wanting to do anything but write. Or at least, I wanted to write fanfiction just to please myself rather than writing anything that could be vaguely saleable. I spent most of the days trying to tear myself away from reading, reading, reading anything I could get my hands on – which was unfortunate, as I had editing and cover art to do, and I was supposed to be re-writing an old story to expand it into a novella.
I get the impression that now there’s a vacuum where UtH had been, I’m trying to suck something in to fill it, but I don’t know what that thing is, so I’m reading everything indiscriminately in order to find it. None of which would be a problem if I didn’t have other things I ought to be doing. I really hate multitasking!
On the ‘things I have been reading’ front, and after seeing my friends list filling up with squee about A Game of Thrones, I tried reading that. But I seem to be fed up of pseudo medieval fantasy worlds featuring oppressed womenfolk, soap-opera style relationships, a pervasive feeling of doom, and politics. I get the impression that no good can come of anything that happens from page one onwards, am I wrong?
I may try the book of the film of On Stranger Tides, now that I’ve decided I’m not going to see the film after all.
I think – writing wise – that I don’t really want to be writing this novella. I want to be brainstorming something new. But on the other hand there’s only 5000 words between me and getting this thing finished, and I feel strongly that I ought to be getting it out of the way first. The trouble is the more excited I get about the idea of doing something new, the more I don’t want to be doing this old thing. If actually started to sit down and develop a new idea it would probably just make that ten times worse.
And speaking of old things, having re-read my first ever novel, I’ve got to say that while it’s not as bad as it might have been, it’s not as good as it could be either. You can tell that I’m trying to make it sound like a Norse saga – it’s all very laconic and full of alliteration – but I strongly suspect I wouldn’t be happy to have it seen until I’d done some re-writing, reformatting and expansion on it first. I’ll post an extract of it next post so that you can see for yourself what I mean.
One of the better things since sliced bread, is Calibre, which I downloaded for free this morning. I wanted to send The Witch’s Boy to a reviewer, but he only accepted .epub files, and WB only came in .pdf or .mobi format. Now, thanks to the magic of Calibre, I can just convert my .mobi file into an .epub file and send him that.
One of the reasons why I haven’t been on a total ebook spending spree on Amazon was that I have a Cybook Gen ereader, not a Kindle, and Kindle’s DRM prevented me reading any of their books on my ereader, even if I had paid good money to buy them.
Kindle for PC is all very well, but I don’t want to have to take my PC with me when I’m on holiday, or going to the shops, or waiting for the bus, or any one of those places where I would normally take a book with me. Also, to be frank, I’m just never going to sit down and read a book on the computer. The eyestrain! The piles! The constant feeling that I ought to be doing something useful instead.
Now, with the aid of some Calibre plugins, available here, I can also convert kindle books (legally purchased by me) into books I can actually read on my own personal e-reader. Shocking thought! The appalling consequences for Amazon from this are that I might actually start buying their ebooks now. Well, I would, if only all the ones I wanted were available in my country, but I guess that’s a grouch for another day.
We now have confirmed publication dates for both the UK meet related anthologies, along with a list of the confirmed contributors so far (this will be added to, as we approach D-day). A really good blend of oldies and newbies.
British Flash – to be published on 16th June as a free ebook
Contributing authors: Alex Beecroft, Stevie Carroll, Charlie Cochrane,
Erastes, Elin Gregory, Sandra Lindsey, Clare London, JL Merrow,
Josephine Myles, Zahra Owens, Caroline Stephens, Lisa Worrall and
Serena Yates.
Tea & Crumpet – to be published by JMS Books on 3rd July as an ebook. Print copies should be available in time for the Meet. All profits to future UK meets.
Contributing authors: Alex Beecroft, Stevie Carroll, Jennie Caldwell,
Charlie Cochrane, Elin Gregory, Clare London, Anna Marie May, JL
Merrow, Josephine Myles, Zahra Owens, Jay Rookwood, Chris Smith, Lisa
Worrall and Serena Yates.
My stories are “Benefits of Peace,” and “Riding with Hob”, a historical and a paranormal.
We’re still getting entries in, so the line-ups are likely to be longer in the end.
The first ever novel I wrote and finished (as opposed to abandoning 5 chapters in) was a historical fantasy that featured Loki interfering with the lives of people in two Anglo-Saxon villages, while simultaneously re-telling some of his adventures from the Norse myths. It was called “Wildfire (in his own words)” and seeing the film has inspired me to dig it out again and see if anything can be done with it. I’m thinking that if it’s not too awful, it might be fun as a free serial or something.
Anyway, I’m a big Loki fan, though I’ve forgotten a great deal since the days when I knew a lot about him. (I do know enough to snort and go “he’s Odin’s blood-brother, not his adopted son!” But actually that leaves him in a very similar place of not quite belonging, so I don’t mind the change.)
I also have a large box in the attic crammed with The Mighty Thor comics, also left over from 20-odd years ago, when a new issue was the highlight of my week. So there was never any doubt about whether I would go and see the film. I went as soon as it opened, and saw it in 3D. Reactions below:
Read the rest of this entry »
Under the Hill is officially finished! Huzzah! I must say – even though it probably counts as blowing my own trumpet – that I love it. I’m sure it’s a good sign when you finish writing a book and immediately want to tell everyone about it so that they can enjoy it too. (Either that or I’m just delusional.)
150K (roughly) of fantasy novel, all inspired by one walk on extra from an episode of Dr. Who. Thank you to whoever cast tank-top man as a nameless nobody at the end of the universe
you will never know what you have unleashed 🙂
So, normally I would have a day off after having finished a novel that took me the greater part of two years to write, but I’ve just found out that my copy edits on “By Honor Betrayed” are due to arrive tomorrow. And in the mean time I’ve got four stories for the UK Meet anthologies to edit, and two pieces of cover art to do. (Oh, and I’m dancing out tonight, so I don’t have the evening to work in.)
Remind me again why I thought leaving my 9-5 job would lead to less stress?
I’m still wasting away on this diet, having lost 2 stone 4lb so far. (A stone is 14lb, so that’s 32lb in total). Only 8lb more to go before I hit my target of 11 stone, which will take me into the ‘healthy’ range of the BMI.
I’m losing between 1-2lbs a week, but that has been prolonged by the fact that I hit a plateau just after Christmas when I stayed around the 12 stone mark and spent six weeks dieting but seeing no change at all. Fortunately, according to the garmin index body fat scale it then started to shift again in February, and I’m back on the regular loss of 1-2lbs a week.
I don’t know that I’ve managed to locate what makes this diet work. It’s certainly not calorie counting, because I can eat as much as I like of certain foods, and we even get “oh, well, obviously you haven’t been eating enough,” as one of the standard pieces of advice for people who don’t lose weight in a week. One of the rules of this diet is to eat often and not allow yourself to get hungry.
That suits me down to the ground. I think the secret of this diet is some kind of combination of low-fat and food-combining. But whatever it is, it results in meals that are big, tasty and filling, and no need to go without snacks. I thought I’d show you a typical day, so you could see. Bear in mind that I’m a vegetarian. The lack of meat is not the diet’s fault but mine 🙂
Read the rest of this entry »
I really meant to have some sort of launch event for this, and then it turned out to be the week of the Livejournal DDOS attacks. Most of the people who comment on my posts do so on Livejournal, so I felt that doing anything while it was down was not a good time.
Then, when it started working again, I had mostly forgotten I ever intended to do anything. I really need to get a tweed jacket and a pipe because all my life I’ve been the model of an absent-minded professor. (Actually I was asked to do post-graduate work in Philosophy when I was at university, and I often think that saying “I’d rather do some research into the cult of the horse in early Anglo-Saxon England” was the wrong decision. I should have stayed in academia, pondering the meaning of the universe. I’m certainly temperamentally suited to the job.)
For example, just take the way that I’ve gone completely off the point there.
Dragging myself back to the point with some effort – I was meaning to have some kind of event to celebrate the relaunch of The Witch’s Boy. However, now that a fortnight has already passed, it seems a bit late. So what I’m going to do instead is give away a copy to the first ten people who ask for one.
However, there is a slight catch. As you can see from the page for the Kindle version of the book, it has no reviews at all. So, because there’s no such thing as a free lunch, I would ask that anyone who receives a copy review it on Amazon afterwards, please. It doesn’t have to be a long or complicated review – I’d be happy with a single sentence. It doesn’t have to be a good review – if you hated it, go ahead and say so. But if you could just put up a short summary of what you honestly thought of it, that would be excellent.
So, if you’d like a free copy and you’re willing to write a brief review afterwards and put it up on Amazon, just give me your name and I’ll send you a copy in an e-format of your choice 🙂
