Not the catchiest title, I admit. But I’m here to share how a royal screw up of mine added a gloriously horrific typo to my book AFTER it had been laboriously proofread and judged error free. And I did it as part of the process, not on a whim. Well, okay, there were whims involved, …
Continue reading What happens when you deviate from the process: Collector’s edition edition.
In the month since I released my second book I have realised something. I was afraid of hard work after releasing my first book. I know why, it was because I read advice online, watched videos that said and repeated the message that a book on its own is nothing, that an author must have …
It is a hard thing to finish a book. Not the hardest thing in the world by a long chalk, but, if you've tried writing a book, and then got feedback, edited, re-edited and then polished beyond editing into obsession, well then maybe you've a small idea of how hard it is to finish a …
This is an update. After losing/significantly depleting my GAF as previously described, I decided to do my usual (i.e. done once before) final step of reading my book out loud to myself as a way to interrogate each sentence and catch egregious typos. This is now done. Yay. I fixed some sentences here and there, …
Continue reading The Writing Life: The Power of the Spoken Word
I have recently been watching booktube videos addressed to authors: readers expressing their opinions on what they do and do not like in fantasy, what they would like to see in new books, and what just won’t cut it anymore. Of course these are just opinions, and if an author tried to satisfy every desire …
So it has been a while. I was going to call this Breaking the Silence II, but I decided to share this song with you instead. When I am in the guts of a pool match, and I or my team are a long way behind, I think of that song, and dig in to …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Ain’t No Way But The Hard Way
Okay, I have a stopwatch, and I'm not afraid to use it. I'm going to give myself 30 minutes, no more or less, and I will stop when the alarm goes off and post the result. Check out this post to get some background on the piece I shall be presenting to you. Ok, time to …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: 30 Minute Fiction Edition
All right then, so I'm going to have a go at belting out something that might approach an idea I've been toying with: to write fictional commentaries on my next novel, The Killer and The Dead. Now before you decide I have disappeared entirely up my own fundament, TKATD is structured as a first person narrative …
Continue reading Why I Write Fantasy: To be Stymied by a Power Outage.
Hello everyone, This time last year I didn't pay attention and missed out on entering The Thief and The Demon into the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off. This year I did. As of time of writing there are 163 entries into the competition, so if you have a self-published fantasy novel out there for sale which is …
Sometimes you just have to start writing in order to get anywhere. This is another made up as I go along blog - welcome to spontaneity land! I am still editing. That basement full of dust covered tables? I'm working on them with chopsticks, one tiny clump at a time. I can't say it's ideal, …
Roderick T. Macdonald 