Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! It has been a week since last I blogged. A long week, filled with nonsense, and not the fun kind that Alice had to deal with. Part of the reason I am not a book business person is I loathe dealing with bureaucracy, with paperwork, with checklists and …
Tag: News
Cover art and Futures Emerging from Dream
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Another week flies by. The Killer and the Dead is now on sale: if this book belongs to any month, it’s October! (In lands that make note of Hallowe’en, or have October as the prelude to Day of the Dead at the start of November.) This week I …
Updates and Lost Dreams (Literal lost dreams – there is nothing grandly melancholy in this blog at all, FYI.)
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I managed not to go see Alien: Romulus a third time this weekend. I did look at the times though. It was still in an Imax near me, I was tempted. I am a massive fan of The Crow. Saw the 1994 movie four times at the cinema. …
Done, in more ways than One
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! How many times can a book be finished? Many many times. Given that, I have finished making the final proofing corrections. So from my perspective the book is done. I will still read it again, because the last thing I did was a specific word check, and as …
The Distraction of Ideas and the Need for Careful Construction
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Final proofing progress now 63%. Getting there. This meant sadly that my self-directed learning has slowed considerably, but hey ho, progress on the book comes first. I did find time to flesh out some more ideas for the next book, writing down what has been percolating in my …
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Happy Hallowe’en!
Hello my friends and the occasional relative! Enjoy this day celebrating all things otherworldly (a great day for fantasy readers and writers, if I say so myself) secure in the knowledge that the saints will all be marching in tomorrow to celebrate the bond between human and divine. (Reminds me of a Dio lyric...) I'm …
One small step at a time.
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 …
The Writing Life: The Power of the Spoken Word
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, …
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The Writing Life: Losing my GAF
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 …
The Writing Life: Ain’t No Way But The Hard Way
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 …
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Roderick T. Macdonald 