Hello my friends and the occasional relative! SPFBO 8 is over, its winner revealed here. Congratulations to Small Miracles! A close run contest – check it out for some quality writing and great stories! So I finally finished #6. For me this is head and shoulders the best of the six I have read. It …
Tag: Reviews
Reading my SPFBO Cohort #3 & #4
Two more interesting books in my anonymous SPFBO 8 read every page review series. #3 This struck me as a book I would have wanted to write when I was in my teens, except in my teens I would have been utterly incapable of doing so! There are lots of references to epic past events …
The Writing Life: SPFBO Time
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 …
The Writing Life: Imagining Success
Hi there folks! I did finally finish my vocalization of The Killer and The Dead today, and many improvements have been made, and a mere thirty two notes to self generated. You know, changes, continuity checks, questions for proofers and beta readers, that kind of thing. I’m still a few steps away from hitting the …
We’ll talk about this later…
But for now I'd like to say I'm "Today's Featured Indie Book Review" on Kirkus. Find it here. I'm pleased with what they have to say. Bottom left of the page. Check it out. EDIT: now that my day in the sun has passed, you can check out the review directly here. And if you …
The Writing Life: Juggling Workload, the Dizzying Kaleidoscope
So the New Year is in, and it’s time to get on with hitting those goals. What are mine? In writing it is to draft, edit, and publish The Killer and The Dead by the end of October. That’s a tough, but doable ask. I stand in awe of folks who boldly declare they will …
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Why I Write Fantasy: The Travel Begins at Home Edition
All writing, it seems to me, begins in your own head. Sometimes it will be written as a strong spontaneous reaction to outside stimulus – protest songs, polemical essays, critical feuds, a satirical impulse to start telling a particular story in order to hit a particular target, but for me, the story starts as a …
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Why I Write Fantasy: The Christmas Presents Edition
In the late 2000s there were two years in a row when my sister sent me fantasy novels for Christmas. These are always welcome, and the choices both years were excellent and made a lasting impression on me, enough for me to consider them contemporary influences: books so good they raised the bar, made me …
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The Writing Life: Letting Go of Your First Love
The first love you wrote, I mean. Of course, many authors successfully publish their first loves, and do astoundingly well. For others there is another story, of a first, or first and second and more novels written and discarded, before a book is released to the reading world. I’m guessing that one of those discarded …
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Why I Write Fantasy: A Suitcase of Treasures, Part 1
In the mid 70s I lived for a couple of years in the USA. When we moved back to Scotland, a large green suitcase came with us. This piece of luggage lived in our garage for years, and when I eventually explored it, I discovered that among the many odds and ends it housed were …
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Roderick T. Macdonald 