For a long time I did not travel. My memories of flight were fuzzy – laying my jacket down on the floor and sleeping between the seats on a flight across the Atlantic in 1974. The weird sensation of the ground I walked on not being solid, the vague bounce I had never previously experienced …
Tag: writing
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 2
Last week, I wrote about the green suitcase in our garage that yielded two world-changing books, the first of which was Nine Princes in Amber. The second book I found in that fateful suitcase (and now that I write about this, it is such a strange happenstance to have so impacted an impressionable child) was …
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The Writing Life: Being True to Your Instincts
As I’ve said in other articles, I’ve known forever that I would be a writer, and that I would write fantasy stories. Apart from one cathartic journey into writing nursing fiction, which still had elements of the fantastical (how many nurses find themselves talking to the devil and questioning their own sanity?), all of my …
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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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The Writing Life: It Takes a Team
I tried for years to transform my writing from manuscript to novel on my own, and for years it did not work. Eventually, I recognized that I needed a team. Only through accepting this, that I was not equipped to do it alone, did I finally flourish…and I intend to do a whole lot more …
Why I Write Fantasy: Primal Influences
Like so many others, it is the tales that captured me as a child that have led me to this place where I declare myself a fantasy writer. There were fairy tale collections, those of Grimm and Andersen, and the Ladybird Well-Loved Tales series that each came in their own slim-line hard back with wonderful …
My Book has Launched!
The day has finally arrived. Hard to believe after all this time that the work of writing is done, and I am a published author. My book, The Thief and The Demon, is now available for sale as an e-Book and paperback, online at Amazon.com. It still seems crazy to say that. Now that the …
The Writing Life: When Plans Change
I have had many plans in my writing life. Or at least I thought they were plans at the time, when in truth they were more like wish lists. Either way, the imagined path has often gone awry. This blog was originally going to be about dealing with when your writing process gets derailed, or …
Roderick T. Macdonald 