My family background was what is usually called working class, which means there weren’t many books in the house as I grew up (yeah, I’m generalising about working class people, but generally it’s true). I had to discover books and reading for myself. Just how I managed to do that when most of my siblings …
Adventures In Reading, Part Two: Science Fiction Read More »
At home I have a shelf of books that’s nothing but books about books and writing. There’s good old Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style, 501 Must Read Books, an intriguing tome called How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (more of which later), and a fabulous title called The Book On …
I want to put a proposition to you that follows up from my previous blog, which is that stories are not there just to entertain us or to help us pass the time. And they are not just made up of themes and tags that can be accessed by hyperlinks or search functions. At their …
I really like science fiction short stories. What I like about them in general is their brevity. You can easily knock them over in one sitting. They’re short, sharp and to the point. And if you don’t like one, there will be plenty of others that come along that you will like. They’re especially a …
Scifi Short Stories, the ISFDB and the Science Fiction Hub: a Reader’s Advisory Read More »
Whether it’s time travellers going into the past to save John Lennon’s life, or a fan who just wants to witness Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris at Liberty Hall, Houston 1973, my stories often feature music. Music is a constant inspiration for my writing. In fact, I’m presently working on a story that’s about an …
Over the last couple of years I’ve become a big fan of the Japanese animation style called anime. Of course, this is not a new medium, it’s been around in some shape or form since at least the early 1960s. A lot of us westerners didn’t know it, but we’d been enjoying anime since way …
I recently read the last of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories, Forward the Foundation. It was published posthumously in 1993 after his death in 1992. It features the last years of his hero, Hari Seldon, and the completion of his galaxy-spanning and history-spanning project, Foundation. It seems fitting that Asimov’s last book was the last Foundation …
I’m making some slow progress on the new novel. The first thing I did was to start organising the chapters I already have, and to work out where the gaps are and rearrange everything. To help me do this I’ve started using Powerpoint, with each slide representing a chapter, with notes about the chapter, which …
It seems like almost every book you pick up these days, especially if it’s in the science fiction/fantasy genres, is a part of some long-running series. There are obvious commercial reasons for this, but I’m guessing a lot of authors also just think in terms of long story arcs. I mean, I’m doing it myself …
In the course of writing my first science fiction novel, Eye of the Timegate, the word count blew out to around 240,000 words by the time the first draft was completed. The finished work clocked in at just over 136,00 words. A lot of stuff was left on the cutting floor. After I finished the …
