OUR LADY OF SORROWS (OLoS) is the story of Sapheda, a Nephilim supersoldier serving a totalitarian, post-apocalyptic regime. A mission to kill a rogue Nephilim thought to be responsible for the assassination of a senior Party official leads to discovering secrets she was never meant to know – information which eventually leads to the extermination…
Blunt Metaphor: A Writer’s Tale
Last week, I committed to joining a writer’s group. I figure that if I am aiming to be published, I need to get used to relative strangers tearing my novels apart. The prospect of exposing my soft, meaty belly to a pack of relative strangers was not an especially pleasant one, but hey – that’s…
The novel writing process
I am eyeing my book, and my book is eyeing me back. Like: “Come on, motherfucker. Write me. I dare you.” 7500 words to go on this draft. If I’m roleplaying, or chatting, or doing things for my editorial job, I can do that in two hours. With my novels, though, the words always seem…
MEAT CAKE: The Reckoning
After 5 months of adventuring around the world (adventures I hardly ended up writing about: but I lived in Ireland for 3 months and Germany for 1 1/2), I return to my adoptive city of Seattle. One of the House members had her birthday on the 6th December, and so I decided to bake her…
Building a plot: using ‘key action points’
Developing plots for your novels is actually one of the hardest parts of writing a book for most people. On a good day, the story seems to spool out from our mind-brains. On a bad day, it can feel like chipping at a huge block of ice with a wooden spoon. This post is relatively…
NaNoWriMo, Week Two: 15 Practical Character Creation Tips
When it comes to writing a book, your most important ingredient in the whole mix is going to be your characters. Some may dispute this, but generally speaking, if your characters fall flat, readers lose interest very quickly. As a storyteller, your characters are the most important element to your novel because they are the…
My shrine to the awesome that is Jeremy Brett
Jeremy Brett. Ah, how I love thee. Jeremy Brett, the man who bought Sherlock Holmes to life. Here are some of the best photos of him off the web: Jeremy Brett wasn’t only Sherlock Holmes, but it is probably that role that he is best remembered for. I can only wish that I’d been around…
NaNoWriMo, Week One: The core framework of your novel
I’m not doing NaNoWriMo per-se this year – I’m working on the second draft of my novel, as well as developing the core frameworks for several others. Instead, I’m going to share everything I know about writing fiction on this blog over the four weeks of November. Here are what I believe to be the…
There’s a man lying down in a grave somewhere with the same tattoos as me
I am a tree that was split at the root, one half of the tree taken away. Somehow, both halves survived. One became two – one of the two has grown strong and tall with scarred bark and branches bent over the gaping hole where the axe fell. The other tree, taken to the cruellest…
I Don’t Love NY, But I Lust For It
In August, I left Seattle, the closest thing I have to a hometown now, and took the train across the top of the United States to New York. The trip was amazing, bleak and frustrating, but watching the change in landscape – from the glorious mountains and springs of western Montana through to the bleak…