My Intermittent Blog!
Homosexuality in Elizabethan England
One of the issues that keeps coming up in reviews of The Alchemist of Souls is my portrayal of the non-straight characters. Readers who know the period praise the authenticity, whilst those who know little about Elizabethan culture seem surprised by it. Rather than comment directly on individual reviews (which seldom reflects well on the writer), I decided to discuss it here.Read more...
Action? Figures!
One of my favourite bits of writing fantasy is the action scenes. I rarely bother to plan them in advance, as I find they're more fun, and more fluid, if I just make things up as I go along—one sword-fighting scene in *The Alchemist of Souls* was described as "Big fight!" in my outline! However occasionally I want to write something that involves more than a single pair of combatants, and it's at that point I have to plan the logistics a bit more carefully. Writers have various techniques for doing this, but one I'm trying out during the writing of *The Merchant of Dreams* is to use Playmobil figures. They're a handy size, come with lots of different weapons - and of course they're fun to collect!Read more...
Ten-Step Novel Revision
Writing a novel is hard work, but for many aspiring authors the much harder part is revising that first draft into something fit to send out into the wide world. It’s easy to think that all you need to do is run that puppy through a spelling-and-grammar checker and you’re done. Sorry, kid, but that’s putting the carriage before the unicorn (you have carriages pulled by unicorns in your world, right?).Read more...