Well, it’s my blog, I can do a ‘my favourite things’ if I want to. What prompted it was this year’s christmas Radio Times. For as long as I can remember I’ve enjoyed sitting down with it and reading through, picking out all the old films I’d like to watch, you know, ‘Meet Me in…
If our homes express who we are, what of the home where all of your literature and music is invisible to the casual eye; no trace of the stories and music that move you and define you represented alongside whatever art or furniture or decor you’ve put together to create a place that is special…
There’s an iron nail in my left knee the first half mile away from my front door, down the slope past the school, dozing in the silence of its lie-in on a bright Saturday morning. The nail, where my iliotibial band sticks itself to my knee, warms and melts away as I turn onto the…
I talked in my last blog-post about the pleasure I get from hard-working prose. Good writing comes from the choices you make with the words you commit to the page. In this blog-post I’m going to look at two scenes from my book Snakewood and explain what I was trying to achieve with them. I…
What would you say constitutes great writing? For a practising writer like me, good writing isn’t just about what is enjoyable to read, but also about the choices a writer makes when they select words to convey their message. I thought I’d try to articulate what great writing looks like to me, using an author…
Over the years I’ve been addicted to a number of games. These include all the MMOs I’ve played, Championship Manager, Civilization, Elite, Just Cause 2 and Test Drive Unlimited. And this was proper addiction, you know: “Oh shit it’s 4am, oh man, not again.” Five hundred calories a day on weekends (crisps, tea and chips) Tips and strategy…
“Sit down son.” Jerry’s mum and dad were on the sofa opposite him. This was his End Day, his sixteenth birthday, and so the day he would be told how long he had to live, the day the law said he had a right to know. His mum was biting her lip, her knuckles were…
I spend some time on an internet writing forum. There have been a few forum threads that have exploded over the titular writing maxim. One post in particular is based on some advice Chuck Palahniuk had written somewhere: ‘you may not use “thought” verbs. These include: Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires’…
This blog post gives an overview of my very physical take on ‘magic’ in the world of Snakewood. Now, inevitably, with a fantasy novel, you’re likely to have some sort of ‘magic’, something to make it fantastic in the purest sense. For Snakewood, perhaps because of my conceptual struggle, as a materialist, for magic, I…
I’m going philosophical in this post, so those of a disposition sensitive to pointless armchair theorising look away now. I’ve long been interested in Philosophy, but particularly interested in the brain, the most complex thing in the known universe, as far as I’m aware. In this post I want to explain why I think the mind is…
How to create a convincing fantasy world. That’s the question I’m sure all writers in the genre wrestle with at the outset. You can get lost in it. All such writers I’ve read on the forums I frequent vary in how deeply they imagine the setting for their story, prior to banging out the chapters….
I’ve wondered for a while what the use of analytics in driving game design would mean for games. There are clearly massive benefits. But along the way I think there are casualties, particularly when it comes to the uniqueness of a vision a designer has for the experience they’ve created. The only time I’ve articulated…
“Surely if incredibly high sales of authors who don’t close edit their books teaches us one thing, it’s that in some parts of some genres editing is less important to readers than other factors…..the point about self-publishing is that every type of reader can find books that are for them so long as we stop…
I never played World of Warcraft (WOW). It could be a fatal caveat to the bag of opinions that follows, but, as Rushdie said of Don DeLillo’s magnum opus Underworld, WOW “fills the sky” where MMOs are concerned. It must be acknowledged, a tip of the hat to the naked emperor from here onwards, as well…
The final sentence of Snakewood approached, already in my head, and I’m looking at the words unfold like I’m on a train thundering off the rails and over the cliff.