Exocets (14/4/2012)

Posted in Critical Failures

Apparenty, if you follow the chain of corporate ownership long and far enough, I am and have been working for the same people as make Exocets.

This is what Exocets do. Arguably dragons do much the same, only thing is this: dragons aren’t real, right.

HMS Sheffield after Exocet hitUSS Stark after Exocet hit

After the number of years I once spent trying to make Exocets pointless, this is actually pretty depressing.

A Sniff of Sodium Hydride (20/9/2011)

Posted in News

Status update. Haven’t had one of these for a while. Why’s that? Oh, right, because I haven’t been WRITING for a while. Stupid summer holidays. Stupid day-job. Ah well, back to normal soon.

It’s become pretty clear that Dragon Queen is going to need a total rewrite. Which is OK, and for which it will be much improved. Partly this has become clear because of what’s going on with The King’s Assassin, which has made a couple of things obvious, and partly because of the Gazetteer. Mental note: write gazetteer first next time <sigh>

The King’s Assassin is close to being ready to submit. The gazetteer is useable and will come with hyperlinks this time (not that any of you care, but it’s for me, not for you, for MEEEE :-) and some serious shit is about to hit a serious writing fan in a week or so whent he day-job finally goes away FOREVER[1] as I beat Dragon Queen into shape for the end of the year and draft out the first third of … uh … some other thing that we shall call the Sodium Hydride project. More of which later.

And finally, summer saw the publication of what will almost certainly be my best-selling words for a very long time – the introduction to the Gollancz 50th birthday edition of Pat Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind. Rumour has it Pat may be coming to the UK in November. You are all to welcome him in your viking suits.

Er… and then I had a bored moment at some point…

003 - Management Meeting 327

[1] A couple of months

Not-So-Challenging Video Games (16/8/2011)

Posted in News

Angry Dragon

It’s The End of the World As We Know It and I Don’t Feel Fine (9/8/2011)

Posted in News

Given what kicked off last night, I’m not in the mood for talking about books much. I’m half tempted to repeat last week’s cartoon & subsitute “Subjegated disenfranchised drugged underclass” for “Impending Doom” but maybe that’s reaching. So have another Test Card instead.

002 - Industrial Relations

Test Card (18/7/2011)

Posted in News

A full first draft of Dragon Queen, the other sequel to The Order of the Scales now exists. Proofing of The Warlock’s Shadow has finished. I shall be at the Debenham Arts Festival on the 23rd of this month. I may be repeating myself. If I am, that’s because it’s a . . .

a . . .

a SLOW NEWS WEEK.

Well it is of your news coverage is confined to the narrow limits of how many words I, specifically, have laid down on various works in progress. Unfortunately this is only going to get worse as, save for the occasional re-drafts of The King’s Assassin and Dragon Queen, the bulk of the next six months will be dedicated to Secret Project G about which little can be said except that it’s secret and involves the letter G. Although thast might be a code-letter. Add to that the demise (for now) of Diamond Cascade, and there could be weeks when I don’t blog at all.  To avoid this horror from beyond imagination, I have made a series of

T E S T      C A R D S

001 - Intro splash

Further may occur when I can’t think of anything useful