A bit less blogging recently because I have been concentrating on managing the flow of submissions to Alt Hist. We’ve had quite a good number of submissions in and I am received to say that a lot of these are good enough to be published. Some have not quite made the grade, but so far [...]

No matter what the e-book/iPad/tech-geeks/get it all free cos it’s online folks may say… There is something very special about seeing your work in print. I ordered my copy of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #33 last week as it features my story “Bird Talk”, and received it in the post the other day. What a thrill [...]

New Alt Hist Facebook Page As you may have realised if you occasionally read this blog, I am really into historical fiction and historical fantasy fiction, and also Alternate History as well. I always find it surprising that there are few outlets for discussion of historical fiction compared to science fiction and the various aspects [...]

The Bookseller released some statistics today on the top 100 selling authors in the UK market from 2000 to 2009. I have extracted the fantasy authors from their data to put together the following list: 1          Rowling, J K                    27,556,478 units, revenue of  £215,876,812.77 6          [...]

My short story seems to be going fairly well at the moment. I’m working on it by going through iterations of more and more detailed outlines. Basically I started with a general outline of what the story was about, then went away to think about the characters and setting – giving things names and brief [...]

Some of the most interesting blog and website posts that I came across this week: Cory Doctorow is serializing a short story Martian Chronicles, that he is working on – quite interesting to do this with a WIP. Scott Marlowe explains how to self-publish your own e-book – part 1 of a series of posts. [...]

A bit of a rant about Genre As a participant in some online critiquing networks I come across a fair amount of unpublished stories written by authors, like myself, who want to get publish. These networks tend to be genre orientated – so for fantasy and science fiction for instance. I hope I’m not slagging [...]

The latest Inside the Blogosphere asked: What are the worst or most disappointing endings in science fiction/fantasy novels? Why? Here’s my, no doubt blasphemous, suggestion that the worst ending is for The Lord of the Rings: “It pains me to say this, as it’s one of my favourite books, but one of the most disappointing [...]

I found this very interesting interview with Stephen Theaker on Facebook – gives a real insight into the work of an editor of a small fiction magazine: The Science of Fiction: The Editors: Stephen Theaker