Do you like it? I had been having my doubts about the original cover for Chivalry – the Lady of Shallot Pre-Raphaelite picture – I thought it perhaps conveyed the mystery of the female antagonist in the story, but it didn’t convey the tone of the story, which is all about the gritty awfulness of [...]

You can now download a free copy of my short story The Easy River to Success for free from either Feedbooks or Smashwords. Set in a fantasy world of dark magic, Benetus, the King’s chancellor, fears the return of a rival he had thought banished from court. Benetus turns to the help of demons to [...]

So far in my Smashwords and Feedbooks adventures I have published three stories on Feedbooks and two on Smaswords. I found it quite interesting to compare the two. Of the two stories on Smashwords, one I am charging for, Bisclavret (The Werewolf), and one, The Human Factor, I have made free. On Feedbooks I have [...]

I thought it would be interesting to give some more background on my recently published short story The Easy River to Success. The story was published recently by Planet Magazine and is available there for free viewing. Please go over and take a look. I would be interested to know what you think of the [...]

Managed to finish off the first draft of my current short story this morning! Wahey! Well pleased with this. Also changed the name a bit, after all not many people will know who my character Jake is just yet. So the working title is now “The Knight Who Wouldn’t Die”. I think that’s intriguing enough, [...]

I’m now about half way through Jake and the Knight Who wasn’t there – so the detailed synopsis method seems to be working quite well at the moment. I feel I am pretty much sticking to the story as I envisioned it, with some deviations and deepenings of character and setting of course, but the [...]

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. [...]

Working on my current short story “Jake and the Knight Who Wasn’t There” I came across the issue of how one of my characters would learn about magic. The story is set in alternative version of the 14th century, so I can hardly have a Hogwarts or Unseen University equivalent. I suppose I could make [...]

As well as my novel, I have also been working on a new short story idea involving one of the novel’s characters. It’s working title is the snappy “Jake and the Knight Who Wasn’t There”! Currently I am trying to take a fairly rapid approach to developing the ideas and the narrative. I already have [...]