I’m delighted to have finished the editing, re-drafting and proofing of The Dam at Hiramatsu, the second novel to feature the grumpy master of inventive swearing, Simon Aulus. Despite having read and re-read the manuscript numerous times, I have no doubt that now it’s available on Amazon I will immediately spot a bunch more typos and formatting errors. I hope it’s an at least fit enough shape to read.

I like Stephen King’s book On Writing very much and re-read quite frequently. From it I have forged my own book development plan, and it goes something like this:

One of the many criticisms of self-publishing is that there is simply no independent quality control mechanism. This is a polite way of saying people without talent are able to spurt out cliched and/or badly written garbage without anyone standing between their fevered ramblings and an unsuspecting world. This is to say, conventional publishing is the hallmark of quality, and with the best will in the world, even a talented author on their own lacks the polishing resources of editors and proofers available to a publishing house.

From the UK Guardian: http://gu.com/p/3zgf9/tw It’s not often there’s an opportunity to read new material from the departed (outside of the plots of horror fiction, anyway). Very interested to learn a new collection is being drawn together. I am a big fan of Jackson’s work, very understated and unsettling. I agree with the author of […]

Without an actual explanation, I am back on Twitter. Not that I have an army of followers, however there were people I was following and those “follows” were temporarily removed during the suspension. In addition to the 140 character writing limit, I have been informally advised also that even that would be too much, and […]

That’s fun. I set up a Twitter account yesterday, in expectation of doing enough work on the website today to be able to send a first tweet announcing website launch. I just logged back in, and received a message telling me my account was suspended, as it had been identified as being amongst those involved […]

And I thought writing a novel was a lot of work. Over the last year I’ve learned more than I imagined about e-book formatting, physical book bleed edges and spine widths, and Photoshop. Now, after some time spent learning my way around WordPress, I have a skeleton of a website – whoohoo! Oh, right; content…. […]