When my publisher suggested I send them a guest post for the Orbit blog, I had no idea what to write about. I couldn’t think of a subject that I hadn’t already covered in this blog, or in subject specific interviews on other people’s blogs. Also, I felt the guest post should relate in some [...]
Category Archive for ‘on writing’ 
Who Am I Writing For?
Years ago, at a charity auction, I bid for and won a t-shirt because it had a bunch of writing quotes on it, including this one: Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money – Moliere* Of course, there are more things [...]
Book Release Anxiety
Last week I finally delivered The Traitor Queen to Orbit, after having polished and tweaked the book for a month, farmed it out to my agent and a few trusted friends to read, then fixed the errors they found. What next? Well, the release month is August next year and a whole lot has to [...]
Goodreads and The Traitor Queen
Alas, The Rogue didn’t make it into the next round of the Goodreads Choice Awards, but some fine books did so go vote for your favourite. Thanks to everyone who voted for The Rogue. I was chuffed just to have a book in the running, and for it to make it to the second round. [...]
Indonesian Voice of the Gods
The Traitor Queen is going well. Last week I passed the big conclusion and this week I’m writing the aftermath and consequence chapters. I managed to squeeze in a bit of work on the Sekrit Projekt and write an outline for short story set a few years after The Traitor Queen, but otherwise I’m not [...]
Five Tips for Being an Author on the Internet
I love Twitter. I love its brevity. Currently it is the easiest and most efficient way to keep up with what’s going on Out There, through following links tweeted by people who are interesting in the things I’m interested in, without it taking up a whole lot of writing time. There’s a lot of information, [...]
The Great Reread of 2011 – Reading My Own Books
The main reason I decided to reread all my books set in the Kyralia world was to refresh my memory and lesson the chance of writing inconsistencies into The Traitor Queen. By that I mean details of the world, characters and magical system, as well as plot, that don’t agree across the books. Of course, [...]
The Future of Books and Authors
Like many authors and people interested in the future of books and publishing, I have been reading a lot of articles and blog posts about eBooks, piracy and such lately. I’m the sort who prefers good sturdy statistical facts and predictions grounded in reality by people familiar with the industry, over wishful thinking and doomsday [...]
First Paragraphs
The first paragraph of a book is one of the most important. It contains the words that can introduce a reader (or commissioning editor) to an author’s writing style, the world the book is set in, and is the first taste of the story to come. If the reader doesn’t like the first paragraph, they [...]
Maps for The Magician’s Apprentice
The first full-time job I had was as a designer at Lonely Planet Publications, where I drew maps and illustrations along with setting them out with the text of travel guidebooks. While I’d sketched out maps for the fun of it as a child, and examined the maps in the fantasy books I was reading, I hadn’t had [...]
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