As I’ve posted before, I used to participate in a Web round called Six Sentence Sunday. Each week, we participants would post six consecutive sentences from a writing project on our blogs. We’d include a link to the Six Sentence Sunday page and then post the link to our post on the central Six Sentence […]
Fantasy lovers, despair not. I’m making good progress with the sequel to my first-published novel, The Bones of the Earth. As regular readers will know, it’s titled The Triumph of the Sky. It continues the story of Javor, the young Sklavenic man who was pulled into a strange war he could not have imagined. […]
Once upon a time, when blogging was still young and the World Wide Web was comparatively innocent, there was a thing called Six Sentence Sunday. During this epoch, authors would publish six-sentence samples of their books, either published or works-in-progress, onto their blogs on Sunday morning, along with a link to a central site called […]
Today is Midsummer’s, the Summer Solstice, long regarded as a special day by humanity. This year, the full moon was just a few nights ago—also an auspicious time for mystics and sky-watchers. The Bones of the Earth, my first published novel, begins at midnight on the Summer Solstice, under a full moon. That coincidence does […]
Sometimes when writing, I feel like I’m just rolling nicely. The word count climbs, I describe setting and action, important events flow onto the pages and then, WHAM! I’m stopped by some tiny detail that I need to research. I like the fiction I write to contain as much fact as possible, whether it’s a […]
Writing can go fast, and then you run headfirst into a wall: how did ancient people live? What did they eat? What kind of clothes did they wear? What were their houses like? This gets more challenging the more obscure you get, particularly when you’re dealing with pre-literary cultures. I’m deep into writing The Triumph […]
Since the publication of Wildfire last month, I have returned to the work-in-progress that I have been promising for so long: The Triumph of the Sky, the sequel to The Bones of the Earth and Book 2 in the Dark Age trilogy. A story set more than 1,400 years ago, requires a lot of historical […]
Historical fantasy series Initiation Rites This stand-alone novella forms Part 1 of The Bones of the Earth. During the Dark Age, the Earth turns on humanity with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and a new plague that kills the Roman Emperor himself. Barbarian invasions shatter civilizations. In this chaos, Javor comes of age in a poor, remote […]
The following excerpt comes from Chapter 8 of The Bones of the Earth. Javor and Photius have been taken in, temporarily, by the village of Bilavod, just before it comes under the attack of a band of Avar raiders. Photius shows the villagers how to prepare defences, and Javor trains some of the young men […]