Hello, US people.
A quick break into your winter festivities to tell you that I’m running a Goodreads givesaway of my upcoming flintlock fantasy book, Beasts of the Wildlands: Tales From Vasini II.
You have the chance to win 1 of 100 copies of the Kindle edition and be amongst the first to read it.
You can enter here. (US-based people only, unfortunately)
The giveaway runs until 16 January 2023.
Beasts of the Wildlands: Tales From Vasini II is released on 19 January 2023.
In celebration of Beasts of the Wildlands, the second book of the Tales From Vasini series, coming out in 9 weeks away, I’m running a Goodreads giveaway of A Divided River: Tales From Vasini I.
You have a chance to win one of 100 Kindle editions of A Divided River.
You can enter here.
You have until 7 December.
Beasts of the Wildlands is out on 19 January 2023. Pre-orders for the Kindle edition are open and can be found here:
Please check your local Amazon store if your location isn’t listed above.
US people,
Nearly a year has passed since The Theatre of Shadows, the second part of the Vasini Chronicles, went out into the world.
To celebrate, I’m running a Goodreads giveaway. You have a chance to win one of 100 Kindle editions.
You can enter here.
You have until 15 July to enter.
The Vasini Chronicles III is still being written. It’s passed the 100,000 word mark and there’s still a few chapters to write until I have a complete draft.
I’m coming to end of working on the latest draft of Beasts of the Wildlands: Tales From Vasini II. This will hopefully mean I can move onto the copy edit, then a bit of proofreading and then it should — if all goes well — be in a position to go out into the world. Many digits crossed for that.
Hi All.
The Theatre of Shadows: The Vasini Chronicles II is out now on Apple Books. It’s available here if you’re in the UK or on your local Apple Books store if you’re not.
It’s still available to buy on Kindle and in paperback. (For those outside of the UK, please try your local Amazon store.)
The adventures of Drs. Marcus Fox & Elizabeth Reid continue…
In the two centuries since the fall of the deities, only a score of city-states have risen from the ashes of their destruction. Foremost amongst them is Vasini — a city divided by politics, class, and philosophies. A city with a threat in every shadow.
Six months have passed since the events of The Silver Mask. Over the winter months, Vasini was plagued by Gareth Miller, the Winter Fayre Killer, who murdered 17 people before he was captured by Lieutenant David Locke. The city now waits for Miller to be hanged. But when Miller escapes gaol, ready to terrorise Vasini’s streets once more, Locke must hunt the murderer again to stop him from claiming more lives.
As Miller flees into Vasini’s streets, Joseph Bastin, ambassador to Vasini for the city-state of Laège, is assassinated in a brothel. With the threat of political repercussions for the death, it is up to Dr. Marcus Fox, newly appointed Commandant of Police, to find the ambassador’s killer.
Fox’s investigation soon leads to a suspect, someone who has been investigating links between the Laège embassy and the worship of the dead deities – his ally, Dr. Elizabeth Reid.
Now, Elizabeth and her friend, Catherine, must act quickly to clear her name before she is found by someone who doesn’t believe her claims of innocence and she’s forced to dance the hangman’s jig.
But these events are only a prelude for what is to come.
The stage is set. The actors are in position. The play can begin.
The Theatre of Shadows is the second part of The Vasini Chronicles, a series of flintlock-and-alchemy fantasy novels set in the city-state of Vasini.
For those in the US, there’s three days left of my Goodreads giveaway of The Silver Mask: The Vasini Chronicles I. You can enter here for a chance to win one of a hundred Kindle editions. The giveaway ends on 21 April.
Hello, a quick blog post to let US people know that I’m running a Goodreads Giveaway of my flintlock fantasy The Silver Mask, part 1 of The Vasini Chronicles. You can enter here for a chance to win 1 of 100 Kindle editions. You have until 21 April.
The gods and goddesses are dead, killed two hundred years ago.
With their destruction the moon split apart, the sun dwindled and the land was devastated. Civilisation has re-emerged from the carnage, but twisted creatures still prowl the savage Wildlands between the city-states.
In the skies above the city of Vasini, a falling star, a fragment of the dead moon goddess Serindra, heads to earth. In the Palace district, Dame Vittoria Emerson, darling of the city, has been found dead, lying amongst her own vomit.
As Captain Marcus Fox of the Inspectorate hunts the killer, Dr. Elizabeth Reid searches for the remnants of Serindra determined to make sure the poisonous quicksilver it contains is not used. With Vittoria’s death threatening to draw the city’s political elite into a war of assassins, Fox and Reid must rush to expose the secrets that lie within Vasini before they tear the city-state apart.
The Silver Mask is the opening part of The Vasini Chronicles, a series of flintlock-and-alchemy fantasy novels set in the city-state of Vasini.
Dear US people,
It’s almost a year since The Cities Beyond the Signal, my portal fantasy novella, was released into the world.
To celebrate, I’m running a Goodreads giveaway. There’s a chance for you to win one of 100 Kindle editions of the novella.
You can enter here.
You have until 8 October.
Good luck.
Hello US people,
I’m running a giveaway of my new flintlock fantasy novel, The Theatre of Shadows: The Vasini Chronicles II, over at Goodreads.
You have a chance to win one of 100 copies of the Kindle edition and be amongst the first to read it.
You can enter here.
You have until 1 July to enter.
Good luck.
A quick note to say thank you to everyone who has bought The Cities Beyond the Signal on Kindle or is reading it on Kindle Unlimited. I hope you’re enjoying Alex’s adventures in some strange cities.
If you have the chance, please do write a review on Amazon and/or on Goodreads. It would be very much appreciated and will hopefully help encourage others to take a chance on the book.
For those of you who have yet to have a read, it can be found on Amazon stores here:
It’s that time of year when I take a look back at what I thought I was going to do in 2019 and say “Well, that didn’t happen.”
Looking back at what I intended to do is frustrating. On the surface it looks like I’ve done little to nothing. In truth, though I may not have ticked off much from the “To Do List”, I need to remind myself what I said on 1 January:
…plans never work. Plans can be too binding, make you think you have to do things in a particular way and to a particular timetable, and make what you have achieved seem like a failure just because it wasn’t in the plan. Better to have a direction of travel, something that allows for changes and for detours, for side quests and unexpected challenges. So let’s say this is the direction I’m heading in, and I’ll get there given the right amount of time.
And although I may not have finished much on the list, I have moved in the right direction and the time left to when it will be completed is shorter.
Well, part of that happened. I’ve edited it. But, I’m continuing to edit it – I’m on the fifth draft. As I said here:
The good news is that it’s a lot closer to being out in the world, to the point where I’m so tempted to turnaround and say it will definitely be out next year. The problem is that I’ve been burnt by my own expectations twice now, so all I’m going to do is keep it vague and say it’s ‘coming soon’ with no clear definition of what soon really means.
I hate doing it (not being able to get this out into the world as quickly as I want and not being able to say when it will actually appear).
It sucks.
It [INSERT MORE SWEAR WORDS OF CHOICE] sucks.
I’m not sure I’ve got anything more to add at this time, other than to say it’s closer still. I’m enjoying it (which makes working on it fun and worthwhile and keeps me motivated to finish it, even if the amount of time it is taking is a source of frustration). Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it too when you have the chance to read it. When that will be though, I’m still not quite in a place to commit without the risk of getting burnt again.
There’re some scenes from the novel that I’ve excised, at least one of which I may well post to my blog at some point. It’s inconsequential to the story – hence it getting cut – but there’s a little anecdote in the scene about the Ranters and their attempts to secure a chance to vote that I want to share.
Aka The Signal (working title), the sequel to the novelette The City Between the Books.
In the gaps between rounds of editing The Theatre of Shadows (ToS), I’ve been working on this. Given that it’s a quarter of the length of ToS, despite being lower on the priority scale, it could find itself finished and ready to publish before ToS.
The two stories that will make up Tales From Vasini II have a (current) combined length of about 64,000 words and I haven’t touched a word of them thanks to editing ToS and The Signal, which have a (current) combined length of around 230,000 words.
Given that ToS needs to see the light of day before these, then editing Tales From Vasini II is low down on my priority list and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Pity, as I want to get stuck back into them. They’re somewhat different to the other Vasini-based stories as they take place entirely outside of the confines of the city and it was great exploring the wider world of the setting and see what happens beyond Vasini’s rain-drenched streets.
The Vasini Chronicles III has actually been outlined in rough, as mentioned here and here. It won’t get written for a while.
This will be three novellas set in the lead up to The Vasini Chronicles III. They’re all outlined. I started writing the first of the novellas back in March. I’m coming up to being about half way through the first draft, as I’m only getting to write scraps around editing ToS.
And writing this post is now getting me down with the simple scale of the backlog that has formed. I so want to be moving forward with all of these stories, I want to be telling them to myself and then putting them out in the world for you and others to read, but…but I only have the time to work on one thing and that one thing, now, has to be ToS. I need to keep reminding myself what I said at the start: things are moving, I’m heading in the right direction and it will get done, every page, every paragraph, every word written or edited takes me one step closer to the end. In time it will appear and then everything else will follow. It will happen…It will.
I was working on this at the beginning of the year. It still needs work. It will continue to need work until ToS is off my plate.
Well, I managed to do this. Kind of. 50 books read, although a lot of them were short and/or graphic novels. I finally got round to reading Stardust by Neil Gaiman, almost certainly my favourite of the books I read this year.
My backlog of unread books, though, sits at 286. That’s, admittedly, 28 books less than at the start of the year, but that means I broke my self-imposed rule of only buying three new books by some margin.
I did manage to do another review on Goodreads, doubling the total number of reviews I’ve written to two.
Technically, I succeeded. I only wrote six blog posts in 2018, this year I managed a grant total of 11 (including this one). Granted, several of them were holding messages rather than proper blogs, but, given the general lack of completing other things, lets call this a success and quickly move on.
And in terms of moving on, in 11 days time it will be 2020. My annual To Do List will look very much like the one for this year, almost identical in fact. But, despite appearances to the contrary, I do need to remind myself that things have moved on. Even if the big final goals have not been achieved, I’ve moved in the right direction along the path – I’ve taken a lot of the tiny steps that need to be taken to get to the end. Just not all of them quite yet.
Here’s hoping that 2020 will bring some closure to some of the above and maybe the chance to start on some new paths.
Best wishes for the holidays to all of you. May the end of the year bring you rest, goodwill and good times with those you want to be with. And may the New Year take you further along your own paths towards where you want or need to be.
We’re now over three months in to 2019, so time to check how far along I am with my To Do List.
Edit and publish The Theatre of Shadows: The Vasini Chronicles II.
Back when I made my To Do List, The Theatre of Shadows was sitting in a virtual draw while others took a look at it, with the thought that I might start work on the next draft in February. In actuality I’ve only just started on the latest draft. I’m a little way in, but what I’ve gone through so far is looking better than I thought it would, which is promising. More importantly, I’m enjoying it.
Assuming there aren’t any surprises on the way, The Silver Mask should have it’s sequel out in the world by the end of the year.
Given that I may refer to it a bit, I’m just going to call The Theatre of Shadows ToS for the rest of the post. Hope you don’t mind.
Edit a novella.
I had thought that I’d get round to editing The Signal (working title) at some point before I got to ToS. That didn’t happen. It’ll sit in the virtual draw a little longer — until I’ve finished the next draft of ToS at least — based on feedback I’ve received, hopefully there shouldn’t be too much to get it into shape for publishing.
Edit Tales From Vasini II.
According to my To Do List, I was planning on editing this at the same time as ToS, but that’s been put on hold. I don’t want to distract myself from work on ToS and I know there’ll be a lot of wok to do on the two novellas that make up Tales From Vasini II, so they can wait for a bit.
Write The Vasini Chronicles III.
I’ve outlined the third Vasini Chronicles novel. There’s still some more in-depth outlining (and maybe a bit more research to do). Given that I need to work on ToS and that I need to write Tales From Vasini III first, I won’t be getting to this anytime soon.
Write Tales From Vasini III.
I’ve started writing it. I’m only a few thousands words into the first of the three novellas that will make up the book, but I’m already enjoying being with the main character and writing something new about Vasini, which makes the writing easier. (You could ask why the hell you’d write something you didn’t enjoy writing, but that doesn’t seem to be the way the writing compulsion works at times — there’s a difference between wanting to tell and enjoying a story and the process of actually writing it.)
Edit and try to work out how to publish a long novel.
This was what was delaying work on ToS.
The draft is done. It’ll go to someone to look and sense check some of the changes I made, then it’ll have to wait in line for its next draft.
I’m missing it already.
Read at least 48 books and cut down my backlog of unread books to less than 270.
According to Goodreads, I’ve read 18 out 48 books, which isn’t bad going. Unfortunately my backlog is still at 306 books. It should be down to 296, but between presents and me buying more books, I seem to be maintaining the status quo with the size of my To Be Read pile.
One thing that may help is that I’m planning to read/play my collection of Lone Wolf adventure game books over the next few months (you can read about my attempts to complete the set over the past twenty years here – as an update to that blog, I’ve managed to get my hands on Book Seventeen, so I’ll be reading Books One to Eighteen). That alone will drop my backlog to 289 books.
Blog more.
With this post I’ve managed to exceed the six blog posts I made last year. I had intended to blog at least once a fortnight. Based on that, I’ve missed two posts. But, much like everything else, although I may not be quite as far along as I would hope (we are, as species, always far too optimistic with what we think we can achieve with the time we have, that’s why all those public infrastructure projects run late and go over budget), I am at least going in the right directions. In another few months I’ll be a few more steps along, a few months after that a few more steps, and I’ll keep on going until I get to where I need to be.
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