Welcome To the Mist and Shadows

Posted: July 22, 2009 in General
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WELCOME TO MY WORLD

This website is part writing journal, part blog and part repository of stories both of adventure and fantastical in nature.

As a writing journal it tracks projects I am working on, their progress, ideas, updates and all other things writing related.

As a blog it features things of interest to me; sometimes they will tie in with my writing, other times not.

As a repository of my stories, it showcases various short stories of a variety of types freely available to download and read. They can be found in the Pure Escapism part of the website.

What is in the name you ask? It ties in with the main setting of my writings and, while hints and references may have cropped up in some of the stories, the true meaning behind it is a mystery for another day.

Enjoy your visit and please feel free to browse and comment.

Dawn of Wolves Free Promotion

Posted: January 29, 2012 in Dawn of Wolves, fantasy, writing
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Dawn of Wolves is now up and ready to go on Amazon – and for the next five days it can be got for free, as part of the Kindle Select program.

Lego Men In Space

Posted: January 29, 2012 in General
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Now this is amusing – a couple of Canadian teens have sent a lego man into space.  Well, near space.

They strapped the lego man and a camera to one of those high altitude balloons and launched it, getting to the edge of space – and they were able to recover the lego when it finally came crashing back down to earth as well.

At least they can launch something into space nowadays, unlike the Australian space program, which vanished way back, or even the US one, which seems to be scrapping any prospect of manned space flight in the foreseeable future.  That kind of thinking seems very short sighted.

 

Dawn of Wolves Completed

Posted: January 28, 2012 in Dawn of Wolves, fantasy, writing
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The Dawn of Wolves novella has finally been finished and uploaded via KDP to Amazon where it is currently being crunched and should make an appearance in a day or two.

 

 

Dawn of Wolves comes in at 49,000 words, a little longer than a normal novella, but one I am calling a novella anyway as it is only half a novel.  While previously I have been jumping around a bit with the stories, Dawn of Wolves starts a sub-series of stories within The Commonwealth Chronicles that will follow the Frontier War against the Nacatori – The Tomb of the Tagosa Kings takes place in the Frontier War and forms part of this series, which I am entitling Frontier Wolves.

The plans for the series are the opening novella, Dawn of Wolves, followed by five novelettes (the last of which is The Tomb of the Tagosa Kings) and then a final novella to round out the collection.  Once done I’ll be collecting it in an anthology, but that is some time off yet.

The next novelette, The Rose of Nakunwe, has already been plotted out in rough form in a notepad.  next step is to write up the first rough draft.

Dawn of Wolves Rewrite Complete

Posted: January 16, 2012 in Dawn of Wolves, fantasy, writing, writing update
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I have finished the rewrite of Dawn of Wolves, ending at around 49,000 words, which is slightly over what is normally classified as a novella, but close enough I’ll still call it one.

Now comes the next step – formatting, editing, proof reading and of course cover design.  Hopefully that will not take too long.

For the release I’m going to do something a little different this time around – I’m going to enrol it in the Amazon Kindle Select programme.

Kindle Select is a programme where by it is enrolled in a lending library and Amazon fork up a bunch of money (currently at 500,000 a month).  Those enrolled get a percentage of funds equal to the percentage of loans they make.  In addition you get 5 days per free months where you can offer your book for free.

There is a but through – there is always a but.  Firstly a lot of people are signing up – and it is the big names that will get the most lends.  Secondly, you can’t sell the book anywhere else.  Not even on your own website.  It is for that reason I’m leaving my old books out of it, as they are elsewhere.  This one is going to test it out, to see if it makes much of a difference.

The Year Ahead

Posted: January 7, 2012 in Dawn of Wolves, writing, writing update
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With another year just started, it seems appropriate to look forward and try and set some goals.

Basically it comes down to write more, publish more and promote more.  And post more to the blog.

On the writing/publishing more, it is off to a good start.  I am up to the final rewrite/edit of Dawn of Wolves, though it seems to have blow out a little in size.  The aim was for a 40,000 novella.  It is looking to be around 50-55K when done.  At the current rate I’m writing it should be finished well before the end of the month.

Once it is done, I hope to add it to the new Kindle Lending Library programme, to hopefully help promotion wise.

When it is done, it will be time to press on with new projects.  The main two are to finish the last stories for Nhaqosa to complete his story arc and then bundle the new ones and the old ones in a single compilation, and to write the rest of the Frontier Wolves collection, of which Dawn of Wolves is the first part, and Tomb of the Tagosa Kings comes towards the end.

After that?  Well, we’ll see.

 

The Hobbit Trailer

Posted: December 22, 2011 in fantasy, General, Movies
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The Hobbit trailer is out!  Of course now we have a 51 week wait until we can watch it, so in the meantime keep hitting replay.  And then we have to wait another year for the second part.

One of the memorable things about the book is that it has a lot of songs and poetry, and by the prominent way one of them is part of the trailer, it would seem that they have included them in the movie.

Winter Wolves Redone

Posted: December 8, 2011 in winter wolves, writing, writing update
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I have finally finished the re-edit of Winter Wolves.  In addition it has received a new cover as well, in keeping with the others of the series.

In addition to trying to fix up all spelling and grammatical errors that I could find, I also re-wrote the last 10,000 words.  I had never been entirely happy with the ending, given I felt it had too much in common with the ending of Tears of the Mountain.  And there was a good reason for that.  I had started work on Winter Wolves first, plotting it out and writing about half of it.  Then, as is my way, I switched projects and starts on Tears.  This time I actually stuck through to the end and finished Tears.  However I had never had an ending for Tears planned and in the end borrowed the one I had planned for Winter Wolves.  When I went back to Winter Wolves I found myself without an ending and tried to cobble one together, one that I felt had too much in common with the ending of Tears.  The re-edit gave me a chance to re-write the ending into one not so similar, and one that I fell makes more sense – at least for me.

The new versions are kicking around at Smashwords and Amazon.

The Adventures of Tintin

Posted: December 1, 2011 in Movies
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It is not long now until the Tintin movie has its release here in Australia, and I am looking forward to it. In theory a collaboration between Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg should be good – and one based on the Tintin comics as well. As a kid, the Tintin stories were right up there along with Asterix as my favourites. Of course going by the trailers seen to date it seems more a ‘loosely based on’ style rather than the true to the source style that the TV show a few years back used.

 

In part it is based on the ‘Secret of the Unicorn’ and ‘Red Rackham’s Treasure’ two parter, which was always my favourite. I always enjoyed those treasure hunt style stories, such as in Indiana Jones, The Mummy, The Goonies, Treasure Island, National Treasure and numerous others. I did write, way back in primary school, some stories of that nature, and went back to that partially in Tears of the Mountain. I hope to do some more of those (revolving around Professor Halir of course) in the future.

RIP Anne McCaffrey

Posted: November 28, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Anne McCaffrey, the US born author who was one of the first female writers to break into Sci-Fi has died, age 85. She is best remembered for her Dragonriders of Pern series, which started out fantasy and became more and more sci-fi as the series went on.

I first read the Pern books in my early teens and, as was the way as a very young writer, wanted to incorporate elements into my world, such as the dragon riders and pets like fire-lizards. Luckily that is long in the past and my stories are my works, not cheap knock-offs of other authors, a big risk among teenage writers.

Plans For The Rest Of The Year

Posted: November 23, 2011 in Dawn of Wolves, General, winter wolves, writing, writing update
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End of the year is rapidly approaching and I still have a few things on the list that I want to see done by then, so I’d better knuckle down and get them done.

First up is to finish the re-edit/re-write of Winter Wolves. I’m down to the last 2K to go, so hopefully won’t be long. After that I need to work on a new cover for it, like the others of that series.

Secondly is to finish off Dawn of Wolves – it has been sitting there for a long while now. At 40K down, there is about 10K to go for it.

Lastly is to do another short anthology of short stories – somewhere between 3 and 5 of them. I’ve got a couple of collection in the works – just need to work out which to finish first.

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