Dear Reader, I have a new novel on the way. Drafting is going very well because I am releasing it as a serial as I am writing. What is the story about? Run Toward Ruin Every year, the five families gather for a conclave to determine the affairs of the Prince they have served for generations. While the families debate the work of the coming year, Darius’s crippled grandfather pursues a far darker goal: overthrowing the Prince and seizing power for himself. Trapped in the old man’s service,...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, As you would know, when you sign up for a newsletter you might receive a series of welcome emails. It all depends on how the newsletter was set up. I have not paid much attention to it and have, I think, only had a welcome email that confuses more than anything else. I have a collection of short stories I have written over a time period of about fifteen years and I have decided to send these all out as a long running free fiction welcome sequence. Not all of them really, one of...
3 months ago • 8 min read
Dear Reader, Here is the intro to a surreal and darkly whimsical short story. *** Tearing Up Chocolate There was a moon. It hung low over the hills. The moon had no right to be that low. It was dangerous. The full moon had a flame sharp edge which could cut smoke and night and dreams into slivers. Tonight, Claretta Muldoon came to dance amongst the chocolate hills. Tonight, because the moon was low. She would start her dance in the flat gullies between the hills, but the aim was to get on...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Dear Reader, I recently moved my Publishing website to a new host and with that also restarted my Publishing enterprise, and the site for it, from scratch. Here is the first post on the blog. GOING BACK TO THE START A month ago this website was a full publisher site. It had pages for authors and pages for readers. There was submission guidelines, forms and everything you would expect on a decent publisher site. But that is no more because I’m going back to the the start. What is that start?...
5 months ago • 4 min read
Dear Reader, The future has aliens, blasters, and spaceships hurling through folded space. Or not. What has become clear over the last couple of weeks is that going to the moon is such an audacious and complicated process that Science-Fiction is not a predictor of the future. It is either a nostalgic harkening to worse (and nobler), or advanced (but depraved) alternatives. In other words, Science Fiction is as much Fantasy as what Fantasy is. Not that Fantasy still is fantastical. Not with...
6 months ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, Writing changes. Everything changes, that's true, but I was struck recently by how writing has changed. I have a small collection of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I gathered them when I was a young man and I remember getting lost in those weird worlds. Reading them was so much fun. Recently I picked up one to read again, partly to remember what made that reading fun. Mostly because I have been so steeped in writing practice and novel development that I wanted to rediscover what...
7 months ago • 1 min read
Dear Reader, When you scroll through lists of fiction, as you might do on any online book retailer, you will frequently find books that have a subtitle: "A Novel". Those people must be idiots, right? Of course we know it is a novel. It is a long book with a written story, as anybody can see. Well, actually, it isn't. I am dipping back into Philip Stevick's anthology The Theory of the Novel. In here is an artcile by Northrop Frye where he explains The Four Forms of Fiction. I'm not going to go...
8 months ago • 3 min read
Dear Reader, I wanted to let you know that a new novel is almost ready. In two weeks, When Oceans Dream will be released. It’s in final proofing now, which means the story itself is finished—sealed, for better or worse—and I’m living in that strange in-between space where the book is no longer mine, but not yet yours. This novel is very different from my first. Where my debut lived in a fantasy city with an ensemble cast, this one is firmly set in contemporary South Africa, in a small coastal...
9 months ago • 3 min read
Dear Reader, I'm writing to let you know about a few changes I'm making next year—all of them designed to give me more space to focus on what matters most: the writing itself. For nearly twenty years, writing has been a process of experimentation. Every book is its own project, its own challenge. That exploration is what keeps the work exciting. But it also requires focus—and I've realized that even my minimal marketing efforts have been pulling energy away from the page. So here's what's...
10 months ago • 1 min read