Covers and Blurbs

The blurb and rough version of the cover for Night of the Long Shadows has been posted on the Wizards of the Coast product catalog.

Nights of the Long Shadows: the three nights of the year when the darkest powers of the world gain strength and rise to prey upon the unwary. When one of Sharn’s most famed Inquisitives is hired to investigate a brutal murder at Morgrave University, his brilliance may be his damnation, as he uncovers a trail of blood leading from the seediest neighborhoods of the City of Towers to the highest reaches of power.

It's a great blurb. I tried my hand at writing one but it kept coming out too long. If I had any criticism (and it's a tiny moan, really) it's that I would have liked it to mention the other main character. The book is shared about 50-50 between the character mentioned above and another one from the "seediest neighborhoods of the City of Towers". But like I said, that's a tiny nitpick.


See that? That's a book cover. With my name on it. Consider me chuffed.

Moving House

So Caroline and I have finally made the big plunge into the property market and bought our first house. We've been renting for the past four years and just got sick of paying someone else's rent. We now have a three bedroom house (plus study) on a half acre plot of land. And it's got a swimming pool. Very South African.

I also have my own office where I can see the sky again. (Growing up I could see spectacular sunsets from the desk in my bedroom. Since moving away from home I've lived in four different houses and have never had any good views. But now I can see a wide arc of sky from my office and the sun sets directly in front of the deck. Yay. I don't know why but I'm much happier when I can see clouds drifting by outside.)

We moved in last Thursday, so everything is a bit of a mess. The only thing unpacked in my office is the desk and computer. Everything else will follow once I've painted over the strange hint-of-bile color the previous owner seemed partial to. I'll also post pics once I've tracked down the camera

Beta

As you can see, the blog has changed look again. I've migrated over to Blogger Beta and it gives me some new shiny toys to play with, not least of which is to change template without losing all your modifications.

I received comments from my editor on the Eberron book. Nothing too drastic. Just a tweak here and there, really. Except for one problem that I'm not sure I agree with. I'll think on it and see how I feel once I get to the chapter.

Now I've just got to find the time to incorporate the changes.

Another Sale

I just sold the short story "Tears of Gold" to the DAW anthology Something Magic This Way Comes. It's my ninth pro short story sale to date, so I'm starting to develop quite a cool little portfolio.

The light - it burns!

One or two of you (hi Marcy) may have noticed I've stuck a picture of myself up on the blog. I've never bothered with this before as any photographs taken of me usually show someone else entirely. i.e. someone who smiles like an idiot, or seems to blink all the time, or just generally looks like a complete, drooling imbecile. And that's not who I am. Honest. Well, sometimes, but it usually take half a bottle of single malt.

So why the change? Well, Caroline and I worked on a tv show this year that is now in post-production and they decided it would be nice for the writers to get their faces on TV instead of the usual practice of zipping our names up the screen faster than a very fast person can blink.

Now, I'm not a vain person (keep it down back there) but I sort of figured that if my picture is going to be seen by a million and a half people every week for three months, then I should at least make the effort. Urgh.

I'll admit it. It took a few attempts on the digital camera (what did we ever do without them?) to get one that made me look halfway normal. So I thought I may as well use it on the blog as well. And in case you're curious, my naturally photogenic better half only took a couple of attempts until she declared herself happy. See below for the result

Under Cover 2

I just realized that I could have simply posted the cover art here. Doh.

Under Cover of Darkness

The cover for the anthology "Under Cover of Darkness" is up at Amazon. My short story, "The Invisible Order" is going to be in it.

Nice artwork.

T.V. stuff

Living in Durban when you want to pursue a career in South African television is a bit like living in Canada when you want to be a screenwriter. It can be done, but you know all the action is happening in L.A.

Here all the action is in Jo'burg. Now, it's not far from us. A one hour flight or a five hour car ride, but the production companies in Jo'burg tend to look on it as living on the other side of the world. Well, most of them do. Caroline and myself have been quite lucky in that we've made contacts with people who don't mind the distance. Well, I say don't mind, but that's not exactly true. They do mind, but they are willing to work around it. Backstage, for instance, the soap opera we work on. We were initially an experiment to see if long-distance writing would work. And it did, a fact that we are very grateful for, as it brings in out main source of income.

And now it seems like another company is looking past the distance.

Actually, that's a bit unfair. We worked with Penguin Films on our first television job. We wrote three episodes of a prime time sitcom. But this was a year and a half ago now, and we haen't heard from them since. But then about a month ago we got an email asking if we were willing to really put in a lot of hard work on a drama series they were working on. The problem? One of their writers pulled out and they now had six hour long episodes that needed to be written. Were we willing to give it a go?

Hell, yes.

(The reason we weren't invited to write on it in the first place is that it is 52 episodes long and they had a lot of workshops to get everything on track. There you can see the disadvantage of living in Durban.)

So we were emailed all the background information. Series bibles that must have run to about 150-200 thousand words, and we had to read all this info over a weekend, absorb it, and then start our treatment for episodes that fell smack in the middle of the series. We managed to pull of the treatments, (5 thousand words. Scene by scene breakdowns), with minimum of fuss, and are now working on the first two scripts. All six scripts(nine thousand words each) have to be done by the end of October.

We can do that.

So then we got another email for the same production company last week. Would we like to write eight episodes in an upcoming sitcom they are producing.

Hell, yes.

I don't know if we impressed heads of the prodco with how quickly we managed to get on board with the drama series or if they were going to ask us anyway, based on our initial work with them, but we're very happy about it. They are having a workshop for the writers up in Jo'burg in October which they have kindly paid for one of us to attend. (They know we have a young baby, so they said only one of us had to go.)

It's a lot of work. All I can say is thank God I had already finished my Eberron book. Otherwise I'd be a gibbering wreck right now.

Justice - South African Style

An example of our wonderful criminal justice system.

Brain Freeze

I seem to be going through a brain freeze.

Ever since I finished up the Eberron book, my mind has been flitting about like a butterfly on speed. I can't focus on anything for any length of time, emails lie unanswered in my inbox, not because of laziness, but because I forget they are there. (Mental note. Answer emails.)

I wanted to get stuck in to my original fantasy novel, but I don't want to get involved with that when I'm going to have to do revisions for the Eberron book soon.

I've slowly started to come out of it in the past couple of days though. And that's because I have no option but to do some work. A quite well known agent I queried with my YA novel idea has asked to see the first 30 pages. Unfortunately, I haven't written the first thirty pages. The idea exists as a 6000 word short story. So now I have to eviscerate it and plot out the first chapter. It's good, because it's forcing my brain to work again, and the glazed look seems to be disappearing from my eyes.

A day off

I sent the first draft of Long Nights of Shadow off to my editor on Monday. (That's a working title. It looks like the Wizards catalog has it listed as The Night of Long Shadows. I prefer my title, but ultimately it's their call.)

I also got my weekly scenes sent off for Backstage last night, so for the first time in months I don't have anything to do today. I thought it would be nice and relaxing but truth to tell I feel totally drained. I don't know if the book was keeping me going or what, but it feels like I haven't slept for two days.

And by 2 in the afternoon I was bored. So I started researching my next book, which is going to be a foray into the British crime thriller, but with a South African twist. I love my British Police Procedurals, (Inspector Frost, Morse, Rebus) as much as I love fantasy, (which was why it was so cool to be able to combine the two genres for Long Nights), and I've long been messing around with the idea of writing one. So I decided to get it into planning stages and see how it goes. Right now I'm reading as many policeman's blogs as I can find, just to get a taste of what's going on. There are a few books I've ordered from Amazon as well that should help.

It's going to be a long process, as I want it all planned out before I start. My first question is whether to start my main character off as a Detective sergeant or a Detective Inspector. My first choice is the DI, starting the book on his first day on the job as a newly minted Inspector, but having him as a DS gives a whole different dynamic in that he will be answerable to an immediate supervisor. (His DI. Essentially his boss). Meh. Still not sure.

And a name. How hard can it be to find a cool name that doesn't sound too gimmicky? I've just finished reading a brilliant new Scottish writer called Stuart Macbride, and he came up with a cool way around it (actually, not really around it. His character is called Logan, which is already pretty cool, but the press also call him Lazarus, as he was technically dead for a while after a stabbing.) So he is called Logan "Lazarus" MaCrae. Nice.

I really like DI Winters, (I've always liked it as a name) but am seriously worried about the similarity to Frost. (Frost-Winters?) Or am I reading too much into it?

Loose ends

I'm currently doing a final sweep through the book, incorporating some comments Marcy made in beta reading. So haven't got much to add right now.

In the meantime, have a picture of my daughter, just because I think she's the most gorgeous little creature I've ever laid eyes on. (Not that I'm biased or anything.)

The End

I have committed first draft.

I still have a week and a half of rewriting to go, but everything is out there now. Out of my head and onto my hard drive.

Quite a feeling of accomplishment, actually.

The final countdown

I'm currently writing the last chapter of the Eberron book. Woo-hoo!

Hitting a brick wall

Haven't been blogging much lately. Staring down at the climax to the Eberron book and hoping to get it finished in a week. As long as nothing unexpected pops up, I should manage.

One of the things I've discovered about myself while writing the book is that I'm one of those writers that can't jump ahead. I have to write in sequence. This is a bad thing, because it means the slightest bump in the road can stop the flow of words – trying to find a name for a minor character, for instance. Or, as happened on Monday, I had my main character strung up by the wrists with a rope thrown over a rafter and he was about to get attacked by someone with a cutthroat razor.

And I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get him down. It was such a stupid corner to write myself into, and no matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn't come up with a plan for him to escape. I ended up leaving it and doing some rewriting of previous chapters, so the day wasn't a complete loss.

But if was one of those writers who could just skip ahead, it would make it so much easier.

I figured out how to get him down though. While I was lying in bed that night about to fall asleep.

The fear... the fear!

So my computer had been acting weird for a while. I knew I needed to format it, but that means spending hours and hours putting back programs and tweaking things and installing all the security updates yada yada yada, and I couldn't spare the time.

But then the spell check stopped working in MS Word, and it was one of things that was just irritating enough to distract me.

So I backed up everything. I pulled My Docs over to my other partition, saved my emails, formatted the c: drive, and reinstalled everything. I was up to midnight installing the updates.

There's nothing like the speed and reliability of a newly formatted machine. It makes all the hassle seem worthwhile.

So I crank up the old comp this morning and load up my Eberron book. I have a glance at the word count.

20, 546.

My heart clutches in my chest. But then I think, no, that can't be right.

I close the file and reopen it.

Still 20, 546. I seem to have misplaced a substantial portion of my book. Did I delete it? Has something gone wrong with the partition? Did I panic? Me?

Yup.

Briefly. Until I realized that I'd brought across an old My Documents folder that I'd backed up some weeks before.

But those few moments of blind, breath-stealing panic. Urgh. It's a feeling that only hits when I lose some writing. But this was a hell've a lot worse, seeing as my deadline is under two months away.

But thankfully everything is there. And if you're reading this, go back up your stuff. Just in case.

Mind in the gutter

Driving back from gym today I saw the following on the side of a courier van.

"The Courier Guy: I'd love to get my hands on your package."

I had a good chuckle, but then I suppose small things amuse small minds.

Hating the Scammer

Most writers will have heard about Absolute Write getting pulled. (Doesn't she know how quickly these things spread?) Explanation here.

And it's all down to someone called Barbara Bauer.

Some stuff

So the Eberron novel is picking up steam. I was a bit worried at the beginning as it seemed to be a real struggle, but I know the characters a bit better and they've found their voices, which makes it a lot easier on me. I'm roughly a quarter of the way through and on track for my deadline. If I keep to the schedule, which I have been doing.

Other stuff.

I sold a short story to the upcoming DAW anthology Fate Fantastic, edited by Dan Hoyt. And Caroline and I have been brought on board the writing team for the drama school soap. So I have a regular paying writing job which is a very weird feeling for me. We're going to go up to Jo'burg this month sometime to tour the sets and meet the actors and producers. We live in Durban, which is a six hour drive away, part of the reason we weren't sure we would be taken on board.

The real estate drama series is winding down. We have the third script to write this week and then we're pretty much done bar rewrites. It goes into production in July and will be broadcast in September in a prime time slot, so that will be fun to watch. I lobbied for the last two episodes because they seemed to be the most fun to write with the characters' all having their emotional meltdowns, but the downside to that is we have to wait three months to see the episodes. At least we got episode 2 as well so we'll see that upfront.

My workload

Current Workload

Eberron Novel. 1st priority. 1000 words a day.

Put together 4 one-page synopses and 4 ten-page writing samples for a British/South African screenplay competition. Due date is April 25th. To date I have written out two of the synopses and have written five pages of sample writing. Sigh. I'm going to have to work harder on this one.

Write three episodes for a local tv drama/comedy. Already done first draft of one episode. Waiting on feedback on beatsheets for the other two.

Write scenes for a local soapie. (Sort of like a South African "Fame".) Caroline and I are auditioning to get onto the writing team for this one. If we do, it will be great as it's regular income, and from someone who doesn't like soapies this one is pretty good and tries hard to raise awareness about social issues.

Finish rewrites on screenplay for producer who wants to send it off to Germany.

Work on my own original novel. (Hah!)I'm 70 thousand words in on a proposed 120 thousand.

Work on a Doctor Who short story for upcoming hardcover anthology.

Work on an on-spec short story for upcoming anthology.

Work on chapter breakdown and sample first chapter requested by editor for a Celtic themed horror fantasy.

I've been wondering why I've been feeling frayed around the edges, and I think I've just found the answer. It's now 11.18 pm and I haven't done my 1000 Eberron words yet. Got to get to that before bed.

Ciao

How stupid do you have to be?

Comments made during the rape trial of our former Deputy President. I'm posting them here, not as any kind of judgment on his guilt or lack of guilt, but because this is the guy who was the head of the National Aids Council and the Moral Regeneration Campaign. I shudder to think of the damage his comments have done to the AIDS movement in this country.

"You cannot leave a woman if she is already at that stage (of sexual arousal)." - Former deputy president Jacob Zuma, giving evidence in the Johannesburg High Court during his rape trial.

"Under normal circumstances, if a woman is dressed in a skirt, she will sit properly with her legs together. But she would cross her legs and wouldn't even mind if the skirt was raised very much." - Zuma.

"I had no problem having sexual intercourse with her, bearing in mind that she had needs." - Zuma.

"She consented. She actually took the initiative. When she got into that bed she encouraged me." - Zuma.

"It would minimise the risk of catching the disease." - Zuma, explaining to the Johannesburg High Court why he took a shower after having sex with an HIV-positive woman.

My first novel

Well I finally get to announce the coolest news ever. I've signed the contract to write my first novel! It is for Wizards of the Coast and is set in their new shared world of Eberron.

For those who don't know, Eberron is an extremely cool world created by Keith Baker. Magic is interwoven into the society, and acts as an almost technological power. But at the same time the world is big enough to write gritty fantasy or heroic quests or whatever. The scope is what I really like about it.

I can't say what the book is called yet, or what it's about, as that would give it away. But it will be number 2 in a stand alone series and will come out sometime in 2007.

Trailer re-cuts

The trailers for Sleepless in Seattle and The Shining have been re-cut to make them into vastly different movies to the originals. I know The Shining one came out a while ago, but I was reminded about them while reading David Bishop's blog.

http://www.collegehumor.com/movies/1611734/

http://www.collegehumor.com/movies/1652506/

A tale of many keyboards

So I've been a bit scarce of late. Apologies to the two people who actually read this blog. I've been working on two proposals, a screenplay, my original fantasy novel, and trying to get some sleep with a nine month old teething baby screaming through the night.

I finished the proposals and I've had some great news which I can't share yet. But soon, I promise.

In the meantime, what is it about me and keyboards? I've been using a Microsoft split keyboard for the past five years, and I've become very comfortable with it. But then the shift key broke and I thought I should move with the times, so I bought a logitech wireless with a laser mouse. The problem is, the keyboards isn't split. It took me a few days to get used to the straight layout again, but I was never totally comfortable typing and I've ended up going back to the split level one. A nice waste of money, if I do say so myself. But the difference is remarkable. I can type so much faster without all those stupid mistakes of typing hte instead of the. (And many more besides.)

So I'll use the split level keyboard again, unless Caroline gets me into trouble for wasting money on a keyboard I'm not using. On the plus side, th mouse is great.

He is the law

Never mind Big Brother. Britain is turning into Mega-City One. Now citizens can tap into CCTV footage and report "suspicious" behaviour to the authorities. Add this to the proposed increased powers of arrest for the police force and you know who's coming.
And I don't mean the crappy Stallone version either. I'm talking the real Joe Dredd.

The Process of Writing

Web pages load graphics differently. (This is a writing analogy, so stick with me.) Some of them load the whole graphic in one big, pixilated rough render, then with each pass the engine paints in more and more detail until you end up with the finely-detailed finished product. The point is, that first sweep is rough and quick, and each subsequent sweep paints in the fine stuff.

Another way to render is the slow and detailed approach. The graphic is loaded line by line, but each line is perfect in detail. When the lines have finished loading, you have the finished graphic. No subsequent passes are needed.

Writing is like that as well. Up until now I have been the line by line kind of writer. I didn't like leaving rough text behind me as I went. I liked to get each chapter as polished as possible before moving on. The problem with that is that I frequently got stuck, as maybe one aspect of a character or plot wasn't quite clear to me, and I couldn't go on until I had resolved the issue. So sometimes a whole week would pass by before I could carry on.

I've decided to try the first approach, and see if it work for me. The thing is, I don't think either one of them is right or wrong. You use whatever works for you. I just want to try the rough render method to see if I can get more work done, as the line by line method is so slow. I just hope I can get past the nagging feeling that I have left this unfinished mess behind me, as I know it will be calling me to go back and clean it up.

I'll let you know if it works.

Limited head space

I received a cheque for my story, The Invisible Order today. It's the most I've made form a short story, which is nice.

I also sent off the rewrites to the Eberron proposal. It's a much stronger story now with a nice, chunky character arc for the main guy. Something to sink my teeth into if it gets approved. Now I've got to get working on a rewrite for my romantic comedy screenplay. Producer wants to take it to Germany in five weeks to show a few people, so I've got to get it done by then. I hope it's enough time, because the rewrites are pretty drastic, introducing a whole B plot for secondary character, the result of which will make her a primary character. And I've got to add this in while at the same time cut out 30 pages. Ulp.

But I'm currently trying to get back into the writing of original fantasy novel. It's the first thing to fall by the wayside when other projects come up, and I shouldn't let that happen. Even an hour or so a day is enough to keep it fresh in my mind. I've realized I need to do this to keep that momentum going, because if I leave it for a week or so it loses space in my head and drifts into the background, making it hard to get back into it again.

So I'm rereading at the moment, and will hopefully get a few hundred words done before the day is out.