Original articles
Do you want professionally looking ebooks to delight your readers? Of course you do! Following my post about the best tools I found to create and produce books and on how to best use InDesign, here are some 11 specific, highly-useful tips about how to create ebooks to the best effect! First, let’s be clear […]
I’m chuffed to formally launch the Egretia Swag Store! We bring many of Felix’s best moments from across the gulf of time and space, and ship around the globe. Check it out, and get yourself something nice and fishy for Saturnalia! For those of you who are about to go swaggering down the swag path […]
Do you want professional looking print and ebooks to delight your readers? Of course you do! Following my post about the best tools I found to create and produce books, here are some 14 specific, highly-useful tips about how to use Adobe InDesign to create print-ready PDF files and ready-to-upload ePubs for the best effect! […]
We talk a lot about how to write books, about author’s craft and writers’ tips. This post is instead focused on the act of writing — on the recording of words. There are probably as many methods of writing a novel as there are authors — writing longhand with a Montblanc fountain pen in a […]
I’ve started the year with 116 reviews for Murder In Absentia (and, I think, there were about 3-4 reviews that have been removed over the years). By now, the number of reviews is up to… … 110! This isn’t going to be a whinging post, just a reflection of what (I think) is happening, and […]
In my continual quest to improve my writing craft, I watched the recorded Brandon Sanderson’ course on Creative Writing. I seriously recommend it to anyone writing novels, especially SciFi / Fantasy. Below are my thoughts about how to make the best use of it.
This post arose out of my review of Six of Crows. I complained that many action sequences were problematic. I didn’t provide examples, to avoid spoilers and in fairness to Bardugo, but I think this subject deserves a full post. There were a few scenes in the novel, more than a passing oversight, where the […]
In the eternal quest to improve my writer’s craft, I do three things. These are, for me, the three pillars that make the best, most stable structure for growth. They are: Writing often (novels and short stories – there’s always something going on in my head) Reading voraciously (in and out of my particular genre mix […]
I’ve blogged recently about a collection of Roman coins, but let’s examine some of the flip side of Roman economy: roads and pollution. In this post I want to present you with several resources about the far-reaching effects of the far-reaching effects of the empire, from unusual angles.
I recently came across Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing a short story. I thought they are pretty brilliant, regardless of the scope of you story (they could apply to a full-length novel just as much), so I have reproduced them below together with my thoughts about them. 1. Use the time of a total […]
