Original articles
Take one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen. At its peak it controlled vast swathes of land and many different cultures – including their associated cuisines. But what happens when you add a fantastical element to the mix? As anyone who read my short stories or novels knows, though they’re set in […]
We’ve all heard the advice to writers to “murder your darlings”. While I’ve been killing characters in entertainingly gruesome ways, the advice relates to prose. I’ve recently went through an extensive exercise of tightening my prose (for a particular submission), and thought I’d share my experience and lessons I’ve learned — both good and bad, […]
In my continual quest to improve my writing, I’ve taken a look at screenwriting. (It has nothing to do with a possible deal for a movie adaptation of Murder In Absentia, about which I’m legally not allowed to talk just yet). Screenwriting is an interesting medium of storytelling, one with both similarities and differences to […]
I’ve come across this article, and I’d like to call bullshit: The Disastrous Decline in Author Incomes Isn’t Just Amazon’s Fault, which in turn is based on this survey: Authors Guild Survey Shows Drastic 42 Percent Decline in Authors Earnings in Last Decade. Go ahead. Go read it (at least the first link) and come back, […]
A collections of links for some funky finds from Ancient Rome. First is this Roman army multi-tool. One can envisage it as a precursor to the Swiss — sorry, Helvetican — army knife. It has a knife, spoon, and fork, a spike, spatula and small pick. Though since it’s made of silver it might have […]
Err, nope. William Wallace was a devout Christian, never actually wore a tartan kilt (they became popular three centuries later), and certainly never sported blue face-paint for battle (associated with the Picts, centuries earlier during Roman Britain). He’d likely wear chain-mail to battle, and use a standard one-handed sword that can be used with a […]
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 […]
