Round-up of latest media appearances. Over at Working Title Blogspot, EM Swift-Hook and Jane Jago (whose novella I loved) granted me an interview. They asked only three questions, but ones that were completely outside the normal selection I see with author interviews: Q3: Who, outside of family and friends, would you most want to read […]
News / Blog
A break: The important things
Thanks for everyone who had inquired after my health – I’m alive and well. I’m taking a break from social media. I have been spending far too much time on various platforms, which was detracting from my life elsewhere. I have decided to step back and focus on the important things in my life: family, […]
Book Review: Philip Matyszak’s 24 Hours in Ancient Rome
I came across Matyszak’s 24 Hours in Ancient Rome: A Day in the Life of the People Who Lived There via a recommendation by Alison Morton (of Nova Roma fame). It looked right up my alley, so I jumped straight into it. Very glad I did! What to Expect A witty, fictional non-fiction description of […]
Ancient News
As most of you know, I love reading news about discoveries from ancient Rome. This post collects some recent articles, as well as a short piece I wrote for Virtual FantasyCon event about using real historical detail as background colour for storytelling. First, a bit out of In Numina. I use a lot of real […]
OMG! Best Meme Ever!
So… I was scrolling past the messages in one one my favourite Facebook groups – Grimdark Fiction Readers & Writers – when what should I see? Someone. Created a meme. About. MY. BOOK!! And I don’t even know them… Years of trying to push my own memes on people, and finally I have fans who […]
Book Review: Black City Saint by Richard A. Knaak
Let’s keep it short, shall we? You’re here because you like historical-urban-fantasy. So stop reading, and go get your copy now. Still not convinced? Let me share some more details then. What to Expect Black City Saint is the first novel in the series from Richard Knaak. Set against the back-drop of Prohibition-era Chicago, Nick Medea […]
Bits and Snippets of Writing
Not all ideas end up as a full novel. Sometime’s it’s just a flash fiction, or even a mere snippet of a story. Here are a couple of particularly delicious ones from the past few weeks. All were done as a prompt (where someone asked for it or not…) to an image. This little techno-beasty […]
Recreations of Roman houses
I love old ruins, as you surely know. Whenever I find myself walking amongst them, or even just in old streets of modern cities, my mind is only half focused on what I see. The other half sees what these places were in their prime. Makes it a bit of a chore to avoid traffic… […]
Virtual FantasyCon 2017 – Now On!
As most of you probably already know, Virtual FantasyCon is now live and active on Facebook. I just wanted to draw your attention to a few cool things 🙂 First, though I haven’t published a book in the past year, I still managed to snag a gold award for blogging. It nominally came for The […]
State of the publishing industry
Rather than an article, I include below links to two others, with my thoughts on them. I think they show pretty well the current turmoil that the publishing industry is in. The first is titled “Cover Story: The Quiet Catastrophe, Then Reinvention Of Book Publishing”, by John Birmingham on which-50. Here’s a notable excerpt: The last […]