 Spring is here and birds are out there doing what birds do – very noisily. Wildflowers are showing off, and all manner of creatures are out enjoying the sunshine. It’s been a beautiful day here and it inspired me to update my blog with the latest news.
The Naiad post has been updated with the finally completed cover and blurb. The book is getting very close to ready to publish, hopefully you will see it soon. I’m hoping for about a month, but that depends on lots of things that are out of my control.
You may have noticed that I’ve also added a brief post relating to the third and final book of The Narun series, Nereid, and I hope to get into some serious work on editing that over the next couple of months. I’ll update that post again when the cover and blurb are available. My hope is that it will make it out much faster than Naiad did, but don’t hold me to that.
With that said, I’m off to enjoy the last of the day.
Contemporary Fantasy Novel, 583 pages. Available now, details below.
Nereid
The Narun – Book Three
Whatever time John has left, he has dedicated it to finding Asha. Without that driving force he would still be sitting next to his corpse, waiting for death to catch up. But his friends will pay a high price for trying to help him.
Asha had placed herself under the control of the brothers, but she hadn’t understood just how complete that control would be. They have taken her away from everyone and everything she knew, and stolen any last chance she may have had to heal Ellie. As she watches the power plays between narun and human, Asha finds she is a prisoner of her own nature, and in that she is not alone. [Read more…]
 It’s been a busy couple of months, it’s always a busy time of year for me. As a result it has taken me more than a month to post here about an important milestone…
On June 23rd I completed the first draft of my third book. This is the third and concluding book of my series, The Narun. There is obviously lots to do before the book can be ready for publication, but the story itself is done. As per normal (for me) the book gets put away for a while (a couple of months), in the hope that when I come back to it, it will be with a fresh eye for any errors or inconsistencies.
The title? Yes, I suppose it’s safe enough to mention that now, since I don’t expect it to change: Nereid. So the three books of the series are titled, in reading order: Dryad, Naiad and Nereid.
I have now turned my attention back to the second book, Naiad, and getting it ready to publish. Final edits and proof-reading are in progress, the cover design is planned but not yet implemented, and I still have to write the blurb (I really hate doing that). Six months back I was saying that I thought the book would be published in a few months, but that has obviously stretched. If nothing else intrudes, I am hoping publication will occur in around two months from now, and I am hoping that Nereid won’t be very far behind it.
 The road to hell, they tell us, is paved with good intentions. I must be well on my way.
I started this blog with the best of intentions. A look around the internet quickly shows you that the most successful blogs are those that are updated regularly (having something interesting to say can help too ;)). “I can do that”, I said to myself. I may have said it to one or two others as well, which makes it all the more embarrassing. It just goes to show that talking to yourself has its advantages … but I digress. I felt confident that I would find something worthy to add here regularly. Probably not daily, but weekly should be within my reach. If not weekly, at least every two weeks seemed certain. Easy.
Not so easy. It’s been two months since my last post. I do have excuses. I was locked out of my site for a few days – some mysterious bug where the login page refused to show (but hey, it’s good security!). The work I get paid to do has gotten more intense lately. And my writing continues. Even so, I had thought … well, you get the idea: good intentions.
And now that I am here, what I can tell you? I have done nothing more with Naiad in the last two months, an annotated manuscript sits next me as I type, reminding me that it deserves attention. The third book has reached up over 140,000 words now and progress continues, but slowly. Please forgive my lapses with this blog, I am still here and the next books are still coming.
 It’s been a while since I’ve posted any news, so I thought it was time I did.
I’ve received some very positive feedback on my early drafts of Naiad, and now I have to find the time to do another pass over the manuscript myself. But I’ve been putting that off. I want more progress on the third book before I publish Naiad; you’re not going to like me very much if the follow on from Naiad is slow coming out. Yes, that’s a hint.
The third book is somewhere around half-done I think. I reached 100,000 words in the last few days (that count will come down after editing). It’s been going well, but I can’t yet say when it will be finished. This third one is more ambitious than what has gone before and that has, at times, had me feeling inadequate to the task.
My writing time is still mostly restricted to the wee hours of the morning, so that doesn’t help things to happen quickly. But I’ll keep at it, I want see how this all comes out as much as you do.
 It is not my intention to post regular book reviews here, but every now and then a worthy exception will appear. One such exception is “Liars & Outliers” by Bruce Schneier. Subtitled: “Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive”. (Cover image on the right from the author’s website.)
As the title probably makes obvious, this is non-fiction. The book is about the critical parts that trust and cooperation play in modern society. The ultimate thrust of the book is to suggest that a better understanding of these concepts can improve the way society operates, possibly resulting in fairer systems of justice, more effective security, and an understanding of the imperfections that will always remain – indeed, imperfections that are necessary for the health of society.
For the most part, this is not a strongly technical book, anyone could pick it up and learn a lot. Read it slowly, there are not many wasted words in the book. Take your time and consider each part as you go, and your efforts will be well repaid. [Read more…]
 I went book shopping yesterday. I went to a real, enclosed-in-a-building containing lots of flammable material manufactured from wood pulp, book shop. Indeed I went to two. I went to a place that sold new books; their covers may have been sullied by the hands that placed them on the shelf, but their innermost secrets are yet to be viewed by human eyes – maybe. Then I went to a place that sold second-hand books, and it was big! It held ten times as many books as the new-book shop, probably more, I didn’t try to count.
Being Australia, it cost me just over $80 to buy three new paperback books, I got six second-hand paperback books of good quality for less than half of that. Why bother telling you about such a trivial and common excursion? Well, I can’t help thinking about, and comparing, the different ways that we buy books. [Read more…]
Three weeks ago my last news post said that Dryad was on its way. Well (drum-roll please) it’s here! I can see Dryad, both e-book and print editions, on enough sites now that I feel I can safely say that Dryad has arrived. And not only that, my very own box of the Dryad print edition arrived today – see the photos.
The Kindle edition of Dryad showed up on Amazon within a few days of that last post, and the EPub edition showed on a few more sites just a few days later … but some others are proving rather slower. The print edition was approved only a week ago, and is already showing as available on places like Amazon and The Book Depository. (Links on the Dryad book post, for those that want them.) [Read more…]
 (To be read with Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” playing softly in the background; side three of the LPs for preference, that’s the first half of Disc 2 if you’re listening to the CDs, “Hey You” through “Comfortably Numb” if you’re using MP3s.)
It’s a month since I launched my website. I’ve had exactly three comments, all of them spam. According to the statistics from the service that hosts the site there have been hundreds of hits, but for all I know they may have all been from Internet search engines.
I’ve done nothing to promote the site, nor my book, in that time. This was intentional, I’ve been waiting for the book to appear on reseller sites so that when I do start getting visitors they will actually be able to buy the thing. But it still feels strange. Kind of a let down after everything I went through to get this far.
[Read more…]
Dryad is prefixed with a quote from Plato’s The Republic, specifically his allegory of the cave. This is something I came across and re-read only after I was well in to writing the book. I can’t even remember what I was researching at the time, but it struck me as something that comes close to what I was thinking when I created the narun.
 The allegory in brief: In an underground cave a light source (fire, sun, good) shines past a stage (a raised way) onto a blank wall such that players on the stage have their shadows cast upon the wall. In front of the wall, constrained so that they can see only the wall, are prisoners. Socrates postulates to Glaucon that unenlightened people are like those prisoners, seeing the world only as shadows cast upon a wall. (For more detail see the Wikipedia article.)
The conversation between Socrates and Glaucon goes on (and on), descending into politics and science and many other areas of philosophy, but I like to think about the original image. I like thinking about those prisoners, as people, looking the wrong way and thinking that they are seeing the world, but in fact they are seeing only shadows of it.
[Read more…]
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