It’s a hot day outside, the sky a sort of molten, carved-out sapphire blue. It’s one of those days that you either need to embrace fully with a trip to the beach or sitting under a tree in the local park, or failing that, hide from in an air-conditioned space. I have edits to wade through,…
Author: Hob Goodfellowe
Second Drafts & Colours
I’ve finished the on-paper edits now for The House of Snow and Apples, and am slowly transferring them across to the Pages document I write in. It’s now sitting at about 40,000 words, though cutting and adding may change that slightly. The other thing I’ve been thinking about lately is racial diversity in fantasy. I mean…
The House of Snow & Apples: First Draft
Well, The House of Snow and Apples, Book Two of The Winter King, is complete as a first draft at 39,000 words. I just typed the last line. It took me longer to get to the end, and the story is much longer than I initially estimated. Certainly, when I started the story in mid-January I…
Endings & Other Stuff
It tends to be something of an truism in writing fiction that authors will eventually discover they have a problem with the beginnings or middles or ends of stories: very few people are good at all three. My largest stumbling block tends to be beginnings. It’s taken me a long time to even work that out. The story…
Thoughts on Titles
Well, I’m now nearing the end of the first draft on what will now be the second book of The Winter King. The manuscript is sitting at about 25,000 words, so a medium to long novella. In an earlier post I discussed the (somewhat) confusing reasons why the release schedule I had so carefully laid…
Alien, Rockstar, Goblin King…
Like many, the death of David Bowie has taken me by surprise. I’m a little knocked to one side. Not speechless, but just feeling that the world is suddenly, unexpectedly, a place with slightly less wonder. Bowie, of course, did so much in his life, although, in the end I suppose I’m the right age…
State of Work
I’ve managed to throw my release schedule into disarray by overthinking the connectivity of things. What I’d intended to be Book 2 in The Winter King, working title Prince of Ghosts, has started to look to me like too much of a jump from Book 1. Anyone who has been following my work, will also…
Aspects of the Story
We are returned now to Melbourne, although the combination of exhaustion from the flight and some other major life events on coming home took me away from the journal. I have managed to keep up my writing every day, although to be honest, that has grown into such a woody, bark-swollen habit, that I’m not sure I…
Where the Green Shadows Sleep
Yesterday, we went for a walk up Mount Pirongia in the Waikato region of New Zealand. The New Zealand forest is a myriad of greens, primordial and ancient. Mosses and lichens drape the rocks, glistening liverworts grow over ochre soils and the canopy of grey-green kahikatea casts shadows and sun-dapples down through treeferns and onto…
New Years
If you have found a thing in life that enthrals you and enchants you, then, please, go ahead and pursue it. The world is full enough of people who force themselves to trudge in endless march through obligations, stress and furious activity. If you have found a thing that brings joy, that makes time seem both wondrously slow and…