Several wooden poles had been sunk into the ground to support a sort of overhanging porch of thatch at the front of the house. There was a small table and a single stool. A trencher and cracked old mug sat on the table, some remnants of dried food crusted to the former. There was no…
Fair Upon the Tor #02 (updates Mondays)
While Caewen struggled to free herself, the half-alive, half-dead woman leaned closer and narrowed her line of sight, staring hard and direct. The noise of Dapplegrim angrily stomping and yelling was growing faint. Caewen realised that the woods all around her had visibly dimmed too, as if she was now looking at the world through…
Fair Upon the Tor #01 (updates Mondays)
Well, here we are then. I’m going to start posting this as a work-in-progress. I’ll set this up as posts of about a thousand words. This is just a first draft, so the final version may end up quite different. I don’t want to comment too heavily about why I might be choosing to do…
Fair Upon the Tor Drafting
I have made some small headway with Fair Upon the Tor, enough so that I’m considering posting the first draft as I write it… or perhaps, not quite as I write it, but in thousand-word chunks. I think I’m also going to switch comments on. I don’t expect I’ll see much in the way of feedback, although…
Is Beauty
The Boulevard Montmartre at Night Camille Pissarro There is a quote from Pissarro I like. I read it once on one of those little white placards they have in galleries, the small micro-essays that sit beside the painting. Have you ever noticed how people tend to spend more time reading those little placards than looking…
Rather neglectful update
Starry Night Jean-François Millet It has been quite some time since I posted any updates or writing. I did consider spinning a story about how Auberon sent me off to beguile a bean-feed mooncalf, or similar, but the truth of it is that lecturing this semester has run me off my feet. I have an outline and some…
Boulders and Hills
https://vimeo.com/159069175 I was quite struck by this video. The phrase ‘exploring the wilderness of your intuition’ especially caught in my mind. I have been thinking a lot lately (maybe to a slightly unhealthy degree) about failure and how we know when we’ve failed at something. How do we know when the better course would be to accept defeat?…
A House of Snow & Apples
I have, at long last, released the second tale in The Winter King. This has taken quite some time, and much longer than I anticipated. Largely, the delay is because I wrote an entirely different book, A Charm for the Nameless Child, which was supposed to be Part Two, and ended up being a little too disjointed…
Cover: The House of Snow & Apples
I’ve just finished a (perhaps still slightly rough) copy of the cover for The House of Snow and Apples. This will now be Book Two of The Winter King. Book Three will be Fair Upon the Tor (incomplete). Book Four will be A Charm for the Nameless Child (complete, 100,000 words). I didn’t really do…
Updates and Suchlike
Just a quick update to say that Allie Sumner posted a very thoughtful review of A Treasure of Bone & Promises at her book review site Allie’s Opinions. I’m still some way off having The House of Snow and Apples ready for release, although I have at least started in on the cover art. I’ve uploaded…