Tag archives for Writing - Page 2
Duke of Piraxis – SciFi draft on wattpad
working cover for Duke of Piraxis Over the last couple of weeks I outlined a science fiction story with the working title Duke of Piraxis. It's about a new colony in the early days of human deep space travel. Despite the name Duke of Piraxis doesn't feature nobility. The Chief Executive is called Duke. They decided to call the colony Piraxis. Hence Duke of Piraxis as he's the primary point of view in what I've written so far. Inspiration for Duke of Piraxis So what inspired me to write the story was a TV programme where Michael Portillo visited Romania. At the beginning of the 20th century the Romanians got themselves a King. They built railways all over the country and also a fantastic palace. It made me think of some of the fantasy steampunk stories. Then I thought, maybe…
Scripting Living History Events for Re-enactors – in Five Steps
It has been quite a while since I was last involved in scripting living history for an event. It has also been a while since I attended one, but I spent this weekend at the ECWS living history site at Newport Pagnell. The ECWS living history has come on a long way over the last few years. There is an excellent small town feel to it with a load of talented people showing a wide range of skills and aspects of 17th century life. This is how it should be. The next stage in the evolution is scripting living history cameos so that there is a hook for the public to learn more. About a decade ago the Fairfax Battalia, now sadly gone, saw this and ran a series of living history events. I was lucky enough to be able to script some…
500 Posts on Themself – milestone
Themself passed the 500 posts milestone earlier this week. I've been specifically writing for Themself since 5th July 2006, so it has taken me a decade to write 500 posts. That said, the earliest posts date from 1995, but they were originally written for the Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group newsletter Milmud. Of the posts I've written, 15 were slotted in before the real start of the blog. All of those come from other things I'd written for publication elsewhere. Part of the nature of the very early blog posts was that I didn't have a topic in mind, so they're pretty short and random. These days they'd probably turn up as facebook status updates. Back then there wasn't a facebook (or at least I didn't have an account). What really turned up the heat was doing the creative writing course…
Attacked by a Zombie Baby (Story)
English: A participant of a Zombie walk, Asbury Park NJ, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) This week I have been attacked by a story about a zombie baby. After spending too much time thinking about what was wrong with some contemporary zombie stories I ended up writing a bit of one to get it out of my head. Zombie Baby Patient zero in my story is a zombie baby. I had an interesting Twitter conversation with some doctors about how an Accident and Emergency might approach it. On the face of it we have a baby that is alive, it reacts to sight and sound and tries to grab people and bite them. So it's alive. However, no discernible pulse or respiration. Here are just some of the tweets I've been writing my zombie baby story in the wattpad app because…
Book Marketing Plan – Part One
Here's my book marketing plan for my novel Perfects that I will publish in January 2017. My current planned publication date is over 11 months away. You could be forgiven for thinking that I'm jumping the gun a bit. However what I've learnt is that doing this properly takes time. Planning the Book Marketing Plan A book marketing plan is no different to any other sort of project plan. You need to work out what you need to do, break it into bite sized chunks and identify the dependencies. I've done that and also identified my critical path. Working back from the start you need to be able to send out advance reading copies to reviewers. Many of the more popular, and therefore more useful, review sites have a wait time in months. So you need to allow about three…