Monthly Archives: August 2009

Feybound

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I encountered Feybound.com when I received a message from Twitter asking if I would be interested in placing an article on their site. Being the curious type I decided to check it out before I made any decision as to whether or not I would follow them up with their kind invitation.

Following the link provided on my Twitter message I went to the site to have a good look round, and I have to admit was very pleasantly surprised. Feybound is a very comprehensive SciFi/Fantasy and Horror review site. The first thing that impacted on me was how many books and features it contained, it is an very comprehensive site indeed and it is obvious from the onset, there here is a site put together by very devoted fans of the genre.

I visit a lot of revue sites, what can I say I am like all writer’s nosey by nature and also interested in knowing if anyone out there has read my work. Most of the sites you visit have a great deal in common, you know the long list of Tolkien, Harry Potter and Pulman raves, which again I hold no objection to as I have enjoyed reading all of them. What most of them lack, is the new quietly working dedicated writers, not unlike myself. You find a few to get your creative juices going, but they are few and far between.

The one thing I loved most about Feybound was the wealth of new writers that they featured, shared with a deep and well written insight to each of the books reviewed. The reviewers at Feybound know their onions and it really shows, I found as a Fantasy fan myself I was inspired and even excited as I looked at the long lists of well crafted reviews and I must admit my Christmas book list began to extend quite rapidly. 

Feybound have managed to pull together a very insightful and worthy package for the fans of these genre’s , not only can you read the reviews, you can log into the forum to talk about them and add your name to the newsletter list and get all the latest updates direct to your email box, its simply wonderful. The one thing that really gave me a buzz, and is very different from other sites, is that not only can you read about who is writing what, but you can then purchase the book, that is simply glorious!!!

As a new writer for myself it is very important I get the word out, and hopefully then get people to set off in search of the book to purchase and read. Self publishing and self promoting is expensive and difficult, but a site like Feybound for all writers and also fans is heaven. Here in one place is everything you need as a devoted fan, you can get a full insight of hundreds of books, and then when you have chosen your mouth watering selection you can simply click to order.

I am a bookshop lover, nothing delights me more than walking along the shelves excitedly following the bar code of colourful spines before that moment of victory where I pluck out my choices, I suppose it can be a little sad, but hey whatever floats your boat right? My visit to Feybound lasted well over an hour and I have to confess is the first time I have encountered anything like the feel of a bookshop online. I can only end by saying, that as a result of my visit I contacted Feybound and began dialogue to get Heirs to the kingdom part one on their site as quickly as possible, I am an addict to Fantasy, but no fool. I know a good bookshop when I walk in one and I think i can say the same for a good online store. I can only suggest that you take a moment to visit, but if like myself you love books, then get a coffee or two handy and free up some time, you may be there for longer than you thought.

www.feybound.com Don’t just take my word for it, visit it yourself

Web Bytes my take on the world wide web.

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I spend a lot of time these days having a look around to see what can be found within the layers of the internet, and I do waste a lot of time chatting with friends about sites that have caught my interest. As a writer I use the internet for research, and as an average guy on the street, I use it for fun and passing the time. Every now and again I come across a few sites that catch my attention, and so here I will document a few of those sites and hope it provides you with some interest, if not then move on to the rest of this site, which as it happens will be my first endeavour into this new section of the blog…

Heirstothekingdom.com

“Wow what a fantastic and wonderful web site,” he says with no sense of shame what so ever. HTTK.com was built by myself and my wonderful partner in a mad panic, when we suddenly realised that book one was in production. Since it was first went live back in April2009, it has undergone many changes, mainly due to the fact that neither of us have ever actually built a site before, as a self confessed technophobe of Internet related things, I leaned heavily on my partner who seemed to grasp things so much quicker than I did back then. I had been making drawings and sketches of what I wanted for well over a year, and I had formatted several things on my computer using Word, so to be honest, even though we were both up against the clock to get the site up for the books launch, I did have a good idea of what I wanted.

I tend to be a very visual person, I use all sorts of props and pictures when I am writing as it helps me to focus on the descriptive detail, (Yes I do have Harry’s glasses above my PC) but when it came to actually working out how all the pages would fit I struggled a bit. After working night and day to format all of the pages, stringing them together caused all sorts of problems, as I had never actually written URL’s and the like before. I had to rely on my very patient and wonderful partner who calmly tolerated my frustration and endless questions as we worked out how to take all the page files out of the folders and begin to upload them to fit in a fluent working site. I solved the problem of understanding, by introducing a visual prop that made everything fall into place, much I think to my partners relief. I drew out on an A1 size pad a family tree, yes I know it sounds odd, but it really worked, at the top was great great granddad, or as we call it now “The Home Page.” From that single page all the other children and relatives sprouted, and my learning curve of web site building finally began to grow. I am no expert, but I now play an unsupervised role on the site now, I am quite chuffed as I think the whole process has greatly increased my understanding of web sites and how they work.

I always wanted HTTK.com to be a site that would hold a lot of interest, but also be one of those sites that felt like walking through a small town. I love the fact that you can go to the Visual site map, and see a plan almost like the towns square’s you are here map, but behind the scenes not all of the streets are on the map, and this web site has a few back alley’s you can slip into in search of other little gems to aid the experience of the HTTK books. Planning HTTK involved a massive amount of notes, of which at the moment the web site has about 2% as rewritten pages, to help add to the picture I have tried to paint in my writing. It has always been a long term goal to expand the site with each book, so that the site remains fresh and up to date, and most days I work on items that will appear much later. At the moment we are preparing the second book, so there are a lot of extras that will go up onto the site when the book comes out. I also can be a little bit of a perfectionist, and it is quite normal for me to spend Sunday’s making changes to several pages as I tweak it constantly.

I consider HTTK.com a family site, and it is bright and colourful as the characters within my work reflect. Its a shame we have been plagued by spammers since we first set it up, who posted obscene links on the Guest book and the forum, but I have to say that even though such (I wont use the word SCUM) twisted individuals have tried to manipulate a novice web site builder, both my partner and myself have learned a great deal, and happily today we encounter less and less problems, and we endeavour to make it a fun and fact filled site, which we both hope increases the experience of the books and also gives a great deal of fun and enjoyment to those who use it.

Its not that bad for a beginner……

Life alongside the Characters.

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LIVING WITH THE CHARACTERS CONT…

I have been surprised at the response I have had to the blog I wrote, ‘Living with the Characters.’ I have had several comments and also a few emails asking for more insight to the way in which the characters were constructed and written. In response to such wonderful comments and requests I will offer the following.

As I have already stated, I did invest a great deal of time and effort into creating profiles of each of the characters that wandered through the book, For myself it was important that I could relate to them as real people, (I know it sounds odd, but hey, it works?) from my point of view it is easier to write about someone you know, I could have taken the easy route and based them all on friends, which would have given me a living example to copy. I chose to create the illusion of a person, which I think gave me the chance to allow each person within the book to develop into a very specific pattern. It is without doubt labour intensive as it means a great deal of note taking as I actually write the books, but I soon realised that as I got into book two they were developing more rounded characteristics as I wrote their interactions with the other characters of the book.

In the early days as I wrote and planned the fist books release, I also had the pleasure of being able to sit and talk with my partner and also illustrator Louis M Slater. It was important to me that Louis especially understood each of the characters, as he would have the task of creating them in the artwork we used on the books jacket, we literally took each character apart and discussed every aspect of who they were as people and how they would react to different situations. It was a series of discussions that actually allowed me for the first time to see and understand how others actually perceived each of the characters, something I am not sure many writers have the chance to do. The resulting conversations made me very aware of how real, others could and hopefully will perceive them.

It was during that time I began to look at how to normalise the living situations around each of the characters, and it was here that i began to see that although I had only added small sounds bites of village life for the characters, it was very important in the placing of each of the characters in what I refer to as a ‘Normal context.’  It does sound odd at times, but just the addition of a little gossip around the village seemed to put another dimension into the lives of the characters. Alice and Ann Kirk, revealing their thoughts and whispered comments to Agatha did help show another perception of each of the main characters and made them feel more human and real. I suppose it was the replication of real life in the situations of the characters that did indeed allow every reader to identify with each of the characters.

Looking now at the books I have written and not yet published, I can see how much of a learning curve I have been on. I have never really considered myself as a serious writer, but the facts are I am a published Author now involved with a large project. I often sense that my development as a writer has been on a parallel to my characters as they face challenges and had to deal with, well so have I. That process of learning and moving forward that all of us embark on in life is now yet again a very real feature of my own life as well as those of my characters. As the books progress the characters will be confronted with tests and trials of which they will have no other choice than to face and overcome, like ourselves they too will wander down the road of life and I am sure i will have much more debate and spend many more hours with my notes as the characters evolve.

I have taken a great deal of joy out of the process and I find that as I continue to write and get more comments and feed back, my feelings of insecurity lessen and I take more time to enjoy the whole process. These books still have the test of time to face, but to those of you to date who have had a little of the enjoyment I have had in the writing I am thankful. May Rune and the others grow ever within my pages, and I hope that all of these wonderful people created somewhere in the darkness of my mind will feel as much like family to you, as they do me.

Thank you for your comments and your support, it has been a thrill for me as a writer to see that there is some appreciation of my work….

Are publishers their own worst enemy?

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Each morning of the week I get my electronic copy of “The Bookseller”, They are decent folk who send me via email a breakdown of many of the online articles about the world of publishing. As you can imagine this year the forecasts have been somewhat gloomy and if I might say, a little alarming. It is easy to see why book shops are panicking and not stocking new titles, whilst they compete by stocking the so called blockbusters.

As I have already written in previous Blogs, many new writers are turning to self-publishing, which is to be honest a very difficult route to take. In my mind the question I would pose would be why, when you look in the writers year and see hundreds of publishing firms? Once again I return to previous comments about how it appears that the whole of the publishing industry is hung up on celebrities, and looking at the bookseller this morning I have been given yet another reminder of this.

I have just read an article in ‘Variety’ and I think it is worth having a look at it to understand some of my points. www.variety.com/article/vr11180006746.htmlit is titled ‘U.K.shows hit the books, by Leo Barraclough.’ The article is a really good example of today’s thinking as the publishers run for the cash cow, whist walking over huge amounts of talented writers. The article quotes. “Every one of the top 10 hardback non-fiction best sellers in Blighty last year was written by an entertainer.”

Its scary for us poor old writers, its bad enough that we are on mass fighting to get our own creative work into print, now we have to face and fight the entertainers as well?  The sad truth is that just about every TV series on earth has a book out, on top of that the stars are writing their autobiographies, and the book shops are filling up fast with them, but please when will this stop? What has happened to the good old days when the publishers took on a writer and supported them, and created their own breed of celebrity? What is with this obsession to use those already made? doesn’t the publishing industry have a duty to those who are writing creative works? We all know it can be done as the list is endless, JK Rowling, Dan Brown, even in more recent times we have seen the overnight status of Stephanie Meyers rise higher and higher.

If publishers are looking to TV and celebrity biographies, they are not looking at new talent, I find it concerning that this year alone we have seen the deaths of some wonderful fiction writers, but who is going to replace them? Publishers at the moment seem to be worried that books sales have fallen and profits are down, no offence chaps but look at what your churning out, its not exactly awe inspiring, its a part of the market, but there are so many genre’s of books that appear to be getting lost in the lack of the media spotlight. The rich and famous are already rich and famous, leave them be and give a little more time to looking at the wealth of talent going through hell trying to get their own works in print. I find it disturbing to think that if C.S. Lewis or even Tolkien were new writers today, the odds are high that unless they did a TV show, we would all be deprived of their work, it a thought that is some what sobering and sends a cold chill down the spine, don’t you think?

I have to confess that I somehow feel that as the publishers complain louder and louder about how rough things are, I can only help but feel they are fighting themselves as their own worst enemy’s

 

Many thanks Leo Barraclough. Variety.com for UK shows hit the books. article vr1118006746/Friday Jul 31st 2009.