Born of Darkness

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Born of Darkness , the seventh installment in the Kormak series, has just been released on all the major digital retailers. It’s another rip-roaring adventure featuring a resurrected Shadow-worshipping, soul-devouring Lunar warlord unleashed in the vaults beneath the Palace of King-Emperor Aemon of Siderea. Here’s the blurb. Millennia ago, the Shadow Lord Vorkhul vanished leaving only terrifying legends of his awesome power. Now he has reappeared in the sinister crypts below King-Emperor Aemon’s palace. Can Kormak solve the mystery of his resurrection and stop his rampage before he acquires the power to topple kingdoms? Until midnight Wednesday 25th March, it Read more…

Lamia’s Bane Released

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A belated Happy New Year to you all! The latest Kormak story is now available. Here’s the blurb: A deadly lamia has returned to  the ancient city she ruled until driven out by the Order of the Dawn two centuries ago. Now Kormak must brave the haunted ruins and find out why she has come back. He is not alone — a Shadow sorceress and a necromancer’s army of the walking dead also hunt the undead temptress for their own sinister purposes. This ten thousand word short story is available at all the usual e-tailers priced at $2.99 or whatever Read more…

Microsoft Surface Pro 3

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I picked up even Microsoft Surface Pro 3 at the airport duty-free store on my way back from Scotland. That was a few weeks ago. The madness of National Novel Writing Month prevented me from blogging about it. I’ve had the machine long enough now to give my first impressions. The Surface Pro is Microsoft’s flagship product for Windows 8, a hybrid of tablet and laptop. It looks like a big tablet with a magnetically attached tear-off keyboard screen cover. (You need to buy this separately.) It runs Windows 8.1 on a full Haswell processor. Microsoft bills it as being Read more…

NaNoWriMo Endgame

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At 16:50 yesterday I completed the first draft of my novel for NaNoWriMo. When it was validated it came to 50,039 words. It was not all plain sailing. The last section was written while I suffered from a very bad flu. Just to complicate matters when I reached about 43,000 words I realised that my outline was going to be useless as a guide to completing the book. I originally thought that the murder mystery plot I was using was going to be a short introduction to the quest adventure. There I was 80% of the way through and the Read more…

Free Stuff for NaNoWriMo

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I should have known it was all going to go horribly wrong the moment I got on the plane. It wasn’t just the person on the left of me was snuffling. The person on the right was as well. As was the person in front of me and the person behind. As we took off the sounds of coughing and sneezing drowned out the engines. I could practically feel the cloud of unhealth settle on me. Father Nurgle has blessed me once more. There was not a lot of NaNoWriMoing done last week. As of yesterday I had completed 36522 Read more…

New Toys For NaNoWriMo

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So here we are in the second week of NaNoWriMo. Things are going pretty well for me. I hit just over 28000 words yesterday so I am ahead of schedule. I need to be. I am in Scotland this week visiting family. Time is tight. Last week I picked up a new toy, reactivated an old one and learned a few things. The Roost Possibly the most important thing from the point of view of ergonomics was that my Roost laptop stand arrived. This was recommended by excellent SF author and long-time friend Gary Gibson in the comments of this Read more…