Thought for the Day

"How to be a Writer:
Re-read chapter you wrote yesterday.
Delete chapter.
Feel inexplicable sense of achievement.
Tea."

~ Joanne Harris

Gamebook Friday: Beowulf Beastslayer sets sail for the Land of the Danes soon!

On Monday 1st October 2018, the Kickstarter for Beowulf Beastslayer, my latest ACE Gamebooks project will go live. Five years in the making*, here's the video promo for the gamebook...

And if you want to know a little more about the story of Beowulf, here's me from five years ago, to fill you in...

* Or, more precisely, five years since I first announced the project.

Thought for the Day

"To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time." 

~ Leonard Bernstein, American composer and conductor

Gamebook Friday: ACE Gamebooks Abroad

Four weeks from today I will be attending the Frankfurt Book Fair for the first time. I will be a guest of Mantikore-Verlag who are launching the German language edition of Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland at the event.

In fact, Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland is becoming a rather well-travelled book. Long time readers of this blog will remember that The Wicked Wizard of Oz is already on display in the All Things Oz Museum in the United States, but in July I was contacted by Vladimir Dorda, from the Russian Federation, asking if I would be willing to donate copies of some of my books to the department of the international literature at the library where he works. And yesterday he sent me this photograph.

Vladimir with copies of The Wicked Wizard of Oz and Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland in the Anton Chekhov Library in the Russian city of Taganrog.

In other gamebook news, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain: Goblin Scourge Edition is now available to buy from the Nintendo eShop, which means that you can now play a game I worked on on your Nintendo Switch console.

I also sent NEVERLAND - Here Be Monsters! to the publisher this week, ready to be laid out, which means that I've been able to spend some time working on my next ACE Gamebook, Beowulf Beastslayer.

The Kickstarter to fund Beowulf Beastslayer will launch on Monday 1st October 2018. Join the Beowulf Beastslayer Facebook group to be kept up to date with developments.

Warhammer Wednesday: War for Armageddon is here!

After a rather convoluted voyage through the warp, my contributor copies of War for Armageddon finally arrived. And rather impressive the book looks too.

You can pick up your copy of the War for Armageddon omnibus here.

Thought for the Day

"Okay, writing advice. Best piece of writing advice I ever had was "Use words." This saved me a lot of trouble. I'd tried to write a short story using some cucumber slices and the skeletised spine of a vole, but the pacing was off, the plot dull, and the characters smelled weird."

~ Jonathan L. Howard

Kaiju. Rising.

Last year, I was invited to contribute a short story to Outland Entertainment's Kickstarter-funded anthology Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters II. Almost a year later, the eBook edition has been sent to backers, meaning that the mass market paperback release isn't far away.

Now entitled Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters, you will be able to get your hands on the anthology on 1st November 2018. Here's the cover blurb:

We are surrounded.

A wealthy man hunts the kaiju that killed his daughter on an island inhabited by mega-fauna.

They are everywhere.

By the light of a campfire a young girl shares the true story of the epic brawl that caused Hurricane Irene.

There is no escape.

Sabotage turns an international science competition into a monster and mecha massacre.

They Reign.

From deep ocean trenches and dense vibrant jungles to alien worlds and other dimensions, the kaiju have returned! This is a collection of sixteen stories by some of the hottest names in speculative fiction. These modern myths celebrate and explore the Japanese film genre popularized by films such as Godzilla, Gamera: The Giant Monster, King Kong, Cloverfield, and Pacific Rim.

My story is called The Ghost in the Machine* and I, for one, can't wait for the book's release!

* I think my story might have made the editor cry when she read it. ;-)