Mapping Vengeance
I love maps with a passion. I've got hundreds of them here, plus oodles of atlases and books of ancient and historical maps, geological maps, bathymetric maps, atlases of history. Any fantasy novel that doesn't have at least one map – and some of my books have had pages of them – feels deficient. A fantasy novel without a map…
Karen Brooks on Giving Birth to a Book
Is there anything Karen Brooks hasn't done? An academic known internationally for her work on popular culture, an award-winning teacher who's also written eight novels and an acclaimed non-fiction book, Consuming Innocence – Popular Culture and Our Children, Karen is also a social commentator who appears regularly in print media, radio and TV. Oh, and among many other things she's also…
Karen Brooks on Giving Birth to a Book
Is there anything Karen Brooks hasn't done? An academic known internationally for her work on popular culture, an award-winning teacher who's also written eight novels and an acclaimed non-fiction book, Consuming Innocence – Popular Culture and Our Children, Karen is also a social commentator who appears regularly in print media, radio and TV. Oh, and among many other things she's…
The Truth About Publishing – 14
Lesson 13: You’re not published until you’re in print (and sometimes not even then)Deals fall over for all sorts of reasons, so don’t count your chickens until they’re roosting in a thousand bookshops. Here are some of the most common deal breakers, all of which have happened to writers I know or have heard about:There was a ‘misunderstanding’ when the…
First Impressions
After 27 books, you'd think I'd be blasé about the latest one, but it doesn't work that way. I've had a lot of stories out in the three years since my last epic fantasy novel, The Destiny of the Dead, was published – new editions of my 3 Human Rites eco-thrillers, 5 children's books, a novella and a heap of…