NANP: Method To Madness

On Thanksgiving Day I bring to you Kenny Soward, the author of the GnomeSaga series and a regular short fiction writer, for the latest on Names: A New Perspective. I haven’t had a chance to read his work yet, the first GnomeSaga novel Rough Magic still awaits me on my iPad, but he’s certainly one of the more interesting authors I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Kenny is also a fellow contributor to the Manifesto: UF, which saw the publication of my short story Dharmayoddha and his story Gold Dust Woman was a stand-out story. Hopefully after reading this post you’ll be interested in his work as well. I certainly encourage you to check it out at least.

NANP: More Than Just A Name

So here we are. Almost four months have passed since the last Names: A New Perspective was featured on the blog. I took a long break in between, but now I’m back and for the first post, I give you Patty Jansen, an Australian author who has experimented extensively with self-publishing and often talks about her experiences, sharing the nugget of wisdom that she’s learned over the years. I have several of her novels on my reading longlist since she writes some of my favourite type of fiction: Hard SF, Military SF, and epic fantasy. She is one of the first authors I reached out to for this brand-new edition and I’m really excited to have her on board, so here she is.

NANP: The Madness of Names

Stopping by the blog today for Names: A New Perspective is John C. Scott, self-publisher extraordinaire and the author of The Legend of Adam Caine and Recon One-Five among others. John is a really involved author from everything I’ve seen and the level of his writing output is crazy high. If I could write half as fast, I’d have at least a novel published this year! I haven’t had a chance to read any of his Adam Caine novels as yet, but they are certainly on the cards, especially after reading his guest post, wherein he talks a bit about his naming conventions. Here you go.

Monthly Report – January 2013

This is quite a bit late, and I apologise for the delay. Lots of things going on this month, and not all of it good, so things have been off-schedule for a while.

In my blogpost titled “2013 – What Now? Some Resolutions Maybe?” I mentioned that I was not going to set myself any individual project word-count goals, and that my big aim would be to do 450,000 words for the whole year. January, on the whole, wasn’t all that great since there were two trips to India involved (one coming back in the first week, and another going there in the last week), so that crimped by writing quite a bit, not to mention that my slump and procrastination continued.

Try as I might, I can’t fix this stupid procrastination. There’s always something that comes up, that totally screws with my writing moment and I end up doing nothing. I have no idea how to get it sorted. The reading progresses great, just not the writing.

Eh, whatever. It’s still better than doing absolutely nothing for a whole month! So here’s how my writing and reading in January went down.

2013 – What Now? Some Resolutions Maybe?

So the New Year has come and gone. The end of the second week is almost upon us. And so far, it’s been a somewhat lazy, yet productive month. Also one that has been spectacular in a few ways. It’s also time to make some new resolutions and challenges. So let’s get to it.

April Report

So its time again to do another end-of-the-month report. Overall, April was a somewhat better month where my writing is concerned as I managed to knock some submissions together and managed to get a headstart on editing my novel submission, but not by much really. The muse was hell of a lot more fickle than it usally is so I didn’t get anywhere near as much as I wanted to get done. On the reading front however, it was a blast, and I read some fantastic novels this month, and some not so fantastic as it turns out. Quite disappointed with two of my reads in particular – Giant Thief by David Tallerman (extremely disappointed) and Void Stalker by Aaron Dembski-Bowden (very ambivalent about it). And on the reviewing front, book reviews were posted fairly regularly while I only got around to posting a single one, I did write two. So that’s a target hit, I think?

Anyway, the lowdown is after the break.

Self-publishing – Guest Post by Michael J. Sullivan

To people who follow my reviews and my tweets and facebook status updates, it will be no surprise to you lot that I am a very big fan of Michael J. Sullivan’s work, the Riyria Revelations novels. I discovered him quite accidentally through twitter and his novels were very much an impulse buy so it was quite rewarding when the novels turned out to be some of the best fantasy fiction I had ever read. I approached Michael in February once I was done with the last novel, the two-book omnibus Heir of Novron collecting together Wintertide and Percepliquis, as I had some questions about the ending and to see if he would be interested in doing some guest posts for the blog and for The Founding Fields. He accepted promptly and here’s the result. To give a small context to this guest post, I am myself very interested in self-publishing and have been seriously considering that route since December last year, so me finding Michael came at just right the time, as does this guest post. I’m sure quite a few of my friends will also be interested in this topic, so here’s to all of you.