27 September 2012

The Travelling Fantasy Round Table : Part 7 : Animals in Fantasy (Pt 1)

Part 7 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is up at Deborah J Ross' blog. This month is the first of a two-parter looking at animals in fantasy.

14 September 2012

And All the Stars ebook competition

Closed!  Congrats Jen, Jennifer and George - the ebook has gone out to you today.

Just over two weeks out from release day (3 Oct) - sounds like a good time to run a competition for my blog readers.  A nice simple one this time - just email giveaway@andreakhost.com with "And All the Stars competition" in the subject line, and I'll randomly pick a winner or two just before release.

Make sure you include your preferred e-format in the body of the email!

Competition closes last day of September.

12 September 2012

Classic Mystery Primer

I have a guest post up today over at the Readventurer blog, all about Agatha Christie.  There'll be a Part 2 up tomorrow which covers other favourite mystery writers.

04 September 2012

AAtS Word Cloud

First draft of And All the Stars done!  It came in at just over 90,000 words, and involved quite a bit of tearing up during the last chapters.

The word cloud shows the focus on my galmance (my term for the girl version of a bromance), but is not particularly spoilery.


Next step is the end-to-end re-read - during final chapters I usually come to a better understanding of some characters, so on the re-read I'll do a little shading and emphasising certain aspects - as well as spotting typos, pace issues, continuity errors, etc.  Hopefully I'll get that done by the end of the week (though fatigued at the moment because I pushed to get the draft done).

After that, betas - I'm fascinated to know what their first reactions will be.  Then editing passes, copy-editing passes.

Just over eight months for first draft, which isn't bad.

Touchstone Trilogy - French Edition

Some news for the Touchstone fans. The wonderful Justine of Seraminda Editions has faced down the truly daunting task of translating Cass...