Sorry about the CAPS. Actually I’m not that sorry – I’M SO EXCITED!!!
My debut novel Bifrost has been published in ebook form and is now available on the major ebook platforms.
If you haven’t already – please click one of the buttons below to go to the respective store purchase page!
Once you’ve finished reading (because of COURSE you’re going to read it – it’s amazing! Just ask me!), please let me know what you think and do please leave a review on your ebook platform or on goodreads.
This is it, folks – the cover for my new novel Bifrost.
Artwork for the cover by Xia Taptara.
Cover design work by The Cover Collection.
Hope you like it. Keep your eye out for the book COMING VERY SOON!
So I haven’t been posting lately, on either Facebook or on my blog. In recent weeks, my Twitter posting has started to pick up again, but even on Twitter (my social media safe space, believe it or not) I was absolutely silent for several weeks.
I just didn’t have anything to say.
Nothing I read particularly inspired me to write or respond.
I suppose it was just a general numbness.
You see on the 20th of March, 2017, my Dad died.
He had lived with incurable bone cancer for more than 8 years, out-living every life expectancy prediction of experts and pretty much everyone else. Though nothing can take away the pain of loss, knowing that he lived his life well and kept his sense of humour in the face of pain and his diagnosis allows me to smile.
Though he had been sick for a long time, he had never let a terminal diagnosis stop him from doing what he loved. He accepted every medication recommended and dealt with every side-affect so that he could continue to not just live, but live with at least some quality of life as long as he could.
Even in the last weeks before he was forced to enter hospital, despite the increased pain he knew it would cause, Dad had gone out into his beloved vegetable garden as much as he could to nurture his vegetable plants and enjoy the plants and the birds in his backyard.
He lived his life as much as he could every day until his last.
For around a month before he died, he had been in hospital, unable to stand by himself or walk and yet finding the strength to believe that he would be able to learn to walk again and be able to see his home again.
As always, he was a force of nature in everything he did, but in the end, the last time he saw his home was as he was leaving it in an ambulance.
Just as he would never again see his home, which he built with his own hands, so too we will never again see him.
I miss him so much.
Grief manifested in me by taking away the excitement & interest I had in many things which had always been my refuge. Since Dad went into hospital back in February, my writing has been basically at a stand-still, my attention span (as well as my temper) short.
It’s only been in the past week or so that I’ve started to re-engage. Even then, I have had to force myself.
But I am back into it. I will keep doing more each day and eventually I will hopefully find my way back into full swing.
I felt I should say something about my complete absence. I suppose this is the sort of thing professional bloggers set up schedules to compensate for.
Take care everyone, I’ll be posting again soon.
— Is
So…as many of you will already know, as of late last year, I re-titled my novel to try and give the title more of a sense of what the book is about. So, the new title for my upcoming novel is:
As some of you may also know, around a year ago, I commissioned & paid for cover art to be created for the book which has become Bifrost’s Forsaken.
Trap for young players: don’t do this before you’ve completed your own edits.
Following the split of chapters back in November, the scene depicted on this original cover is no longer in the book!
So, pencilling this cover in for Book 2 (now in development), I asked the same fantastic cover artist (Xia Taptara) to create me a new cover based on one of the scenes which IS in Bifrost’s Forsaken.
I received the finished artwork for it a couple of days ago and I am SO EXCITED that I have to do just a tiny bit of a cover reveal…
I’m going to this tomorrow and I am VERY bloody excited.
Thanks, Co-Consul. You win at Xmas presents.
— IEK
Recently week Bifrost has finally tipped over 100,000 words (um…yay?), so in typical self-assessor style I decided to have a look at how many words I’d written the last time I decided to “take my writing seriously”. You know…just for comparison.
I remember it clearly, I didn’t have a writers group or critique partner (still don’t actually…um…anyone?), I didn’t have Twitter (it didn’t exist), I didn’t have Evernote (also didn’t exist), I didn’t have Scrivener or a tablet PC or even a smartphone and I reached a point where I just didn’t know what to do or where to take the novel, so I just kind of stopped.
So this morning I had a look at my wordcount spreadsheet from way-back-when…and there it was: 140,943 words.
140,943 words…AND I STOPPED!?! I need a time machine so I can go and kick past-me’s butt really, really hard. What a dope! Another 10,000 words and I have TWO ACTUAL NOVELS!!! AAAARRRRGH!!!
Now I feel like “why is it taking me so long to get to that point now?”* I had a full-time job back then, though one other thing I didn’t have back then was kids, so my level of distraction and household work was a LOT lower. Still…it kind of feels deflating after the initial excitement of reaching 100,000.
I suppose on the bright side, every word of that 140,943 is set before Bifrost starts, so when I get done with this one, a couple of prequels are going to take no time at all! (You hear that, potential publishers?)
Looking forward to the revisions on that one.
— IEK
*And why does it take me 150,000 words to reach an ending I’m happy with!?!
So many of you will have seen the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer by now. If you haven’t and you want to FOR GOODNESS SAKE – GO! NOW!
If you DON’T want to see the trailer and you live in some sort of pre-Internet spoiler-free world…um…OK, good luck and:
**SPOILER ALERT**
I was fortunate enough to be drinking coffee and checking my Twitter feed when the trailer first leaked on DailyMotion. I immediately retweeted @DailySuperhero‘s tweet because I trust those guys to have the real deal, then I watched it.
I actually need to have a double-carriage-return after even SAYING that I watched it because it was THAT exciting. There are numerous videos on YouTube now of the reaction to the trailer and I’d really quite like to see a video of my bouncing on my chair like a giddy child when the HULK-BUSTER ARMOUR came on. I genuinely lost my shit, as did a number of other fine people I know when they first saw it (thanks for the memories, dudes).
Now the trailer as a means of advertising upcoming films has been around for a long time, but I feel that its place as a genuine art form and even phenomenon has only really come about since the advent of high-speed internet and social media. The EXPLOSION of tweets, Facebook posts, blog posts* and forum threadviruses has allowed movie producers and executives to gauge the quality of their trailers immediately. I think the global reaction to the leaked trailer either forced Marvel *cough*Disney*cough*’s hand or did it’s job in convincing them that this teaser was EXACTLY on the money.
I tweeted earlier in the week that I hadn’t been this excited about a trailer since the first glimpse we all had of a dozen or so Jedis kicking some arse in the Episode II teaser back in 2001 (after the sad “love story” crap from the third teaser trailer). In fact, let’s all re-live that Jedi moment (bless the Internet)…
Ah…I know I feel better.
Anyway…what was I saying? Ah yes: arse kicking. How much did James Spader’s narration MAKE the Age of Ultron trailer? I was so looking forward to nightmares narrated by him on Thursday night. Alas, I slept well. But for the period of about the last two days, I’ve been riding a wave of excitement about how completely awesome this movie is going to be and how the fulfillment of many childhood dreams feels.
Like many magnificently energising action movie trailers, the Age of Ultron trailer had enough glimpses of devastation to hint that whatever threat the Earth was under, the Avenger would truly be needed again, showed enough of the unhinged menace of Ultron to make you realise that this big-bad would be more than worthy and gave you THE BLOODY HULK-BUSTER ARMOUR!!!! So fans of drama excited, fans of apocalyptic storylines excited and fangirls & fanboys VERY excited. It was almost the perfect trailer.
The only thing I found as a mark against it was that the scenes of devastation, the ruined, dusty cars and Cap walking between them, the scenes of crowd fleeing and screaming in terror could easily have been lifted from the first Avengers film – the scenes were just so similar (stock footage?). But I can forgive all of that VERY easily for the HULK BUS–
…Oh OK, I’ll shut up now (briefly).
— IEK
* Self reference – I WIN!
Well, I’ve finally broken Chapter 18.
It’s been a horrid slog through 17 and 18, but I’ve finally broken its back thanks to some stellar work from alcohol and #5amWriteClub I have CONQUERED THIS SHIT.
I say shit and hey, it probably is because it’s a first draft, but at least it’s done. Our good friend (whom I have probably never mentioned before) the Witch has met the love of her life (so far) and has discovered something quite unique about herself.
It’s all downhill skiing from here, right? … RIGHT!?! Well sod it – bring on Chapter 14!!!
— IEK
