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Blog Tours: an explanation
Last week I was at a meeting at Writing West Midlands. I was asked to explain blog tours because some of the people present weren’t familiar with them. I’m quite sure I didn’t do the subject full justice, so I thought I’d write a brief blog about the experiences that I’ve had with them. A blog…
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Baby’s Fantasycon 2018
Baby got back from Fantasycon in Chester, very happy to have mingled with old friends and new. Here is Baby’s account, as written up by Heide. Friday Baby and I arrived in Chester just after 3pm on Friday afternoon. Friday was our busy day, so I went to the bar to look for the other…
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Writing conventions to get excited about
What’s the collective noun for a whole load of writers? It’s a convention – yay! The fun times during the year when lots of genre writers get together to exchange best practice and sing bad karaoke. It has dawned on me recently that we have a slew of fabulous events on the horizon, so I…
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Creepy Dolls (and how this one demanded to have stories written about it)
The Uncanny Valley You may have come across the concept of the “uncanny valley”. This is the strangeness that humans perceive when something is very close to resembling a human, but isn’t quite right. The reason for it being described as a valley is because our acceptance of human-like forms goes up and up as…
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What price research?
Heide and I are currently working on third and fourth books in the Oddjobs series. If you’ve not read them (and you can get the first one HERE) then we should explain that they’re comedy horror novels about the government employees who have to manage upcoming apocalypse and were described by a recent reviewer as…
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The Virtual Reality Book Trailer – Simon Fairbanks gives it a test drive…
We met up with indie author, Simon Fairbanks, at the Edge-Lit genre fiction event in Derby last weekend and we showed him our new Virtual Reality Book Trailer. He was so impressed, we asked him to do a guest blog to describe his experiences… Edge-Lit surpassed my very high expectations: charming authors, fascinating workshops, and…
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The power of local services: 4 things that can work locally
We recently blogged about micronations. If you’re not quite ready to set up an entire new country, you might want to dip your toe in the water by declaring independence for your local area in a more targeted way, perhaps with local services. Today we’re looking at some of the fascinating ways that areas of…
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Set up your own micronation for fun and profit!
We live, as the Chinese allegedly say, in “interesting times” or as internet memes would have it, in that bit of history labelled in school textbooks as ‘Factors Leading Up To…’ and followed by a section which involves maps with lots of red arrows. In such times, it’s only natural for people to want to…
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Has humorous fiction lost its fizz?
Where are all the funny books? It’s apparently a question being asked by the judges of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize (the only prize in the UK for comedy novels) as they have decided not to award the prize for 2018 because none of the entries was funny enough. Can it really be true that there…
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Talking about Genres – Who cares about genres?
Writers, publishers and readers talk about genre a lot. It’s how bookshops decide where a book belongs. It’s used to draw up charts, award prizes and produce those “If you liked this book, you might also like…” messages on-line retailers send us. Pigeon Park Press asked a number of published authors whether we need genre…