I've been reading fantasy fiction since I read Victor Kelleher and The Hobbit when I was about 10. I read everything else as well (no, literally, everything - my project for grade 7 was to read every book on the grade-7-only shelves) but I knew I liked that zany stuff. I fell irrevocably into all-fantasy-all-the-time when I discovered the genre as ( Read more... )

When I began writing Boralos in 2003, my father had just completed his first course of treatment (radiation therapy, from memory) for his cancer. The treatment was successful, he went into remission, he was vibrant and healthy; we all got on with life ( Read more... )

The hacking 50k words out of Boralos is still underway, having been interrupted by various pesky excrescences of real life. I'm about six chapters from the end (of sixty chapters), and looking like being about 130k words by the time I'm finished. That's slightly less than I was asked to cut out (50 rather than 60k) but I'm pretty happy with it as a ( Read more... )

Last week, I got a response from an agent I queried last year. This, in and of itself, was sort of spiffy, since I was batting at about 60% cricket-chirping silence in response to Boralos queries. As a (big) bonus, it was a "I really like your writing voice, but..." response. I've been getting quite a few of those. But I can't sell single-volume ( Read more... )