Jan 9, 2024
In my post yesterday I threw in the term Galdorland and you might be wondering what that’s all about. Simply put, it’s the umbrella term for all the books set in a world I have created. Think of it like Discworld, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or Star Wars.
Galdorland is a world that is very similar to our world. So similar, in fact, that the term Galdorland is really only something I will use to refer to the universe. As far as anyone living in that world is concerned, it is still called Earth.
The big difference between our world and the world of Galdorland is that magic and monsters that we think of as myths and legends, are very real there.
I published the first books set in Galdorland about ten years ago. Since then, the possibilities for the universe I created have kept coming back to me and every now and again I sit down and try to write them. Outside of the main books I have published a couple more “side books” and a few short stories.
The trouble with publishing more, was that I was never quite sure how that world worked and it has taken me until now to make firm plans. That means there is going to be a lot of changes.
As you may know if you’ve read some of my other posts, I am currently in the process of going back through old titles and tidying them up. What I am calling “Remasters” for want of a better term. Unfortunately, a fresh round of edits and a new cover isn’t going to be enough to fix the original Galdorland books and bring them into continuity with what I am writing now. Instead, they are going to need a bit more work.
That means I will be removing the original books from sale to do the work. The new editions will be available again in the middle of the year.
I am really excited about this project. These are books and ideas that have been with me since I started writing professionally and it now seems that I am in a position to do them justice.
Jan 8, 2024
I hope you had a good holiday season. We got through it, which is about the best we hope for these days. I don’t like to dwell too much on the season, other than it being a time to hang out with family and eat some good food. There was plenty of both. Now it’s back to work and I have some exciting plans for the year ahead.
What I thought I’d do today is list the projects that I am planning to publish. The further from today’s date they get, the less fixed things are. There might be a few changes later on in the year but whatever the dates end up being, these are the books I am expecting to release in 2024.
The White Silence – February
An apocalypse story set during a long winter. This is one of four books that I will be publishing this year which were written previously and never published for whatever reason. I took the draft I had and treated it like a first draft, going through all the usual editing stuff. Most of that work was done last year and I am now in the process of getting the cover made.
Night Hunter 1, 2, & 3 – March, April, May
The first three books in an urban fantasy series. Like The White Silence, these were written a while ago, but unlike that book, I know exactly why these weren’t published. I will write about Galdorland in more detail another time, but suffice it to say for now, that these books are set in the same world as the Blood Hound series, albeit in the modern day. I have been thinking about that world for a long time and when these were written I had specific plans for what I was going to do with it. I then changed those plans and decided not to publish these. Well, the new plans never worked out so I get to publish these now.
Jessica 1, 2, & 3 – October, November, December
A second Galdorland series, set in the modern day. A story that I have been trying to write for a long time but is now finally moving forwards. I am really excited about these books. As of right now, they are the only books I plan to write and publish this year. I will have a lot more to tell you about them later on.
Short Stories – Whenever
While I get back up to speed with writing after the winter break, I am writing short stories. I started the first one this morning. I am not sure what I’ll do with them yet. There doesn’t seem to be much of a market for short stories. More than likely I will send them out to mailing list subscribers, so if you haven’t already signed up and you would like to read the short stories, now would be a good time.
There is loads more going on at the moment, but I want to keep this post focused on the books I will be publishing. More news to come.
Dec 14, 2023
I have a natural inclination towards orderliness. I like everything to have its place and to put things away where they belong when I have finished with them. On my computer everything is neatly filed away in the correct folder and the desk where I write is arranged so that it doesn’t get cluttered. It gives me a sense of peace to work in an orderly environment.
For years, I have tried to write in an orderly manner, but I am coming to the conclusion that the process is inherently messy. Ideally, I want a system that I can follow each time, which should generate minimal debris. The way I have set that up is to plan stories using Goodnotes on my iPad, then using the plan I come up with there to write the first draft in Scrivener, to then export as a PDF, so I can do the edits on my iPad again and then type them up and the whole thing should be neat and easily contained.
That’s not how it works, though. Every time I try, I find myself compelled to get out pads of paper to make notes there rather than on my iPad. I jump back and forth between paper, Goodnotes and Obsidian.
It used to frustrate me, but I am coming to the conclusion that doing that isn’t a failure in my process, it is the process. Switching from one medium to another (even between two that are pretty much the same) is where the story comes alive. There is no way to systemize this process and there is no point looking for a single tool I can do everything in.
Planning a story is a messy process, I guess, and I just have to make my peace with the piles of paper that litter my desk. They aren’t a sign of failure, but of a system that has evolved naturally over the years.
Dec 12, 2023
When Jude died, life felt impossible. There are entire months of time that I can barely remember. Somehow, we got the important things done; Oscar went to school, we ate, we slept. We had a lot of help. We watched a lot of television.
The television we watched was mostly old stuff that we’d seen a dozen times before. It was comfort food. One thing I remember watching was Friends. It was a good show to watch because nothing about it was too serious and we had both grown up watching it as kids, so it was familiar. There were a good number of episodes, so we didn’t have to think about what to watch next. Just start it on Netflix and let it keep going until we started falling asleep in the evening.
It was also the first time I realized I had a problem with endings. Not just me, either. Without needing to discuss it, neither Tamzin nor I wanted to watch the last episode of friends and have it end. I have noticed the same thing with books and other television shows.
The books I read tended to be things that went on for a long time. I started re-reading the Discworld books, and even now I haven’t finished the series. It is just there, unfinished.
You don’t need to be a psychologist to realize why endings were such a problem for us; we had just dealt with the ultimate untimely ending and the idea of anything else finishing was hard to handle. Plus, there was no need for us to handle it. No one cared whether we watched the last episode of Friends. It didn’t matter whether I read the last few Discworld books.
There is one place where it does matter, though; my writing. If I can’t end a story, then I don’t really have a story. I quickly found that I did still have the desire to write (which surprised me, in the early days I had assumed I would never write again) but couldn’t bring myself to finish any of the stories I wrote.
It took me a long time to get over that, and along the way I found other ways to get the comfort I desperately needed from books that I was reading and books that I was writing. But it still isn’t easy.
Endings are tough.
Dec 11, 2023
Maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems as if there is a fundamental difference in the way we think about books and other mediums. The longer a book series goes on, the smaller the readership. It feels as if we have accepted that each new installment will only appeal to a percentage of the readers who liked the previous book.
On the surface, that makes sense, but we don’t think that way about other things.
No one is suggesting they should stop making Star Wars or Marvel films because they will only appeal to a few existing fans! No one expects viewers of Doctor Who to have watched 60 years’ worth of stories.
In film and, to a lesser extent, television, we view each new entry in the series as a potential entry point for new fans, but I rarely see books talked about in the same way.
There are reasons for this. Films are more self-contained; you can watch the latest super hero film without having seen all the others leading up to it because all the relevant information will be explained. I don’t feel so confident about picking up the latest in a book series.
So then is it because of the way we write books we expect each new edition to sell worse than the one before? To an extent, and if that’s the case, then can we overcome it? I think so.
The only long-running series I can think of that doesn’t have this problem is Discworld. You could jump in at any point in the 41 book series and enjoy the story. That is largely down to the brilliance of Terry Pratchett, but also because the stories themselves are self-contained, like films are.
As I begin the process of re-launching my series with new titles and remastered editions of old books, I’m looking at these lessons closely. I want each book, or sub-series, to be something that anyone could pick up and read. Sure, you will get more out of it if you read them all, but they should be accessible to all. And as I think about that, it seemed interesting that the best lessons for how to do it are contained in films and television, rather than books.
Dec 7, 2023
It started off as an idea for a television show about a super hero called Champion. I came up with that while I was at college, so around the year 2000. It was a pretty good idea, highly influenced by the Tim Burton Batman films and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I produced a lot of notes and plans for it, and then, because I was dreaming big, I came up with an idea for a spin-off that would be set 150 years before.
The spin-off, was called Blood Hound and that went through various incarnations before ending up as a quartet of books that were published in 2018. Which seemed to be the end of it, but the idea didn’t go away.
In the years since then, I have written other books set in the same world, some in the Blood Hound era, some in the modern era. Some were published, others have not been yet. The idea kept growing and I started thinking that I should rewrite the whole thing with all the new information and ideas. I made some notes on that as well, but it didn’t get very far.
Now I once again find myself working on a story set in Otherland, which is the name I’ve given to all the titles set in this universe. This new story is set in the modern world, which is very similar to our world, except there is magic and monsters in it.
I have written a lot of stories but it is rare that a world sticks with me the way this one has done. There are a lot more stories to tell about it, and I’m excited for this new era. There are going to be some changes to the existing stories, nothing major, just a few names and things that need to be updated to bring them inline with one another.
The first new releases are a series I wrote a while ago and never published. Currently called Night Hunter. That’s almost done and should come out in March 2024. There are three books, with more to follow. Then it’s the new series that I’m starting now.
This world is not done with me yet.
