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Showing posts from April, 2019

Writing Again (and I'm done with themed anthologies)

Following a minor bout of cancer (featuring surgeries and 6 months of chemotherapy), I'm writing again! Having spent some time reviewing my writing career to date, I note with a degree of dismay that while I've had some material published, I'm not super happy with all of it. In the past I've pandered to the whims of the industry in order to get stories out. Well, I'm done with that. Now I'm writing what I want to write. No more < 5,000 word stories about "blue aliens on exoplanets", simply because a publisher somewhere decided that's what they wanted for their next anthology. I know it may seem a little hypocritical, given that I helped come up with the theme of A Hand of Knaves (and I stand by it), but I'm allowed to be hypocritical if the mood takes me. And the mood does take me.  From now on I'm writing whatever the hell I want. It might not get published, but it'll be mine and I think I'll be a lot happier with that.  Let...
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A Hand of Knaves on Ballot for a Ditmar Award!

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The title of this post says it all. My writing's been given mentions in "best of"s" and I've had the odd award here and there, but my work's never been nominated for a Ditmar award, so this is new for me. Which isn't to say A Hand of Knaves is all "my work". It's an anthology containing the work of plenty of people, but Leife and I planned the theme, read and selected the stories, and edited them as best we could to come up with the final product - which also contains artwork from Shauna O'meara that just happens to be nominated in the Artwork category (so we're winning all 'round). Congratulations to everyone involved with A Hand of Knaves and thanks to everyone who voted us into the ballot. As I've only ever considered myself a writer, it's strange to have something I've edited up for a national award. Strange, but AWESOME!!! Go AHOK!
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Marvel's Spider-Man PS4

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Wow. Just, wow! I had reservations about buying Marvel's Spider-Man for PS4 when I first heard tell of its development by Insomniac Games. Never, ever, ever , have I taken to a superhero game for PC or console. Even the recent Batman games were - for me at least - a soulless button-mashing exercise in kicking and punching bad guys into submission with little-to-no story or motive above the generic satisfaction derived from kicking ass. Marvel's Spider-Man has changed the way I look at superhero games. Insomniac has managed to inject story into Peter Parker's journey, but more than that, they created a series of narrative sequences that really motivated me to want to come back time after time to unravel more of Peter's tangled web of relationships. Sure there were predictable back-stabs and double-crosses from (mild spoiler alert) the likes of Dr Octavius and co. But because aspects of Peter's relationships with other characters were so strong, I found myself...
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