I just got delivery of a paperback copy. What a crazy feeling to see the real thing, the printed thing, in my hand. In the acknowledgement section at the back of the book I thanked a lot of people, including the two editors who helped me along the path from early draft to the finished story, and all my Beta readers, but there are a few others I should thank. First, I should thank my daughter Kate...
Clouds overhead and rain is falling, and what the Beaufort Scale would call a gentle breeze is blowing in Kensington right now. It’s been that way through the whole morning here, and through much of last night. It’s not a heavy rain, just rain. But I woke in the dark to the sound of rain on my roof, and spattering my windows. It’s OK. I like rain. And it’s now exactly one week until the official...
Eleven days. Eleven, eleven, eleven. But don’t think about that. Put that aside. Let’s see… One thing leads to another, you know? For example: my MacBook Pro did an odd thing yesterday morning. When I lifted the laptop lid the screen remained black. It was alive under the blackness; I know this because it successfully drove two external monitors, and they looked fine. Unfortunately, the...
One of the purposes of this social media involvement is shameless self-promotion in pursuit of book sales. Of course. Hardly needs saying, right? So, in pursuit of this purpose, I will tell you about Netgalley. Netgalley is a website where books are read and reviewed by book advocates and book industry insiders, and The Téuta’s Child is available to members there as an Advance Review Copy...
These author sites I’ve created remind me to live in the deep past, where my book is set. That’s good, but sometimes strange. Last night, without leaving my home office, I was teaching an economics class at a high school in Hong Kong nearly halfway around the planet. It was 10 PM for me and 10 AM for the students when the class started. It’s become so common that it’s tedious to point out how...
In the banner above, just under my name, is a sequence of mysterious symbols. I think I should explain them a little. They have an ancient feel which makes them seem appropriate for the book I am just publishing, which is set in the Neolithic, and that, of course, is why they are up there, but they’re not just random artsy squiggles. There’s a reason they feel ancient: they are ancient...
This is a first effort at a first post on this page, the page devoted to my life as an author of fiction, an author of novels. At the moment it’s lonely here. Authorship—at least of the first novel—is in the past, but publication is still in the future.It’s a novel I never expected when I sat down to write. It’s set a bit over 8000 years ago, which is odd, for me. I’m not an archeologist, or an...