Military Fiction
Category: short stories
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Inchoate is finally published in Urdu
I am over-the-moon to announce that Inchoate, my science fiction story about a time-traveling paleontological investigator, is now available FREE and in Urdu. My deepest and sincerest thanks go out to Atiya Adil, a teacher, for undertaking this huge task and seeing it through to its conclusion. It is extremely satisfying to see this project come to fruition after such a long period of sustained effort.
I have long wanted to provide a free and representative sample of my work to people in Asia and the Middle East, of whom I seem to have many followers (I have more followers in Cairo than any other city and more followers in India than any country other than the UK and USA). I frequently see mountain-loads of downloads in these countries during my free promotions so I know the readers are there and I also know that getting online credit to buy books, let alone having the outlet to buy them, is not easy there. Now, these readers should be have both.
Below is just a short excerpt from the Urdu version. Continue reading “Top Quality Science Fiction in Urdu?”
This week Memories of the 1960s – Toys, Books Available on Wattpad, Free Giveaway and Honorary Cliff Robertson Documentary
I had several nice comments about Issue I so here is another:
TV programmes
Most people will remember the two most prominent aspects of 1960s TV; no colour and the dreaded test cards!
Colour television didn’t arrive in the UK until 1967 (BBC2) and late 1969 (BBC1 and ITV). There were some early test programmes on BBC2 and I think I remember one featuring a carnival. My father designed television cameras for a living so we were the first family I knew to have a TV set that could receive and display colour. I remember the riot of ultra-vivid colour blasting out of the screen. It seemed to completely transform the world. There were of course hiccups. Many people turned the colour button up to full, which made greens and red so bright that you would quickly get a headache. Paul McCartney had been assured that the Magical Mystery Tour would be broadcast in colour on Boxing Day 1967. But BBC1 still had not made the transition to colour so he was to be disappointed. Continue reading “Lazlo Ferran: Memories of the 1960s – TV”
Egypt or any part of Africa through Kobobooks.com, I am told. I need somebody in Egypt to test this.
http://store.kobobooks.com/en-gb/Search?Query=lazlo+ferran
nb: you will have to convert the book to .mobi using a free software programme called Calibra if you want to read them using a Kindle device.
If you have problems let me know by commenting or emailing me so that I can send you a workaround.
You can always find details of availability and updates on the Catalogue page of this website.
If you live in Egypt please can you test the Kobobooks source and get back to me?
This week, first of my new OCD updates and FREE eBook Offer: Eighteen, Blue
OCD Log 1
To make it easier to find my updates on OCD, I am starting from today to name them Log 1, 2 etc. Too often, these posts might get lost among other subjects and I am aware there are many sufferers out there.
In my last OCD update, I announced my first OCD-Free day. It was really just an experiment and I didn’t expect it to work. But it seems to have worked.
OCD-Free is a strong term however. I think it would be more accurate to say that I have ‘broken the back of my OCD’ or ‘turned a corner’. The OCD is still there; every day I catch myself doing something that I call ‘OCD behaviour’. I just stop myself, say, “That is OCD behaviour. I am not going to do that,” and then ignore the impulse. Continue reading “OCD Log 1”
This week: OCD Update, special offers and: How do you market your books?
OCD Update
I am proud to announce that today is my first OCD-FREE day of this year (and for about 20 years for that matter!). It is probably just an exercise but if it works I will stick to it.
Basically I woke up this morning, took a long, hard look at things and decided I didn’t have time for the OCD any more. Anyway, my fear of getting fatal diseases (like AIDs for instance) simply haven’t come true, probably because I have been very careful. For whatever reason, now seems a good time to try this. I already feel I have burned my bridges somewhat so there may not be any way back in the short term.
No doubt, my mind will try to take over and my ‘OCD-self’ will try to gain the upper hand so watch this space. But if you don’t hear any more about my OCD, then I am free of it. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed. Continue reading “My special offers this week and: How do you market your books?”
I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of translation services on the internet and the quality of those that do exist. For some time I have been gaining a disproportionately large number of fans in Egypt and India. I don’t know why this is, but that’s hardly the point. If these people are interested in me, then I want to publish something that is easy for them to read. In other words I want to publish in their languages: Urdu and Arabic.
You are probably thinking; what’s the point? If they understand English then they can read it and if not, why bother? Well, I just feel that they deserve it!
Until now I have used Google Translate – http://translate.google.com for twitter and Facebook posts. It’s okay for short posts but as everyone probably knows by now, it’s not great. If you have ever received spam from a fake Russian girl looking for a boyfriend you will know what I mean. The result is a sort of gobble-de-gook; a soup of phrases that overlap each other and mean little. I recently tried to translate a tweet into Chinese and then translate it back to see how good/bad it was. I had to make several attempts before I could get anything that retained even the basic meaning of what I was saying! Continue reading “How can I get my stories into Arabic, Urdu and other languages for my fans?”
This week: An interview with Jake Nanden from the Iron Series and: Where could vampires have come from?
Where could vampires have come from?
I am not going to say here whether vampires exist or not; that is a question I might never find an answer to. But where could they have come from if they do exist? That is an interesting question.
Funnily enough, since the beginning of man’s history, vampires have been seen to be some kind of ‘elite’. They are even idealised versions of humans in some stories. Recently this thought has played on my mind a lot.
It would seem logical to assume that the natural suspicion working and middle-class people feel for royalty and nobility might naturally lead to attribution to them of ‘unnatural powers’. I don’t think this is a modern trend and might have even been more prevalent in the age when Royalty was seen to be mandated by God to rule
Vlad III, known posthumously as Vlad the Impaler because of his cruelty, was just one such ruler. His first name, Dragwlya, is the origin of the modern name Dracula and Vlad is most likely the source of the legend of Dracula – a fiend who drank blood. Continue reading “Where could vampires have come from?”
This week: The Moon, Shape-changers and Consciousness – what is the truth?
The Moon, Shape-changers and Consciousness – what is the truth?
I recently started a discussion group around the concepts in my Ordo Lupus series. You can find the group here and I invite you to join. I am planning a pure Vampire novel as a follow up to this series and I want to try to understand further how shape-changing has become buried so deeply in our consciousness and explore whether it actually exists in humans.
Notice how I carefully say ‘humans’, for it certainly exists in other animals. Look at butterflies, moths and flies for instance. The crysalis stage is a fascinating example of metamorphosis in nature. Continue reading “The Moon, Shape-changers and Consciousness – what is the truth?”
Lazlo Ferran | Vampire, Werewolf and Sci-fi Books 