Category: FICTION

How to get my stories into Arabic or Urdu?

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 to get my stories into Arabic or Urdu?” →

Where could vampires have come from?

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?” →

Should your main character have flaws?

This week: Sneak Preview, news about an Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate promotion and: Why should your main character have flaws?

Why should your main character have flaws?
All of my main character (and thus protagonists) have flaws. In my earlier books I think it was just instinct that led me to this. In fact you could argue that for James Brennan in The Man Who Recreated Himself and King Vaslav in Infinite Blue Heaven the question of whether they are flawed or not is the main theme examined in the novels. James is perhaps naive and Vaslav is perhaps sexually weak, being a willing participant in incest, something not uncommon in the 17th century. In The Ice Boat, which is my first novel completed, it’s very obvious that David Dee is flawed; naive and confused by life. Physically he is in good health however, as are the other two characters mentioned. Continue reading “Should your main character have flaws?” →