This week: OCD update and Hot off the Press: an extract from my forthcoming sci-fi novel Worlds like Dust, about replicants in a battle to save Earth.
OCD Update
I finished my course of therapy over a month ago but that is not where the treament ends. My therapist recommended a great book for me – The OCD Workbook: Your Guide to Breaking Free from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. There is a scheme in the USA and now in the UK to get copies of this from your library. It’s called Books on Prescription so go to your library and find out about the scheme, if you need the book. I can recommend it. A link to this book will be available from now on if you go to my OCD page.
I managed the first few chapters without difficulty over the last 2 weeks but when it came to ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) I hit a barrier. My belief that something bad will happen is way higher than the book accepts as practical for this exercise. Too bad they only told me that after I did the exercise. Ha! Ha! The book recommends a limit of 70% and I am 90%. Continue reading “Will replicants inherit the Earth?”→
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?”→
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?”→
Occult, Sci-fi & Military 