Monthly Update...

First of all, progress on 'Battle of Hercules' is good; I'm past the half-way stage now, and pushing hard for the finish line. I hope to have the first draft finished by Sunday, get it out to the beta readers and then get cracking on the required changes...with a little luck, it should be on sale by the end of the month, maybe a little bit sooner. I think this probably has the most action of any book I've written.

It's been an interesting process, this time, because I'm actually putting in specifics about the Cabal. Obviously, I know what it is, but I've had the ability to make tweaks and changes over the last year or so, without contradicting anything in the books – now, over this and the next two books, the Cabal really features directly a lot more strongly as Alamo goes toe-to-toe with them, and having to make a host of final decisions has been fun. Specifically, I'm having to map it properly, and that isn't even quite finished yet – I keep making tweaks...

This blog has been...less than I would have liked it to be thus far, and I think I've expressed that in the past. I think it is partly because I haven't really worked out, thus far, what it is and what I want it to be, and so...that's something I need to fix. I guess what I want to do is to provide some sort of insight – for my own benefit as much as anyone else – into how I do what I do. How I work, where I draw ideas and inspiration from, and analysis of same.

There is an obvious 'in' for me with this, and that is...reading. I do a thundering lot of it, there are times when I average a book a day, all of it to support the idea mines required for Alamo and other works. I have a tremendous backlog of books to get through of late, to the point that I'm imposing a moratorium to myself to buying more for a while until I get down the pile a bit. To structure things a little, I'm going to work out a theme for each month, and try and stick to them – and naturally, discuss them in this blog. My goal is, really, to learn, to absorb material for my own future work.

This month, the theme is going to be one of my big heroes – Lin Carter. If any one man can be said to have kindled the fantasy genre, this is he; while his skills as a writer have been questioned, there is no doubt at all that he brought a lot of fantasy novels to wide attention, including the Lord of the Rings, for heaven's sake! He was an extremely prolific writer, and one always gets the sense when reading his books that he was having fun with his work, that he was doing exactly what he wanted to do. Naturally a month is woefully insufficient to cover him, but I can certainly make a good crack at it. I'm definitely covering the Thongor series, as well as the recently released 'Young Thongor', as well as Imaginary Worlds (which I'm reading for the first time, I only just managed to get hold of a copy!) and a few of his anthologies...

Naturally, my reading won't entire focus on one topic for the whole month, so other bits and pieces are going to creep in...frankly – I just plan on doing more posts!