Loins being girded!

Or maybe lions being girded. Can you gird a lion, and is it any more effective than girding a loin? Does sound like it might be quite dangerous.
Anyway...
It's almost NaNoWriMo time again, and once more I find myself trying to put together a novel plan that I will almost certainly end up ignoring within the first two hundred words. So it always seems to go but I swear I'm going to try and stick to the plan this time. Really.

My novel this time is tentatively called Ironheart and that is all I'm telling you for now. Sorry, I'm a terrible tease! It should be good though, I hope. 
I think I'm going to let people read what I've done each day, probably in a Google doc, a bit like I'm doing on the Live Writing page (which I swear I haven't given up on, by the way, I just got distracted and kind of forgot about it. I will write that story one day, I vow it).
As long as you all promise to buy it when I finally release it!

In other news, I'm desperately trying not to suck at marketing (and failing, by and large) - to that end, allow me to mention that Heroes Wanted, my hilarious (I think so anyway) fantasy adventure, is available for pre-order for $2.99 and will be released on 19th of December. Hit the link below!

CLICK ME!

I'm also going to do Movember. Which means that the extensive facial fuzz that currently adorns my ugly mug will have to removed. All of it. The world will see a sight not seen since 1995, my chin (seriously, I've been a bearded idiot for nigh on 20 years) - I'm not sure you're all ready for that. I might video the removal for posterity.
I'm going to donate half the profits from the sales of Crystal Eyes during November (which might very well amount to sweet FA but it's the thought that counts, right?) to the Movember charity.
Note: since Crystal Eyes is just 99 cents I only get 35% from Amazon. Thought it was worth making that clear in case you all rush out and buy it (which you should totally do) and you end up wondering why the donation amount isn't as much as you might have thought.

Woah!!

It's been how long since I last updated this? I am a bad, bad man!
I honestly hadn't realised so much time had passed since I last posted anything.
So...how have you been?

What have I been up to? Well, I finished the first draft of my sequel to Crystal Eyes, and then wrote another entirely unrelated book (both of these will be out in 2015). I've also been tinkering and tweaking and generally dicking about with Heroes Wanted.
It's time to let go of that, however. For better or worse, I hereby declare myself to be done with Heroes Wanted. It is time to set it free. To be more precise, it will be time to set it free on Friday the 19th of December! Yep, that's the release date, but it will be available to pre-order from, well, now actually.
Behold, links!
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Smashwords
iTunes

More to follow!

And I heartily encourage you to pre-order it because every pre-order sale is counted as occurring on the release date, which in turn gives it a higher chance of increasing its visibility on places like the Amazon charts.
By the way, if you're a book reviewer, run a book review blog or anything like that, drop me a line and I'll send you a free copy.

I've also permanently reduced the price of my first novel, Crystal Eyes, to just 99 cents (or the local equivalent)!

In other news, I've added a new short story to the website - a piece of World of Warcraft fan-fiction called The Last Farm In Lordaeron. 
I've also added a gallery of the sketches I've been doing for Inktober.
I'm also in the process of trying to arrange a house move and gearing up for this year's NaNoWriMo. It's possible that by the end of this year I may just collapse into a heap on the floor, and not just because of too much wine.

So that was 2013, eh?

Greetings, one and all, on this, the final day of 2013!

Hope all of you out there have had a good year!

As for me...it's been eventful. I've sold a house, moved to the Lake District, finished polishing up Heroes Wanted, ran a KickStarter (unsuccessfully) to get Heroes Wanted edited, started the sequel to Crystal Eyes, scrapped what I'd written and started again, finished the sequel to Crystal Eyes, started my Live Writing experiment, wrote the first 50,000 words of a new story for NaNoWriMo, and finally set up paperback versions of Crystal Eyes on Amazon's CreateSpace program. 

And for 2014...
Finally get Heroes Wanted published, either by a publisher or just by me, polish up and publish the sequel to Crystal Eyes, find somewhere else to live and a way of earning money (you could buy my books, or get your friends to, that'd help a huge amount - just saying!).
Work more on promotional type stuff because generally I have sucked at that. Going to try and build up my twitter following, "build my brand" or whatever the marketing types say.
Do more video content stuff - I've been trying to do a short, daft film but the technicalities are defeating me at the moment (lighting green screens, man, harder than you think).
More Live Writing - need to finished the steampunk story I've already got going and I'm going to try and do a live short story at least once a month, like the one I did for Halloween, with a video stream and multiple drinks! Keep an eye on my twitter feed for that!

That's it for now, hope you all have a great 2014 and that it brings you all that you could hope for.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

What, Christmas time already?

I swear we just had one of those. Anyway, hello, brave traveller, and welcome to another brain splurge from the depths of my, for the want of a better word, mind.

NaNoWriMo has been and gone - this is basically all I think about during November and other stuff that would probably be a lot more useful gets shunted back. But it's done now, I got my 50,000 words done of a fantasy novel that could be pretty epic - there's a long way to go on it yet so you'll not be seeing it for a fair while.
Well done to everyone who took part in this year's NaNo, and congratulations to everyone who hit their target!

The continuing saga of Heroes Wanted. I got my report back from the editor I hired - overall they liked it, found it funny, but they had some good feedback for me as well. My current focus is polishing it up based on what they said to try and get it into a publishable state. If I can get it done by the end of December then I might take a punt at sending in to Angry Robot's open submissions. We shall see!

I've made a tentative start on going over my first draft of the sequel to Crystal Eyes but that's taking a back seat to Heroes Wanted (I will get that thing out if it bloody kills me - it's been at least a year of trying by now!).
In related news, I'm setting up Crystal Eyes on Amazon's CreateSpace print on demand service. It's not quite ready to go yet but I've got a proof copy - something very cool about seeing a physical manifestation of your work like that. As nice as an eBook is there's still something ephemeral about it.
So, if you've been thinking "Oh man, I'd love to read this cool sci-fi book but I don't have an eReader", well then I've got you covered. Or will have in the next few days...just in time for Christmas, in fact! It would make the perfect gift.

A thick, inanimate object...holding up a book!

WooooOOOoOOOooo

Happy Halloween!
That's right, it's the time of year when people can legitimately dress up in funky (and possibly sexy) costumes without people looking at them askance! Also a fine excuse to eat too many sweets, drink too much Halloween themed alcohol and watch ropey horror films.
I also made a Halloween Baking video for your delectation, in which I make pumpkin bread (see the bottom of this post for the video).
 

But, more important than any daft holiday, tonight is NaNoWriMo eve - tomorrow the challenge begins!
30 days. 50,000 words. An unreasonable amount of coffee...
Let's do this! 

I hope there are plenty of you joining me this year so we can encourage/mock each other - here's a link to my profile! 
I am almost totally unprepared. Again. This is becoming something of a tradition.

That's it for now. Good luck to all the other NaNoWriMoers and a happy Halloween to everyone! 

Allen.