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I finished the first draft of ‘Dead Snow’ on New Year’s Eve 2016 – that’s exactly one year after finishing ‘An End of Beginnings’! I’m now at the embellishing/polishing/formatting stage and am aiming to publish in 2 months’ time. Although this novel was ‘completed’ 1 year after AEOB, the writing only really got going inContinue reading “Completed the first draft of ‘Dead Snow’…”

I run a small website on the internet to promote my writing and share free stories. In the past 2 weeks I have seen a significant increase in hacking attempts by criminals trying to take control of the site. They are seeking admin passwords, worpdress passwords, passing carefully constructed PHP strings, attempting to download vulnerableContinue reading “Website under siege…”

Writing of my next novel, ‘Dead Snow’, is going very well and I hope to complete the first draft by New Year’s Eve. It is a coincidence that my first book, ‘An End of Beginnings’ was completed on New Year’s Eve 2015. That one took 5 years to complete – this one will have takenContinue reading ““DEAD SNOW” – progress update”

  My latest blog update is about creating well-written characters – see http://tinyurl.com/obnp33o Good fiction stories are about people, not places or things. They give relief from our normal lives and enable us to have other experiences through our imaginations. Well-written characters can come to have a special meaning for us at an emotional levelContinue reading “Writer’s blog – “Keeping control of your characters…””

At Christmas 1975 I was given a copy of “The Sun annual for Boys” – it led with an article called “Vikings in Space” about the 2 Viking spacecraft that were being sent to Mars. That article kick-started my interest in Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science Fiction – here’s a great image and article fromContinue reading “Viking Landers on Mars – 1976”

We are living in an age of technological miracles! – Watch this video from ESA of the Philae lander’s descent to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko at    Philae’s descent: The director’s cut   

Many people either simply don’t know that they can load other free books onto an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, or they are too worried about trying in case they ‘break something’. That is a shame because the Kindles can read .mobi format e-books very well, presenting them from the reader’s perspective in the same wayContinue reading “How to load .mobi books onto Kindle e-readers…”

Between 24th April 1955 to 9th January 1958, NBC broadcast a series of half-hour sci-fi radio stories under the title “X-Minus One”. These were small-cast productions, not just a narrator reading out loud, and the quality is often pretty good. The collection includes some classic stories from well known writers and I have 3 particularContinue reading ““X-Minus 1 radio dramas…””

My latest video blog update is about the use of Texture in fiction writing: Video blog on using Texture in fiction writing Short video blog about the use of Texture in fiction writing youtube.com

To quote BSG – “… Life here began out there…” http://www.sciencemag.org/news/sifter/rosetta-finds-ingredients-life-comet The Rosetta orbiter has detected some of the molecular building blocks for life on a comet, bolstering the theory that life on Earth could have been seeded by a small solar system body sciencemag.org