Category Archives: The Green Man

Aiming High Part 2: Failure = New Information

Last week I worked through the idea of trying to capture one’s aspirations with as much detail as you can bear. The justification being that specific objectives enable one to create a useful plan or map of how to reach those objectives. The alternative is a sort of fuzzy goal that may or may notContinue reading “Aiming High Part 2: Failure = New Information”

Aiming High Part 1: Write For The Stars

I made the conscious decision to make a serious go at writing around about ten years ago, during a holiday with my wife (then fiancée), and set about pulling together an epic fantasy that was pretty much 100% ideation, and 0% planning. I had no idea how I was going to approach the task, soContinue reading “Aiming High Part 1: Write For The Stars”

Agency: Not Just For Characters

One word which crops up time and again among writers’ groups is agency. You gotta make sure your characters have agency. Your characters can be good, bad, ugly, beautiful, have a myriad of character tics, discourse markers and fascinating mannerisms, but without agency, they’re just cardboard cutouts, shadows of what they could and should be.

It Takes A Village To Raise A Book

It’s been almost a week since Chris and I went official with our announcement of the Official SFF Chronicles Podcast (which reminds me; we will definitely be working on a snappier name for it…) and the response has been overwhelmingly positive so far. One of the initial reasons I had for wanting to do aContinue reading “It Takes A Village To Raise A Book”

Rejection Doesn’t Define You

How many people reading this have submitted a novel manuscript to a literary agent? More to the point I wonder how many people have received rejections? In fact, scrap that. Forget about writing and submitting manuscripts to an agent. How many people have been rejected for anything, ever? A job, a business proposal, a grant,Continue reading “Rejection Doesn’t Define You”

Literature Long Read: The Parable Of Nehushtan, The Bronze Snake

A lot of the background research for my novel The Green Man has involved reading The Bible. That’s perhaps unsurprising given that the story is about a group of Benedictine, Franciscan, and Dominican monks from the 14th century. One of the Biblical stories that I ended up using as a reference point in TGM isContinue reading “Literature Long Read: The Parable Of Nehushtan, The Bronze Snake”

Confirmation Bias: The Green Man Problem

I’ve made some very encouraging headway in completing the first draft of my third novel, The Green Man, a speculative historical fiction set in 14th century England. As such it’s quite a dramatic departure from Man O’War and The Hole In The Sky. The differences are in one sense quite plain with respect to theContinue reading “Confirmation Bias: The Green Man Problem”