Stephen Deas's Blog, page 11

Book Giveaway: Orc War-Fighting Manual (21/10/2013)

Another week in which not a lot got done. My second Bulldog Drummond novella for Piqwiq got drafted and I’m just about recovered from the great iPhone-rain interface disaster. A lot of the last two weeks and a good chunk of this week is going to be filled with trying to choose a secondary school. I suspect I speak for a lot of parents when I say that I don’t really want all this choice – I just want the local school to be a damn good one and for that to be all there is to it. It also occurs to me that there is surely a viable commercial venture in a website for people to whinge about really dumbass drivers. Had some peaches yesterday, people jumping the queue at temporary traffic lights into a single-file stretch of road only to then find the lights were red, jump those too and then end up blocking the one lane through the roadworks. And I guess that one dick per day is tolerable random background noise but several people did this. So if you were in Stratford on Sunday and waiting for ages and ages at a set of temporary lights, I’m sorry about the dickheads.

This week’s giveaway is the Orcish War-Fighting Manual by Den Patrick. My last regular gaming character was an orc so i have a soft spot for this.

Usual deal – comment on this post before October 28th  and I’ll randomly select a lucky victims for a free copy of the book. This week, your challenge is to either vent some spleen about bad drivers, expound an Orcish approach to dealing with some of life’s problems or, for extra points[1], both at once.

Although, though no one has yet complained about how long it takes me to get to the post office and post things, it can take a while and if you live abroad then it can take even longer. Sorry about that, but they do get there eventually. Well, so far. Recent winners, I have a backlog again.

[1] Extra points not guaranteed to actually mean anything.

Book Giveaway: Land of the Headless/Swiftly (14/10/2013)

Last week was a desperately lazy week in which not a lot got done. News? Nah. Still waiting on a couple of announcements for new projects that are already in their editing stage, though – the Sekkrit Projekt and a piece of historical crime fiction. I was supposed to write another Bulldog Drummond novella for Piqwiq last week and then this week being a lazy sod, so I guess that’s now this week. Ho Hum. Also not at all helped by the great iPhone-rain interface disaster. Yes, folks, iPhones do not like being used in heavy rain. Given that I took my previous phone swimming by accident, maybe I just shouldn’t be allowed to have one. Meanwhile the topic of authors reading and commenting on reviews of their work keep bugging me because I keep seeing and being shown things in Dragon Queen that I hadn’t consciously realised were there. I may write something about that once I get this novella out of the way.

Anyway, this week’s giveaway is a double-header, meaning there will be two winners. Yay! Cheer, damn you! I have two old Adam Roberts novels: Swiftly and Land of the Headless up for grabs. Adam’s one of these authors who quietly gets around quite a bit and he finally won some award recognition this year for Jack Glass. I haven’t read Jack Glass but Yellow Blue Tibia was one of my favourite books of the year a few years back.

Usual deal – comment on this post before October 21st  and I’ll randomly select two lucky victims for a free copy of the books (one each). Now if you don’t follow Adam on Twitter then you won’t know this, but he has quite a fondness for puns. Frequently very bad puns. So this week, your challenge is to come up with a pun. The gods of random will judge the two best puns. If you want some inspiration, go follow @arrroberts on Twitter. You won’t have to wait long.

Although, though no one has yet complained about how long it takes me to get to the post office and post things, it can take a while and if you live abroad then it can take even longer. Sorry about that, but they do get there eventually. Well, so far. Recent winners,my backlog is cleared and they’re all in the post.

Book Giveaway: Legion and the Emperor’s Soul (7/10/2013)

This week’s freebie is Brandon Sanderson’s Legion and the Emperor’s Soul. This guy, he writes like even more books per year than I do. And they still too. Irritating so-and-so… I haven’t read it so can’t comment personally on the story.

News: The Splintered Gods has finished edit and gone back to the publisher. I might post some thoughts on that later this week. Next up is another Bulldog Drummond novella.

Usual deal – comment on this post before October 5th  and I’ll randomly select a lucky victim for a free copy of the book. Last week’s game maybe put people off. This week I want names, character names. Anything that amuses you, either that you’ve seen or you’d like to see. This comes from the novella I’m about to write being partially set in the Chinese communities in Limehouse and Pennyfields in the late 1920s and the need to resist the desire to pepper the story with good (ahem) English and Chinese names like Professor Wilberforce Throckmorton-Device and Ho Li Phuk. So throw me some bones and help me get the whole stupid names thing out of my system…

Although, though no one has yet complained about how long it takes me to get to the post office and post things, it can take a while and if you live abroad then it can take even longer. Sorry about that, but they do get there eventually. Well, so far. Recent winners, I have a backlog again.

There’s a new review up for The Crimson Shield by The Benign Guy

World Fantasy Con – Unexpected Journeys (02/10/2013)

I shall be at World Fantasy Con at the end of the month, a long established intention and a fact of great excitement to at least one person. As things stand I won’t be doing any panels, despite last-ditch efforts to establish a panel on why author should regularly interact via the internet with those who comment on their work and damn well comment on any review they damn well please. Fortunately this means propping up the bar for longer hours and probably having exactly the same discussion only with beer and thus louder.

However, I can announce that I’ll also be appearing in a slightly more useful and written form as part of the BFS anthology Unexpected Journeys and in the form of a short story, The Sin Eater, a brief vignette of revenge and wickedness and redemption and in which dragons are not mentioned even once. See, I can if I try…

The other stories are:

A Thief in the Night by Anne Lyle

Seeds by Benjamin Tate

Steer a Pale Course by Gail Z Martin

The Groppler’s Harvest by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Oak, Broom and Meadowsweet by Liz Williams

King Harvest Has Surely Come by Chaz Brenchley

The Queen’s Garden by Kate Elliott

The anthology is edited by Juliet McKenna and rather than have me waffle about it any more, you might fancy reading her thoughts and observing how I totally stole that list. You can also see the cover artwork there.

The anthology is only available (I think) to BFS members and WFC attendees (that may be a redundant statement). The BFS have a few months of exclusive rights to the story before it revert, after which I reckon there’s a fair chance it’ll show up here as a freebie.