Niall Teasdale's Blog, page 11
October 13, 2020
Thaumatology Updates
As I indicated a short while ago, I’m endeavoring to get all the Thaumatology books updated across Amazon and Smashwords. I had them worked over by my proofreader a long time ago but kept them back due to a need to get something else done for the Smashwords release. I’ve decided to just update the texts so everyone can have nice, clean, error-free prose, even if some catalogues won’t currently list some of the titles (long story).
I’m doing three a day (because I want to get some writing done as well) and the first three are now up. That’s:
Thaumatology 101Demon’s MoonLegacy (plus the Black Moonlight short story)
Now then, Legacy was updated on Amazon a short while back, but I neglected to add in Black Moonlight at the time. That has now been fixed (or it will be when Amazon have got their end of things together). If you’re interested, you may wish to look for an update to that book on Amazon.
I’ll be updating this list through the week as I upload more updates.
The updated Legacy text is now up on Amazon too.
October 5, 2020
Indecision
The last few months have been interesting. King Solamet’s Mines is in the editing pipeline for release next month, but it was a bit of a struggle. Why? because I keep having new ideas!
In the past month or so I’ve come up with:
The Demon Generation: What happens when people start exhibiting supernatural abilities and changing into monsters without warning.Something I just called ‘Elven Knight’: A portal opens in Central Park, NY, bringing various creatures out of fairy tales with it. Something dangerous has come through and a knight from the other world is sent to bring it back with the help of an NY detective. Fish-out-of-water stuff.UNO: Ultimate Necromance Online: A sort of LitRPG/isekai story where the twist is that our hero is a guy who gets transported into a sort of fantasy game world, but on his secondary character who is female.Renae Clifton: Supernatural detective story set in Manchester, England.Bullet Dance: A weird western story.And I shouldn’t leave out Sign of the Dragon which is to still ongoing, but has had some radical rethinking.
They all got a little development and thought. I even wrote a few pages of The Demon Generation and I restarted Sign of the Dragon. But I’m not quite in a cyberpunk mood right now. That will change in mid-November, however, because Cyberpunk 2077 is coming out and I’ll be playing it on a nice, new XBox Series X. If I can drag myself away from the controller, I should be in a strong mood to write sci-fi.
So, right now I’m doing something different. It’s a one-off fantasy which is something of an experiment. I wanted to see if I could do a slowish burn story set in a world with a highly stratified class system. so far, so good.
I blame YouTube reviewers. There was this anime series that got some pretty rave reviews for its world building and relative plot complexity: Ascendance of a Bookworm. It’s a rather unusual isekai. A Japanese girl who loves nothing aside from books is killed when an earthquake topples a badly piled stack of books on her and she wakes up in the body of a small, frail girl, the daughter of a poor soldier in what, at first, appears to be a straight medieval society. Her beloved books are practically impossible to get since books have to be hand-copied; no printing presses. So, she decides that if she can’t buy books, she’s going to damn well make some. And that’s the plot: how Myne starts changing the world by (re)inventing shampoo, crochet, plant-based paper, woodblock printing… And she has to deal with some fantasy stuff and an exclusionary social system, but it’s really about the books. I’m hooked. I watched it twice in succession (helped by there not being anything else I wanted to watch, I admit). I started the light novel it’s based on.
So, I took a few ideas from that and real medieval society and something I don’t normally do: straight-up, impossible without magic cosmology. Put in brain. Turn on mixer. Pour contents onto page. The Empress’s Mage was born. As I said, it’s designed to be a one-off, but it could get a sequel if a plot comes up that works. As it is, it’ll take a poor girl with a talent for magic to the heights of society, which is a good place to end things. I hope it works out (before November 19th when I go all cyberpunk). If it does, it should see a release date in January. As they say in a strangely large number of anime episode previews, ‘Look forward to it.’
September 7, 2020
Atlantis Art Dump
Okay, sorry for the delay, but the Age of Atlantis: Return art dump is now available on ArtStation. Click on the image above to go there.
September 2, 2020
Age of Atlantis: Return
August 21, 2020
English Summers Are Awesome
So, last week I was cooking. Today, it’s raining. The rain is coming down at a 45 degree angle. I couldn’t actually say it’s cold, but it has cooled down some. This is summer in England: you never know what you’re going to get.
The Atlantis book is in the final stages of production. Should be out soon. More on exactly when when I know.
August 12, 2020
Too Hot
It’s too hot.
I realise that, for many of you, having to put up with 28C (82F) in my office is cool, but I live in the UK! We can’t cope with hot weather. Or cold weather. We get temperate weather and we like it!
All I want to do is sleep, but it’s too hot to sleep! Getting work done is hard. Luckily, I got the Atlantis book finished a couple of weeks ago. You should be seeing that early next month. And things are supposed to cool down at the end of this week, so I’m hoping my progress on the next Unobtainium book will pick up then. I’ll go back to struggling to concentrate now.
(This ramble was brought to you by Niall’s overcooked brain.)
July 19, 2020
Change of Plan
Plan Z? re we up to Z yet? Probably.
Anyway, ran into a problem with Sign of the Dragon and I’ve put it aside for later. Next month you’ll be getting the first Age of Atlantis book which I’ve been working on since something like 2015 and suddenly I figured out how to finish it. Still not happy with the title I have for it, so I’ll keep that for later. It’s got semi-naked amazons and mermaids. The art dumps are going to be very NSFW.
After that there’s a fairly high chance that I’ll be doing the second Unobtainium book. Finally. Sign of the Dragon isn’t going away either, it’s just on hold until I’m feeling my cyberpunk again, which shouldn’t take too long.
July 3, 2020
Freedom, Humanity, and Other Delusions
July 2, 2020
Stuff and Things
Okay, here’s a few things I thought I should mention. In no particular order:
The third Death’s Handmaiden book will be out soon (next day or two). It’s called Freedom, Humanity, and Other Delusions.
I’m currently working on Sign of the Dragon (though I’m having a little fun with it and I’ve taken it back to the drawing board). It should be out in a couple of months. This is going to be a replacement for the Fox books because…
There are going to be two more Fox Meridian books, and then I’ll be bringing that series to a conclusion. I hope to wrap up all the loose threads in those two books. Why am I ending the series? Well, two reasons. First, I’m running out of ideas. I think I’ve gone as far as I can with the overall plot, and I’d rather handle any other ideas I have for that genre with new characters. Two, my mother liked reading the Fox books. I wouldn’t say I wrote them for her, but she liked them. It’s going to be hard writing those characters knowing that she won’t be reading the results. I was aiming to wrap up the series before my mother died, but now it’s become more of a necessity.
Anyway, more about the new Death’s Handmaiden book in the next day or two. I’ll be posting the cover soon, as usual. I’ve also been posting a few random images (of Tatsu from Sign of the Dragon) on ArtStation; you can see them here.
Stay safe, and don’t break your keyboard hitting F5: I’ll post as soon as it’s ready.
