Chilling Out in Budapest!

Gorgeous, leafy Baross Utca.

I’d heard Budapest was one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, but wow. Check this out.

Hello from Hungary! I’ve moved on from Germany, my last pit-stop on my ongoing global nomad adventures. Now, I’m writing and working in Budapest, the capital of Hungary and surely one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever lived in.

A lot of European cities seem to have no trees on the streets, especially in England. Cork and Dublin were practically leafless; the elegant architecture became really bleak after a while. But Budapest seems to have nailed the balance between greenery and stonework. The results are fantastic.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’m actually going to backtrack through the countries I’ve lived in over the last couple of years, blog about them, and post photos. Why? Because being a global nomad has had an enormous influence on my work. The experiences I’ve had – good, bad and in-between – have been immensely formative.

There’s now a new category. The ‘News’ section has become the ‘Blog’ section, and will have a bit more of a personal character from this point in. I’ll talk about the work process, travel, word count, and other developmental stuff.

Speaking of wordcount: yesterday’s tally on Our Lady of Sorrows was 3600 words, for a total of around 30K. There’s still anywhere between 50-80K to go, and then, the type-in!

What is the type-in, you may ask?

I draft all my novels longhand. Like a boss. Or a Lithuanian church scribe. I find that I can write longhand in ways that I just can’t on computer. It feels freer, more private, more authentic than what I generally churn out straight onto computer. It’s also mostly crap, but it is very much like sketching. Loose and rough, the formation of the image that is then refined into a sexy svelte little package.

And speaking of sketches, I’ve been drawing:

Before and After: From the first ‘block-in’ sketch through to a mostly finished product.

Who’s this, you might ask? Devon ‘Knives’ Krukov, one of the major human players in Our Lady of Sorrows. There’s a single quote from him on the Nephilim page.

But here are some more photos of Budapest!