Fantasy and Science Fiction Author

31/01/2026

Just now, I copied all my blog posts into a local file. (You can never have too many backups.) It comes to 84,000 words since November 2011. That's almost as long as one of my books. No, I'm not going to publish them as a book. Not when you can read them all for free here -

31/01/2026

A day early, just because - what I did in January.

I was a bit optimistic about when I might be able to release the audio version of The Last Dragonrider. I finished recording it after 13 days (mostly 13 ...

25/01/2026

Still editing the audiobook of The Last Dragonrider... in chapter 19, I find that I said, "[character] laughed mercilessly," when I'd written "[character] laughed mirthlessly."

20/01/2026

The interesting part here is the thin strip along the bottom of the window. The grey boxes are what I've edited so far in this chapter (about 4 minutes). The red boxes are what I've still got to do (about 17 minutes). The yellow line near the end is the original length of the file (about 23 minutes)

19/01/2026

Six attempts to say "Neeru wanted to slap herself" without my mouth clicking😛

17/01/2026

I've now edited the first four chapters of the audiobook (out of 71). I have 20 places in chapter 4 where I need to re-record something - mostly because either my mouth clicked or my stomach growled.

But it still amazes me that if I have two takes with mistakes in different places, I can usually cut them together - often in the middle of a word - and as long as the performances are similar enough (which mine usually are) you can't hear the join.

15/01/2026

I started editing the audiobook of The Last Dragonrider. Reinstalling Ardour and the few plugins that I use was a lot faster than the last time I did it. Having two monitors now should make the process smoother, as I shouldn't need to cycle between windows.

14/01/2026

Primary recording of the audiobook of The Last Dragonrider is complete - 21 hours and 54 minutes of 16-bit 44.1kHz goodness. That should edit down to about 14 hours, assuming I was speaking at the same pace as the other ones.

After editing, I'll have to do another short (I hope!) session for pickups. (Re-recording any part with a mistake that I didn't notice at the time.) There's a blatant one right at the end, where I confidently said, "This has been The Accidental Dragonrider." Oops...

13/01/2026

It occurred to me that we hadn't yet done the pictures of me with the latest book. Thanks to Breda for taking them.

12/01/2026

I know most of these, though "lozzock" is a new one on me.

Lancashire dialect is a law unto itself - full of quirky words and sayings we love, use and are proud of - some anyway!

02/01/2026

Now I really am recording The Last Dragonrider (29% of the way through, so far).

31/12/2025

What I did in 2025, and what I want to do in 2026:

I set myself two goals at the start of this year: publish The Last Dragonrider and publish a new audiobook. I did the first of those on 3rd December,...