In Dreams Awake

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

(Henry David Thoreau)

Wednesday 24 September 2014

Discipline

  Troy: Heirs of Immortality is now out!

  It was a day late going live on Amazon Kindle, because the ratification check took so long. Very strange, but complaining/ asking why does no good, as a reply takes so long to arrive and is usually a bit rubbish when it does. So sorry to anyone who was looking for it on Monday, the official release date. I'll try not to let it happen again.

  The print version will take a little longer as the cover design was refused (sigh...). That should be sorted out in a few days.

  Volume three, The Untrodden Sanctuaries, will be mostly written (I hope) before the end of the year - the first draft, anyway. NaNoWriMo is coming in November - National Novel Writing Month - and I hope to complete a good chunk of the book in those 30 days. I quite enjoyed NaNo last year. It's a bit daft in some ways, because it prizes the number of words and makes no mention of quality. I could write wah wah wah until I hit the 50,000 word minimum and I'd be classed as a winner.

  But still, NaNo is an excuse for writers who struggle to find time to set some aside. It gives us a target of 1,667 words per day, about what a professional writer might aim for, and challenges us to match it. There's a discipline in that, if you treat it right. Some don't - a couple of people reach 50,000 words on day 1, which tells me they understood the target but not the point. But most do. And if you end on 40,000 words, or half that, you've still managed to write a goodly bit, and hopefully learned a little about how to manage your time too.

  I'll be playing in the local pool league during November, and beyond. I'm also now engaged, and will be married almost exactly a year from now. Finding time for NaNo is going to be a wee bit interesting.

Heirs of Immortality is $0.99 by the way. Find it at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heirs-Immortality-TROY-Book-2-ebook/dp/B00NU6X0B2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411586760&sr=1-1&keywords=ben+blake+heirs+of+immortality

Thursday 4 September 2014

Fast and Breathless

  Hi everyone. Summer may be on its way out but there's still lots to look forward to, including crisp autumn mornings, mist on the water, and this;


  This is the first glimpse of the cover for TROY: Heirs of Immortality. It's the second volume in my Troy series, and will be out on September 22nd. If you like your Fantasy fast-paced and breathless, this is for you. From the ports of Greece to the beach and plain of Troy, Agamemnon and Achilles argue and Odysseus plots, while Hector defies them and the walls of the city stand impregnable above it all.

  In other news, I've arranged a personal appearance at Bideford Library on Saturday October 22nd, from 10.30am. It's only a small library and a small event, but if you're in the area, come along for a chat, I'll be glad to see you, and I'll have books to sign.

  When I did my last PA, at Barnstaple, one of the copies of The Risen King which I sold went to a woman called Gill. I saw her recently, and she said she'd been on holiday in the Yorkshire Dales and had found herself looking down on a moorland valley, lush and green with high rocks all around. In a moment her mind went back to the place where Kayl finds the Brethren, right at the start of the novel, because (she said) I'd described what she was looking at so vividly.

  Thanks, Gill. I can't expect finer praise than that.