New covers

First, a possible new cover for The Druid's Son, the book I'm currently writing.

Then, a possible cover for Storyteller Songs, the poetry collection I mentioned in a previous post:



I think the photographic style matches earlier books in the series better. What do you think?


eta: I just tweaked the fonts on the second cover a bit...

-GRG

New project

Having ported the e-editions of all my existing books over to Smashwords, I've been playing with another little project: a collection of all the poetry in the first three Storyteller books, together with some of the surrounding prose. It'll be a small chapbook, available through Smashwords and then eventually through Lulu and Amazon. I pulled the text together in a spare couple of hours yesterday afternoon, but the cover design will take a little longer. The title is "Storyteller Songs: Poetry from the Young Gwernin Trilogy".

Meanwhile I have another busy weekend coming up. After that things quiet down somewhat, and I can start writing again!

-GRG

And more ebooks...

Storyteller, Flight of the Hawk, and The Ash Spear are all on Smashwords now. I've checked the .mobi and EPub formats out with Kindle for PC and Adobe Digital Editions, and they all look good - not perfect, but quite good. Kindle for PC and Adobe Digital Editions are free readers, by the way, and I recommend them for anyone who wants to read ebooks on their computer.

More new ebooks...

Update: King Arthur's Raid on Hell has been clear-listed by Smashwords for general distribution. The page is here, and I've generated a coupon code (MZ86J) which will make the book free for the next month. Please try it out, and let me know any problems you encounter!

New e-books

I've been experimenting with Smashwords.com, and the first results are available here: a new e-book version of King Arthur's Raid on Hell. If this works out as well as I expect, all my books will soon be available at Smashwords. Check it out!

Quitting the day job...

Time vs. money: it's always a trade-off, isn't it? Sometimes I feel like one of those late-medieval serfs I read about when I was in college, bound to the land and spending most of their days working for the lord, with only a little time to tend their own gardens. I don't know how accurate that picture is, since it's not a thing I've researched since, but it's always had a resonance for me. It certainly describes the part-time writer's life, where your creative work is always being interrupted by the insistent call of the Job. It's been particularly troublesome with the present book, which for various reasons is proving harder to write than my first three. So... I've decided to solve the problem.

As of December 31st, I'm retiring in order to write full time. I'm really looking forward to it!

-GRG

Progress...

Another page written yesterday, and three more today. Not much momentum yet, but better than I have done in some while. I stayed at home today, gardened, read, and wrote. The weather was a bit cooler than yesterday, which helped: hard to imagine a cool, wet day in Ireland when it's this hot and dry.

Lots of squash and tomatoes, and the apples are getting ripe: time to make chutney, as soon as I get a cool enough evening. Summer's passing: almost September, and the days are visibly shorter since Lammas. Maybe a month left for the garden, if I'm lucky, before the first frost.

-GRG

New review

New review of Flight of the Hawk on LibaryThing.com.

Progress...

No actual writing done over the weekend, but a good bit of research. I've been rereading A guide to early Irish law and Early Irish farming, both full of useful details and more entertaining to read than one might think. Pretty soon I'll have to just start putting words together again, and see where it leads me.

Mist on the Mountains...

The Black Mountains again, on a different day. It would be easy to get lost if that cloud came a little lower.