So that was November

Did it rain? Yes, yes it did, though I saw no sign of Slash standing on top of any nearby hills with his guitar.
Obscure joke, right there. Well done/commiserations if you got that.

Anyway, November's done and it is now December! How the hell did that happen? It can't be December already, I refuse to accept that it will soon be 2015.
NaNoWriMo was a success! All fifty thousand words! They're not great words, honestly - it's very evident that it's a first draft. It will need much rewriting before it's fit for general consumption.
Which might be part of the explanation as to why my plan to tempt people into donating to my Movember page (which is still live - click here if my dumb moustache pics have entertained you enough to sling a few quid there way!) by letting people read the first draft as I was writing it was such an abject failure. Ah well, you live and learn.
Still, I think there's a good story lurking inside Ironheart and I'll drag it out one way or another.

Onwards and upwards though, and coming up next we have the release of HEROES WANTED, my new fantasy novel filled with fun and hilarity!
There's even a slightly dumb launch trailer, complete with a heinous attempt at an American accent, and here it is!

Halfway to NaNoWriMo!

Except not quite cos I'm several thousand words behind!
Hey all!
It's the 15th of November, the halfway point of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), so I thought I'd do a progress report. 
There is progress. Slow, painful progress. I'm at a point in Ironheart that I didn't plan out beyond a vague "put some stuff here" type of description and I'm having a bit of a hard time finding the words. I'm also, as mentioned above, quite a long way behind. It should be noted that this is absolutely not my fault - a friend came to visit and, when faced with the choice between writing or drinking and playing computer games... I was weak, internet, and I lacked the willpower to resist.
You can spot the days this occurred quite easily in this NaNoWriMo widget from their site:

Hint: red = bad
Anyway, I'm trying to play catch up now. The mathematicians amongst you will have realised that I really ought to be at 25,000 words at the halfway point, as opposed to the 19,000 I currently have.
You know, you can actually read what I'm writing if you want. The first chapter of Ironheart is here. It is only the first draft though, please bear that in mind!
The reason for this is that it's also Movember so, as well as producing some fine facial hair, I've made my novel available in the hope that you'll find it enjoyable enough to make you want to donate via the links on the pages. So far...not the most successful strategy. At all. In any way.
Still, hope springs eternal and I'm sure I'll get a donation any day now (hint hint).
I mean, look at this magnificent moustache. How can you not be tempted?

And yes, if you're wondering, that is a stuffed Paddington Bear teddy behind me.

Leaving aside books I've not finished writing yet, it's only just over a month until Heroes Wanted comes out - guaranteed (though not in any legally binding way) hilarity with swords and dragons and irate innkeepers! You should totally pre-order it! And then tell your friends about it!

Loins being girded!

Or maybe lions being girded. Can you gird a lion, and is it any more effective than girding a loin? Does sound like it might be quite dangerous.
Anyway...
It's almost NaNoWriMo time again, and once more I find myself trying to put together a novel plan that I will almost certainly end up ignoring within the first two hundred words. So it always seems to go but I swear I'm going to try and stick to the plan this time. Really.

My novel this time is tentatively called Ironheart and that is all I'm telling you for now. Sorry, I'm a terrible tease! It should be good though, I hope. 
I think I'm going to let people read what I've done each day, probably in a Google doc, a bit like I'm doing on the Live Writing page (which I swear I haven't given up on, by the way, I just got distracted and kind of forgot about it. I will write that story one day, I vow it).
As long as you all promise to buy it when I finally release it!

In other news, I'm desperately trying not to suck at marketing (and failing, by and large) - to that end, allow me to mention that Heroes Wanted, my hilarious (I think so anyway) fantasy adventure, is available for pre-order for $2.99 and will be released on 19th of December. Hit the link below!

CLICK ME!

I'm also going to do Movember. Which means that the extensive facial fuzz that currently adorns my ugly mug will have to removed. All of it. The world will see a sight not seen since 1995, my chin (seriously, I've been a bearded idiot for nigh on 20 years) - I'm not sure you're all ready for that. I might video the removal for posterity.
I'm going to donate half the profits from the sales of Crystal Eyes during November (which might very well amount to sweet FA but it's the thought that counts, right?) to the Movember charity.
Note: since Crystal Eyes is just 99 cents I only get 35% from Amazon. Thought it was worth making that clear in case you all rush out and buy it (which you should totally do) and you end up wondering why the donation amount isn't as much as you might have thought.

Woah!!

It's been how long since I last updated this? I am a bad, bad man!
I honestly hadn't realised so much time had passed since I last posted anything.
So...how have you been?

What have I been up to? Well, I finished the first draft of my sequel to Crystal Eyes, and then wrote another entirely unrelated book (both of these will be out in 2015). I've also been tinkering and tweaking and generally dicking about with Heroes Wanted.
It's time to let go of that, however. For better or worse, I hereby declare myself to be done with Heroes Wanted. It is time to set it free. To be more precise, it will be time to set it free on Friday the 19th of December! Yep, that's the release date, but it will be available to pre-order from, well, now actually.
Behold, links!
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Smashwords
iTunes

More to follow!

And I heartily encourage you to pre-order it because every pre-order sale is counted as occurring on the release date, which in turn gives it a higher chance of increasing its visibility on places like the Amazon charts.
By the way, if you're a book reviewer, run a book review blog or anything like that, drop me a line and I'll send you a free copy.

I've also permanently reduced the price of my first novel, Crystal Eyes, to just 99 cents (or the local equivalent)!

In other news, I've added a new short story to the website - a piece of World of Warcraft fan-fiction called The Last Farm In Lordaeron. 
I've also added a gallery of the sketches I've been doing for Inktober.
I'm also in the process of trying to arrange a house move and gearing up for this year's NaNoWriMo. It's possible that by the end of this year I may just collapse into a heap on the floor, and not just because of too much wine.

So that was 2013, eh?

Greetings, one and all, on this, the final day of 2013!

Hope all of you out there have had a good year!

As for me...it's been eventful. I've sold a house, moved to the Lake District, finished polishing up Heroes Wanted, ran a KickStarter (unsuccessfully) to get Heroes Wanted edited, started the sequel to Crystal Eyes, scrapped what I'd written and started again, finished the sequel to Crystal Eyes, started my Live Writing experiment, wrote the first 50,000 words of a new story for NaNoWriMo, and finally set up paperback versions of Crystal Eyes on Amazon's CreateSpace program. 

And for 2014...
Finally get Heroes Wanted published, either by a publisher or just by me, polish up and publish the sequel to Crystal Eyes, find somewhere else to live and a way of earning money (you could buy my books, or get your friends to, that'd help a huge amount - just saying!).
Work more on promotional type stuff because generally I have sucked at that. Going to try and build up my twitter following, "build my brand" or whatever the marketing types say.
Do more video content stuff - I've been trying to do a short, daft film but the technicalities are defeating me at the moment (lighting green screens, man, harder than you think).
More Live Writing - need to finished the steampunk story I've already got going and I'm going to try and do a live short story at least once a month, like the one I did for Halloween, with a video stream and multiple drinks! Keep an eye on my twitter feed for that!

That's it for now, hope you all have a great 2014 and that it brings you all that you could hope for.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!