It’s an odd occupation, this writing business. You sit alone in a room and make up stuff, and if you’re lucky, you find that someone else likes it, has faith in it, and is willing to put it out in the world for you. If you are even luckier, you make a little money out of the process and find that it becomes a job – a career, even.
I’ve been writing full-time for twenty-five years now, a figure that has me scratching my head and wondering where in the hell the time went. I look up above my desk, where there is a shelf upon which sits a copy of each of my books, and as I look at the titles on the spines I think not of the characters and worlds therein, but of the places I was at when I wrote them. They are waypoints in my life, and within their pages are ideas which flared up at certain times like a match struck in the dark, only to die out in the darkness again when their time was past and a new idea was being lifted out of the box. Continue reading
Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Robert Kroese?
A must-read collection of essays
If you have any interest in Gaiman’s thought-processes when it comes to art, creativity, books, popular culture, specific works… Then you will undoubtedly find something fascinating in The View From The Cheap Seats. It’s a substantial collection of essays and speech transcripts. There is some overlap between certain pieces, which I thought was interesting — giving us some insight into those authors and books that most influenced Gaiman, and also the issues that have been most important to him at certain points during his career.
So, DC Comics is re-branding again. After five years, the New 52 has been brought to an end (judging from the leaked images from the DC Rebirth #1 issue, through an entirely-expected timey-wimey bit of trickery), and the entire DC line-up is, you guessed it, being renumbered again. All but two series are turning back to #1s. The two exceptions? Action Comics and Detective Comics — both of which are turning back the clock even further, and… picking up their numbering pre-New 52. I don’t really understand why, because the continuity of the New 52 is supposedly staying (aside from the aforementioned timey-wimey muddling). The Action Comics storyline sounds interesting (see 
Let’s start with an introduction: Who is Laura Lam?
Just stumbled across this in Tor’s new catalogue: a stand-alone novel set in Brian Staveley‘s Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne universe! Skullsworn is due to be published in the US by 
The beginning of an intriguing new urban fantasy series…?
Crack open an author’s skull (preferably after drugging them first) and you’ll find a simmering stew of influences floating around in there like a horrible soup. It’s not pretty, but these are the things that shaped me as I grew up and wound up rendering me virtually unemployable, incapable of doing anything except sitting at a desk and typing about imaginary people doing made up things.
Following our interview with Andrew Cartmel, yesterday, Titan Books has sent us an excerpt from 
Civilian Reader 