It’s done. Upgrade is now available for digital preorder.  You can whisk yourself off to grab a copy right now. The machine is still churning on physical copies, but they will arrive there on a schedule determined by the fates and the gods.  It’s roughly that scientific.  If you’re hanging out for a physical copy, Upgrade has been enrolled as a zero-cost Kindle Matchbook — so if you buy the physical, you’ll get the digital for no extra dollars.  You’ll just need to … be patient. You can expect the usual boutique hardcover edition, as well as the usual paperback style too. Here are some store links: [US] [UK] [AU] [CA].  And, possibly, some less relevant ones: [DE] [FR] [ES] [IT] [JP] [BR] [MX]

I’ve finished removing a significant volume of fuckage from Upgrade. At this stage, I’d say maybe only one in every three or four uses of the word “fuck” has made it into the next draft.  Don’t worry, there’s still plenty in there to go around. This weekend was interesting in terms of feedback (my beta buddies have started to stream in the next round, which is good). One wee mote of self-doubt has crept in following some of the feedback, where the beta reader basically said the thing sucked.  I mean, that’s a valid world view, but it got me thinking as to whether the people who’d read Night’s Favour would like Upgrade, and vice versa.  I think there are people who will like both, but now I’ve got nagging doubts that people will expect my second work to be like the Read More …

The beast has landed. Wednesday saw me knock off the second round of editing on Upgrade.  It’s now in the capable hands of the next fleet of beta readers.  This is a few days ahead of (my) schedule, and makes me a happy camper. The review process has been fun and hard in equal measure, and now I’m going to give my brain a rest by working on cover art this month.  I’ve made some minor, some major changes to almost every chapter, and added in a new chapter or two.  Overall length is still about the same (~160,000 words) due to some cutting with knives. Still no MacBook – the dead one is proper dead, and the quote to fix is roughly equivalent to a top-spec Air, so I’m trying to work out what I should do there.  I’d like Read More …

Imagine you’re on a deadline.  Imagine it’s all going well — to the wire, but well.  Then, imagine you turn on your laptop and see this: Upgrade might be delayed slightly — I need to get the ol’ workhorse repaired to actually be able to complete my edits.  I’ve got a loaner laptop at the moment, but there will still be … issues. Naturally, all data is backed up and the manuscript appears to be totally intact, so life isn’t over — life has just hit a wee snag. One of the curious things about this has been the repair process.  I dropped the machine off at our local repair agents for Apple hardware (they are the dudes — there are no other dudes), who said, “Oh, yeah.  Right.  Sure.  Looks fucked, bro.  Oh, and our tech’s away now.  Can Read More …

It’s starting to come in for the first draft of Upgrade. By and large, it’s all very positive — not that people think it’s flawless by any means, but because the feedback is stuff I can work with.  I know what it means, and have an idea of how I can use it to improve the story. I thought I’d share one of those pieces with you today.  Some of the characters in the story come from another planet — no huge spoiler there.  The trick here is that doing world building for two planets, not just one, can be a bit hard on your reader — yet my beta humans are interested in more of the motivations behind some of the characters from that other world, and want to hear more about the other world.  Thus: an idea I’m playing Read More …

One of the things that gets people excited is vampires. This is not a lie — it is a zeitgeist.  And, I guess, if making a lot of money is your thing then you should hop right on that bandwagon and write about the most popular things.  As it turns out, vampires are still supreme – what’s more, they’re a growth industry: You can infer all kinds of things from this – for example, cunts are more popular than zombies (but it’s closer than your average presidential election): I can’t make this stuff up.  Unfortunately, I can’t really prostitute myself either, so I write about stuff that’s fun to me.  Me and the werewolf cyberpunk monsters from hell will be keeping it real.

…has been accurately captured by Poorly Drawn Lines.

Turns out, once you come out from under your writer’s rock, you find there’s shit outside like daylight. But what to do with it all? Today marked the day: a bunch of beta copies of Upgrade were shipped out to eager readers.  And by “eager” I mean, people who love me more than they love themselves, because those first drafts are nasty.  I’ve got a few weeks before they’ll start coming back in with comments, so what do I fill my days with? Spacies. Ok, and probably, planning my next work.  I get a bit of head space back now to think about Boundless, which is important: it’ll take time to spin that sucker up to speed, and get my head out of Upgrade.  I’ve been thinking about writing a small palette-cleanser, but time’s the thing. Despite that, I’m enjoying Read More …

A hundred and sixty.  Thousand. That’s how many words Upgrade’s first releasable draft has.  Printed out in proof form, it’s about the size of a phone book for a mid-sized city. Going through the edits for this one, I learned a bunch of things about myself.  For example, it’s possible to know how to use an apostrophe correctly at the start, but by the end, you’re not even sure if apostrophes should still be included in the English language anymore.  All time records of self-doubt, you know? It’s beer o’clock.  But… I’m really pleased with the manuscript.