Dublin 2019 gives details of flight plan with one month to liftoff  Dublin 2019 – An Irish Worldcon will have more than 700 separate programme events over five days from 15 to 19 August, making it one of the summer’s largest arts gatherings of any kind. More than 60 authors will give readings, including Elizabeth Bear, Marie Brennan, Pat Cadigan, Zen Cho, Aliette de Bodard, Guest of Honour Diane Duane, Joe Haldeman, Roz...

Among the other irons in the fire which keep me busy, apart from writing, is film production and my shop in the Powerscourt Townhouse Centre. This year my production company www.veridian3films.com was awarded by the Kildare Arts Council for a documentary on Castletown House, the details of which are below. I would like to thank the Kildare County Council Arts for their award to myself and a co-producer Jules Charlton for their   Kildare County...

The BBC Arts’ Novels that shaped our world festival was launched to mark the 300th anniversary of the English language novel. This is an initiative in conjunction with the BBC, libraries and reading groups to explore 100 novels that have had an impact over the last three centuries.   The centrepiece of the season will be the three-part BBC Two series, The Novels That Shaped Our World. The series will examine the novel from three...

The final stretch of the first draft is a tricky one. For one, you’re so excited that you’ve managed to get this far, in my case I’m currently on 85,000 words of what should end up to be roughly a 110,000-word manuscript. Already I know that elements in this draft that are slowing the pace of the story down need to come out but we’ve come too far to go back now! I started my...

“The minute you slow down, that’s the same minute they get you.” As accurate as that sentence is when it comes to the Skrake, the same is true for how it feels to read Sarah Davis-Goff’s brilliant ‘Last ones left alive’ I made the mistake of reading a few pages of this novel while I was supposed to be working. Needless to say, I didn’t get any work done that day. Last Ones left Alive...

When you’re a writer, sometimes you just have to hustle, it’s a competitive world out there and when you’re self-published it becomes even harder. You have to use any and all platforms available to try to get your work under the eyes of readers who might like what you do. So here’s the deal. In my last post, I outlined one of the strategies that I use to get as many reviews as possible on Amazon....

  This is probably the hardest part of being a writer. Putting on your business hat and finding out how to not only believe in yourself and your work but asking an already saturated market to believe in your story as well. I’ll break down the basics first.   Before you do anything and this can be the most expensive part, EDIT your book professionally. Trust me on this, I’ve learned the hard way. If...

So for the next few weeks, I’m going to be working hard on getting the first draft of a new novel written. I’m going to take you through my prep all the while trying to keep my sanity. Currently, I’m at stage one, or what I like to call the “Come on man, you can do this” phase. I’m sticking with the science fiction genre and tend to begin with several questions. Firstly, whose story...

Over the years I’ve used loads of programs to try and organise my thoughts into something that resembles coherence. I thought it would be a good idea to give a list of the ones that I found to be the most useful to me and the ones I now live by. For novel-writing I used Scrivner. It’s a brilliant program and not only the best value but one that has the very best features when...

Greetings, fellow scribblers and readers. It is with great pleasure that I begin my blogging journey with Writing.ie. I thought I would take this first slot to tell you a little about myself and why I’ve chosen a life dedicated to writing about all things science fiction. I currently run a small business in Dublin’s city centre, which has actually come in handy as having a business head helps to think of ideas to promote...