I will be doing a six-month ‘Fantasy’ Mentoring Clinic through Writers Victoria. Click the image to sign up for six months of personal feedback on your creative project.

December Update

2023 Workshops

I’m already confirmed for two workshops/mentoring clinics for 2023. When ‘Minds of Sand and Light’ is released, I’ll definitely be visiting places and conventions to do signings. I’m sure next year will be a busy one for me!

Online Feedback Clinic: Fantasy, presented through Writers Victoria

This is the workshop I’ve linked to the image above. It’s a six-month online feedback, where you provide a sample of your writing each month (it can be made for the workshop, or from a prompt I give you) and I will give you my professional feedback. It’s open to all, not limited to members of Writers Vic, so if you’re interested click the link and check it out.

Self-Publishing (Full Day) with Queensland Writers Centre

My little two-hour and half-day self-publishing workshops are immensely popular (as demonstrated in the previous newsletter!) and QWC have asked me to provide a full-day workshop with full demonstrations of how to self-publish a book both in digital and print and on multiple platforms. It’ll be in May, and the details are yet to be confirmed, but once it’s all designed and presented I’ll probably make an online course of the same material.

‘Dragon Empire’ has been a successful self-publishing project for me, and I’d love to share my experience of the self-publishing journey, so I’m looking forward to sharing more about this workshop as the time nears.

‘Minds of Sand and Light’ Typesetting

When a novel is close to publication, it is ‘typeset’ into a final PDF file that will be plugged into the offset printer that will print the book. Here’s what that PDF looks like – we’re at the ‘proofreading’ stage now, where I have a printed version of the PDF on my desk, and I run through to make sure there are no errors in it.

There are three different fonts in use throughout the manuscript, which is a first time for me. There’s my usual ‘Sabon’ for the ‘story’ text (which you probably don’t notice, because it looks a lot like Times Roman). Then there’s the Council of Artificial Intelligences, who have a chat channel where they are all very random. And then there’s system messages, in the case of this screenshot below of page 28, of the Mobile Infiltration Platform (the android)’s startup messages.

I love all these fonts to bits (top is the Council’s chat channel, middle is the system messages, and bottom is the font for the ‘story’ part)!