The Order of Winter

I’m running very late on this blog tour thingy but here goes.

Thanks to R.A.Smith https://projectshadowlondon.wordpress.com/2014/08/07/how-i-write-blog-tour-thingy/ for linking me on it and giving me the opportunity to have a play.

If you haven’t read the Grenshall Manor Chronicles (books Oblivion Storm and Primal Storm) yet then you really should.

Also thanks to I C Publishing www.ICPublishing.ca for starting this.

There are four things I’m meant to be talking about .

1. How do you start your writing projects?

Well for me it’s usually to do with a voice. A character will start talking to me and won’t let me go until I write for them. For my current project this was as I was walking through Manchester in a thunder storm. A slightly depressed, wacky and very capable young woman crept into my head and wouldn’t let me go. She’s still there and she is very upset with me for not…

Conflict is common over the depiction of race and gender in speculative fiction. As a middle-class first-world white bloke I recognise that I’m in a very privileged position and over-represented in popular culture. But as a nerd I also recognise why people get defensive about challenges to a frequently mocked subculture. I’ve written a post about this and recent superhero films over one Curnblog. Here’s the start of it…

Where Did Storm Go? Representing Race and Gender in Superhero Films

Superhero films and the comics that spawned them are famous for their traditionally white male fan-base. It’s a fan-base to which the creators play, with the vast majority of superheroes, and particularly the high profile ones, being white men.

This raises issues for the balanced representation of gender and race and for the diversity of perspectives possible within these stories. It becomes even more problematic as these stories reach out to…