Category Archives: fantasy

Cory Doctorow – Little Brother – For your reading pleasure

Posted on April 13, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

This was up for a Best Novel in the Hugo awards and if I’d been eligible to vote that year I’d certainly have voted for it. Yes, it’s aimed at YA, but what the hell, it has Important things to … Continue reading →

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Researching Historical Fantasy

Posted on April 6, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

The first scene of Winterwood came to me almost fully formed. I knew there was a young woman paying a deathbed visit to her estranged mother and finding that there was still no forgiveness between them. I knew the young … Continue reading →

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Brent Weeks – The Way of Shadows – The Night Angel Trilogy #1 – For your reading pleasure

Posted on March 30, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

I discovered Tanya Huff in 2003, Lois McMaster Bujold was a couple of years after that and Patricia Briggs in 2008. Brent Weeks become my discovery of the year in 2009. His Night Angel trilogy is riveting. Having bought the … Continue reading →

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What have I learned about writing?

Posted on March 23, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

Writing is a funny old business. Writers probably learn most by reading. You are what you read. Reading develops your ear for tight prose and snappy dialogue. Without even thinking about it, you learn about character and plot. The difficulty … Continue reading →

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Kari Sperring: Living With Ghosts – For your reading pleasure

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

This is a gorgeous multi-layered work with a cast of characters which includes the city of Merafi – as much a part of this as are Gracielis, failed Tarnaroqui assassin-priest now courtesan and spy; Thiercelin, husband of one of the … Continue reading →

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Sea Shanties, and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s Songkiller Saga

Posted on March 2, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

As a long-time folkie I watched with great amusement as the Good Morning America TV show interviewed Nathan Evans – the twenty-six year old Scottish postman whose Tiktok renditions of sea shanties seem to have sparked off their discovery by … Continue reading →

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Building a Universe – Law and Order in The Psi-Tech Novels

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

More about the universe in which the Psi-Tech books are set. The Monitors – Galactic PolicingFormed in 2391, the Monitors are an interstellar policing force largely concerned with providing law in the space-lanes and for those newly established colonies that … Continue reading →

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Patricia Briggs: Steal the Dragon – For your reading pleasure

Posted on February 16, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

There are no dragons in this book – well there is one, but not a significant one and it only appears on the page once, in a dream.  So having got that out of the way, this is early Briggs … Continue reading →

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Building a Universe – Folding Space – The Psi-Tech Novels.

Posted on February 9, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

Early Space ExplorationHumans established several stations on the moon, and a joint scientific facility on Mars by 2050. At the same time commerical expeditions to mine the Kuiper Belt proved successful, and, following a twenty year scientific study, shipyards were … Continue reading →

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Lois McMaster Bujold: Legacy – Sharing Knife # 2 – For your reading pleasure

Posted on February 2, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

The continuing adventures of Lakewalker, Dag Redwing Hickory and his ‘farmer’ wife Fawn Bluefeld, following on directly from the events in ‘Beguilement’ which ended with Dag and Fawn’s wedding at the Bluefeld farm, having more or less overcome her family’s … Continue reading →

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Building a Universe – The Psi-Techs

Posted on January 26, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

My Psi-Tech Universe has implant-enhanced humans who have telepathy to a greater or lesser extent, combined with other psi talents. My main characters, Cara and Ben are psi-techs. Cara is a top class telepath with a side order of empathy, … Continue reading →

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Lois McMaster Bujold: Beguilement – The Sharing Knife #1 – For your reading pleasure

Posted on January 22, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

All the reviews said: ‘Good, but not as good as Curse of Chalion,’ so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. On the whole I would agree, but to my mind it will be a very exceptional book that is … Continue reading →

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Building a Universe – Power Structures and Personal Stories.

Posted on January 12, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

When I started to write Empire of Dust I didn’t really know much about my setting. I didn’t build my universe first and then people is and dream up stories. The people came first, and along with them a predicament. … Continue reading →

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Charles Stross: The Bloodline Feud – for your reading pleasure

Posted on January 5, 2021 by Jacey Bedford

Charles Stross: The Family Trade – Merchant Princes #1 Two books, one story. I bought them as individual books, but they are now available in the omnibus The Bloodline Feud. Damn you, Charlie Stross! I was just getting into this … Continue reading →

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Looking Both Ways – 2020 and 2021

Posted on December 29, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

As a year, 2020 sucked bigtime. It was not fit for purpose. If I’d paid good money for it I’d want a refund. Sure, it wasn’t too bad in January and February. The weather was miserable so I mostly stayed … Continue reading →

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Lisa Shearin’s Raine Benares books – for your reading pleasure.

Posted on December 8, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

I’ll be perfectly honest, though I liked the first Raine Benares book, Magic Lost, Trouble Found I wasn’t 100% in love with it. Luckily I liked it enough to get the second book, Armed and Magical, which picks up just … Continue reading →

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Scene 1 of Winterwood – author analysis

Posted on December 1, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

This was first written for Tiffani Angus’ blog. Tiff teaches creative writing and publishing. Story interspersed with my comments in bold italic. This first scene pretty much sprang into my mind fully formed. When I started to write I didn’t … Continue reading →

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Anne Lyle: Night’s Masque Trilogy – for your reading pleasure

Posted on November 24, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Published by Angry Robot, The Alchemist of Souls, Merchant of Dreams, and The Prince of Lies are the three books in Anne Lyle’s Night’s Mask Trilogy, set in Elizabethan London with (kind of) aliens. Queen Elizabeth has married, produced heirs … Continue reading →

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Books etc. for Christmas

Posted on November 17, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

2020 has not been the year it was supposed to be. (Not fit for purpose. Can I get a refund?) I didn’t get anywhere as much writing done as I could have, but I read, and re-read an awful lot. … Continue reading →

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Scott Lynch: The Lies of Locke Lamora – for your reading pleasure

Posted on November 10, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Thoroughly absorbing, interesting characters who are changed by events that happen to them, great backstory, twisty plot in the front-story leading to nail-biting tension. Highly recommended. Trying not to give away too many spoilers we get to see the formation … Continue reading →

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What I learned about Tallinn that I couldn’t have found out from a guidebook.

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

I was supposed to be going to the World Science Fiction Convention in New Zealand this year, a country I’ve never been to, even though I visited Ausralia in 2000. Australia and NZ look conveniently close when viewed on a … Continue reading →

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The Road to Publication – a guest blog by Tony Ballantyne

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Short story collections don’t sell. Everyone in publishing will tell you that. Every writer who has a few short stories under their belt loves the idea of having them collected into a slim volume.  Unfortunately, very few people are interested … Continue reading →

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Liz Williams: The Snake Agent – for your reading pleasure

Posted on October 27, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Any book which opens with the main protagonist swinging by his heels in Hell has got my attention from page one. This grabbed me and never let me go. Det. Insp. Chen is the cop whose responsibilities include the underworld … Continue reading →

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Style Sheets

Posted on October 6, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Jacey Bedford There’s a lot of information to keep in your head if you’re writing a book. There’s even more if you’re writing a trilogy or a series. I happily wrote seven books without … Continue reading →

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Joe Abercrombie: Best Served Cold – for your reading pleasure

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Joe Abercrombie never fails to disappoint. After thoroughly exhausting myself reading his First Law trilogy towards the back end of 2011 it took taken me a while to come to Best Served Cold. I anticipated reading it last year but … Continue reading →

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The Rule of Three

Posted on September 22, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

This post first appeared on David Tallerman’s blog. As humans we look for patterns. Three is the smallest number of elements that can form a pattern. Superstition suggests that three is the magic number, or that both bad things and … Continue reading →

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Boy Wizards on the Lam. Three series beginnings – for your reading pleasure

Posted on September 15, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

This is the first of my new alternate Tuesday reading posts, so I thought I’d dip back in time to tell you about three books that are each the first in their own well-loved series. They all owe something to … Continue reading →

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Space Opera

Posted on September 8, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

I write science fiction. I’m pretty sure my sub-genre is space opera. I’m happy with that definition. I grew up reading my dad’s Lensman books and the distinctive Gollancz yellow jacketed SF, however I wasn’t aware of any distinction between … Continue reading →

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Book Blogs

Posted on September 7, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

I’ve been posting writing-related blogs every other Tuesday, and I’ll continue to do that, but from now on I’m also going to do reading-related blogs on the intermediate Tuesdays. Yes, that’s right, this blog is going weekly. I blog everything … Continue reading →

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Game of Thrones Revisited

Posted on August 25, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Just after Game of Thrones finished, Iain Grant sent a few of us some revealing questions about Game of Thrones. I know the ending was contentious, but though I would have wished for a happier ending, I wasn’t honestly expecting … Continue reading →

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The Belgian Refugees of World War One

Posted on August 11, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

In 2017, when Alma Alexander asked if I’d be interested in writing a story for her refugees anthology, Children of A Different Sky, I jumped at the chance. There are so many refugee crises in the world that a writer … Continue reading →

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The Geography of Words

Posted on August 4, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Writing science fiction and fantasy involves worldbuilding. Sometimes we take a concept, strip it right down to basics and invent a planet where the sea is pink, the sky is upside down and the dominant life form has seven tentacles … Continue reading →

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Rejectomancy

Posted on July 28, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

I don’t write much short fiction these days unless I get an invitation to contribute to an anthology. Mostly it’s because I’m too busy writing long fiction. My novels are published by DAW in the USA. I’ve just signed a … Continue reading →

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Getting Things Done – a guest post by Gail Z. Martin

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

I’ll admit it. I have a reputation for getting a lot done. People ask me if I sleep, or take vacations, or have down time. And the truth is that I generally log about seven hours sleep a night, take … Continue reading →

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How Long is a Piece of String?

Posted on June 30, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Chopping and Changing – Revisions, Cuts and Additions. How long should your story or novel be? A piece (story, novel or poem) should be as long as it needs to be – but that’s not always as long as you, … Continue reading →

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How Much is Too Much History? – A guest post by David Tallerman

Posted on June 17, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Though I’ve gone on to write a couple of things since, my novel To End All Wars, out last week from publisher Aethon, was my first stab at writing historical fiction.  It was a dramatic about-turn for me after years … Continue reading →

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A Moment of Stuckness

Posted on May 19, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Anyone who knows me will testify that I’m not usually stuck for words. It’s not that I don’t believe in writer’s block (obviously it is a thing) it’s that I’ve rarely experienced it. However, recently I had a period where … Continue reading →

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How I Got Here From There

Posted on May 5, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

First published on Gillian Polack’s blog in March 2020 for Women’s History Month It took me a long time to get here, possibly too long. If I’d known then, what I know now, it might not have taken so long… … Continue reading →

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The New Normal

Posted on April 21, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

To meet or not to meet – that is the question. I’m a big advocate of critique groups. I’ve been attending the Milford Writers’ Conference since 1998 with enough regularity that eventually I’ve ended up being the secretary. Milford is … Continue reading →

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Fiction Must Make More Sense Than Real Life

Posted on April 6, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Fiction must make more sense than real life. I think we all know that real life isn’t making much sense at the moment. If we wrote about a global pandemic in which presidential staff held hands and prayed that it … Continue reading →

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House Arrest

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Due to Covid 19 we’ve pulled up the drawbridge and dug a shark infested moat around Bedford Towers. No, we’re not sick, but I’m diabetic and my other half has suddenly become classified as elderly. How scary is that? Our … Continue reading →

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An interview first published in SF Signal

Posted on March 10, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

I like doing interviews, especially when the questions are both thoughtful and taxing. Carl Slaughter presented me with an intriguing set of questions way back in 2016. I thought I’d revisit them. CS: Your first series is cyberpunk space opera. … Continue reading →

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Reading Writing and Rewriting

Posted on March 10, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

I was a voracious reader as a child, working my way steadily through the stock of my local public library children’s department. My literature of choice was anything with horses or ponies in it. Some of the books in my … Continue reading →

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Useful book cover tool online

Posted on February 25, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

I posted this to the Milford blog this week, but I’m so taken with it, I thought I’d post it here, too. Whether you’re self-published or traditionally published there’s a good chance that you’ll need to shout out about your … Continue reading →

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Quantifying Success

Posted on February 18, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

A few years ago, Chuck Wendig posted to his Terrible Minds blog saying: ‘It Only Gets Harder Once You’re Published’. (http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2015/08/19/it-only-gets-harder-once-youre-published/) How true. That article really resonated with me. I wonder if authors ever get over the self-doubt thing. When … Continue reading →

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Fantasy Food to Go – Part 2 – Overland

Posted on February 11, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

Land journeys Looking at the amount of storage required on board ship for all the provisions, it quickly becomes obvious that carrying anything close to naval rations for even a small party travelling on land would require wagons or, at … Continue reading →

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Fantasy Food to Go – Part 1 – All at Sea

Posted on January 28, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

As a fantasy writer I’ve given much thought to what characters eat on those epic journeys by land and sea. My Rowankind Trilogy involved stocking the Heart of Oak, Ross’s tops’l schooner, for an Atlantic voyage. You need to base … Continue reading →

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Updated Blog Archive: 2013 to 2019

Posted on January 14, 2020 by Jacey Bedford

  2013 Bated Breath Seven Short Men and a Waif Preparing for Milford Jumping in at the Shallow End Serendipitous Book Browsing Four days to go Three Book Deal Milford Writers Publishers Marketplace Announcement Editor Talk New Book Log on LJ: Karen Traviss: … Continue reading →

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2019 – Retrospective

Posted on December 31, 2019 by Jacey Bedford

2019 has been a pretty good year. I did a few conventions, read a lot of books, finished editing a couple of my own, saw a lot of movies, kept up with the day job, organised (and attended) a couple … Continue reading →

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Creativity and the laugh-track of my life

Posted on December 3, 2019 by Jacey Bedford

I signed up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) at the beginning of November, a commitment to write 50,000 words in a month. It’s fewer than 2000 words a day, so it should be—if not easy—not all that difficult. I’ve … Continue reading →

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