Samhain Publishing Ltd. Weblog

Hazards of working from home

Repetitive Strain Injury.
Writer’s Bottom.
Feline-inflicted Injuries Due to Smacking Her When She Walks Across Keyboard.
Falling Asleep at Laptop and Accidentally Typing fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff For Six Hundred Lines.
Slowly Solidifying in Chair Due to Extreme Cold of Unheated House.

The alleviation of many of these conditions is a little tricky. I’m currently experimenting with a mix of pen and tablet, vertical mouse, mini keyboard, exercise DVD and water pistol.

I have, however, found what is, in my opinion, the Ultimate Cure for the last condition. I present it to you below.

Tools for Writers (and anyone else who works from home).

Lying in bed one night, thinking about what I’d do if my computer corner were destroyed by flood, fire or plague of electronics-eating locusts—is it just me whose imagination tends to the paranoid?—I found myself making a shopping list of the things I’d have to replace as soon as the desk, chair and computer were back in situ.
And I realized it’s actually quite a useful shopping list for any writer—or anyone who works from home. So I’m sharing it, together with the offer to join in my late-night paranoia.

Spot the Handwavium Contest: Heart of the Volcano, out today.

See all those pretty covers on the front page of the Samhain site. And, ooh, look, for the first time one of them belongs to me!

Can we take a moment to worship Scott Carpenter, god of cover art?

I started writing Heart of the Volcano in late 2008. I’d won the Romantic Novelists’ Association Elizabeth Goudge Award with the first chapter of an as-yet-unwritten faery book, A Stolen Cloak of Feathers, and I was determinedly trying to write the rest of it. It stalled horribly at 37,000 words (I know, ugh) and I shoved it aside and decided to write something short, fun and shapeshifty instead.

Heart of the Volcano wasn’t quite as easy to write as I’d intended it to be. I had to ask people some actual science questions, which is always alarming (research, seriously?). But I worked it out in the end, and sent it off to my then-boss, Angie James. Who, in a spirit of pure evil, didn’t send me a formal acceptance letter, but just marked it as “accepted” on the submissions-tracking spreadsheet (which I manage) and left me to find it. At which point I may have screamed a little.

And now here it is, fresh and shiny and for sale today!

Read on for the blurb, a link to the excerpt, and how to enter the contest.