The Delight of Unexpected Reviews
I was thrilled to discover that two of my books were reviewed and given 5 stars! Shade of Evil and Evil Under The Circle, Parts 1 and 2 of G1: The Guardians, were reviewed by Chris The Story Reading Ape and the reviews can be found on Goodreads, Barnes & Noble and Amazon. You can find all of Chris’ reviews on Goodreads. Of course, you can also find Chris’ reviews on his own blog. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Chris for his kindness and honesty. Having friends who understand fully that you only wish to receive absolutely genuine reviews of your works is beyond valuable.
I was further delighted to find a 5 star review of Intruder from the Thief series of free short stories! The review, posted on Barnes & Noble is so heartening! I quote it below:
This book kept me on the edge of my seat until the last word was read.
There is a serious threat that exudes evil and wants to claim the land in this sci-fi fantasy. Mages, which this author describes as magicians of a sort, are sought to help go up against the evil.
Characters are richly described and likable and fascinating. This is a novella which is a quick read but this reader did not want the story to end. The author is a very talented and creative storyteller. I will be reading many more of his stories. This is an excellent choice of reading for YA.
Review by jesNH, 6th August, 2013. 5 stars awarded.
I would like to thank jesNH for such a glowing review!
Going for a New Look – Again!
Yes, I’m afraid I’m going to be tinkering again! The main page of posts can be rather overwhelming, especially when the posts are long! I’ve decided to try to improve things by making use of a WordPress post facility. This will involve adding the codeword More to all long posts, which will mean that only part of the post will appear on the main page and you will need to click on the More… link in the post to read all of it. One advantage of this is that it will give easier access to other facilities, such as commenting, sharing, rating and liking. In respect of special days (Book Promo Day and Blog Browser Day), I will endeavour to place the codeword in such a place that the link has to be clicked or some of the detail information will be lost to the reader. Obviously, this will be subject to any feedback – positive or negative – as to whether I continue to use the codeword. Also, I will not be going back to posts already displayed. I simply don’t have the time to edit all those posts (around 270 of them)!
If you wish to provide any feedback on this change, at any time, please contact me using the contact form on the blog, or via email if you have my address. I would suggest not using Facebook or Twitter, as messages are too easily lost unless the direct message system is used.
Uncovered: The Naked Manuscript
If by any remote chance you’re waiting for Part 4 of G1: The Guardians, which will also be the first novel I will have released, I’m afraid the waiting must continue. It still lacks a cover. My son is extraordinarily busy now, with negligible time for such extra projects. My own attempts have been woeful, to say the least, and I simply can’t afford to pay anybody to provide a more professional cover. I can assure you all that I am more frustrated than anybody else. I even considered abandoning my original vision for the cover, even if only for the first edition, and going with an extremely simple cover. So desperate have I become! There has been a consequence to this situation, too, in that the work on Part 5 is crawling along.
“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
No – they dream of having more storage space built into their main circuitry! How do I know? Well, I have a Samsung Galaxy Ace S5830i and it is forever complaining that its built-in memory is almost or actually full! The kind folk of Samsung allow the use of micro SD cards to obtain more space. Unfortunately, that really doesn’t help because they have been so miserly as far as the built-in space is concerned! Don’t misunderstand me. This isn’t a problem unique to Samsung, I had, for a short while, an Android tablet, and that suffered from exactly the same problem! Sure, most apps are installed to the SD card, along with things that they handle – such as the Kindle app and the ebooks that you download for it. I was amazed, having watched TV adverts talking about the vast number of available apps, that this ‘phone has so very little actual capacity. Every app installed contributes to the space consumed in the ‘phone itself, regardless of where the app itself is installed to! And even more annoying is the fact that there are pre-installed apps which you can’t uninstall! Some of these are massive (‘bloatware’) and I know that I’ll never use them, but Samsung have decided that they should be locked in, untouchable. I find it increasingly difficult to understand how Samsung, and most other Android device manufacturers, expect to compete with Apple’s devices! For example, the internal, built-in storage of the iPod Touch is impressive. Sure, you can’t expand it, but at least most of the storage is available without all the nonsense problems of the Android competition. Yes, there are locked apps with Apple too, and yes, it would be hugely beneficial if we could remove them, but even then I can get loads more apps on the standard, basic iPod Touch than I can on the Android smartphone!
(Apologies to Philip K Dick, author of the book whose title I have stolen for this section!)
