Split-Personality

Writing whilst trying to hold down a full-time job is a lot harder than most give credit to. I speak to a lot of people who think I spend my time in artistic pursuits and faffing around being ‘creative’, composing light and airy prose and dreaming up fantastic concepts. Actually, most of my day is […]

Book Review: Robert Jordan’s The Dragon Reborn

The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Dragon Reborn is a bit of a departure from the previous books in that the narrative doesn’t really follow Rand’al Thor (the main character of the first two books), despite him being ‘the Dragon Reborn’ of the title. Instead, it focuses on […]

Keeping up Appearances

Whilst going through my short story folder, I realised that I haven’t really been pushing much or writing much new stuff. I’ve been so focused on working on my novels that I haven’t given much thought to shorter fiction. Now I recall that David Farland mentioned in a recent post that a writer needs to […]

Review: The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan

The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Great Hunt is the second book in the Wheel of Time series, which has a huge following across the globe. The book continues the story of Rand al’Thor and his friends from Two Rivers, with their destinies woven tightly into the fate […]

Waaaaaah!!! Nobody Want’s to Play With Me!

Hope you’re all doing well so far in the new year. Life sucks in the UK at the moment, with our new nazi prime minister cutting funding left, right and centre, leaving us with a skeleton service at a local level, lots of unemployed people, non-profits going bust and no tax-cuts to reflect the lack […]

The Eye of the World

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Eye of the World is the first book in Robert Jordan’s international bestselling Wheel of Time series. I’ve been eyeing this series up for a long time, but have been put off by the prohibitive length of each installment and […]

2011 – The Future?

First off, the chocolate keyboard doesn’t have much of anything to do with today’s blog. It’s a nebulas link bringing together writing (blog and the wider sense) and a common new years resolution of stop eating chocolate. In fact dieting is the number one resolution for most people. The second being to write a book. […]

British Asian Writers

The Bookseller have published an article on their website, on the reading habits of the British South Asian community (http://www.thebookseller.com/in-depth/feature/136096-an-untapped-market.html). The thrust of the article is that British Asian writers tend to do well in sales and winning awards, but that there is only a handful of them. When I launched Seven Earths eJournal with the […]

Fight for Your Library

Last Friday, I spent two hours at Burnley Central Library as a Living Library Book. I was titled, Muslim Author. Most of the two hours were spent talking to Ben Kenyon from the Burnley Express and then to Mary, one of the librarians. The sub-zero temperatures and icy roads had kept away most of the […]

End of a Decade

The more you put something off, the harder it gets to just do it. As usual, my creative output has been hampered by the complexities and demands of the day job, which though rewarding, is quite time-consuming and burdensome on the mind. That said, I have been reading a lot of fiction and also managed […]