Stretched Thin

Today, I’m treating this blog post as therapy. I’m feeling over-stretched and out of sorts. As usual, I have taken on too much. My new day job is very demanding and often leaves me feeling exhausted at the end of the day. I’ve also made a commitment to my old job, to help tie things […]

Clash of Mythologies

The troll hefts its makeshift club and advances cautiously towards the glowing blue figure. He roars a challenge at the strange creature to show his dominance. But the blue figure is uncowed. She just smiles as she hovers above the ground and raises a single hand. The earth rumbles in response. In my last post, […]

Ink and Algorithms: AI vs. Human Writing

I wanted to test the mettle of AI, so as an experiment I fed Microsoft Copilot the blurb from my novel, The Changeling King. Here is the original prompt complete with the text of my blurb: Write me a chapter of a fantasy story using this blurb: At the height of the Age of the […]

Author in Transition

I know. I’ve been neglecting you. I could give you a list of reasons, all of them good, logical, honest and inadequate. The truth is that I have been writing intermittently; switching projects, writing new stuff, writing old stuff, then writing some more new stuff. I have been in-between different jobs in my other […]

Book Reviews – New Policy and Reviewing Template

I’ve been reviewing books for two years now and have been approached for reviews by indie authors, publicists and even a few named authors. In my day job I’m a Chief Exec of a not-for-profit organisation, and as a matter of course, I tend to review my organisational policies every year. So why not carry […]

Book Review: Sean Benham’s Blope

Blope by Sean Benham My rating: 1 of 5 stars BLOPE is an sf story set in an alternate reality in which Taiwan (the Eternally Free Taiwan) is the world power, and its Emperor has won a big chunk of America in a Russian Roulette game against the US President. The Emperor decides to run […]

Review: White Tiger by Kylie Chan

**** The first thing you notice about White Tiger is the size of the tome. It’s 528 pages long and much of it seems like padding, although I’m sure the author would argue that it was needed to develop the characters more fully. White Tiger is an urban fantasy that uses the rich mythology of […]

Live Again

After a couple of weeks of trying to transition from the old site, which still exists in the ether, I have finally managed to configure the trollking web address to the blog site and set up my email using Google Apps. So hopefully you can continue to visit for book reviews and news about my […]

Book Review: Catching Fire (Hunger Games #2)

4 out of 5 With the Hunger Games movie coming out soon and my recently developed fascination with archery, I thought it was high time to review the sequel to the brilliant original by Suzanne Collins. Oh, I should say at this point that if you are thinking of reading the original book, which is […]

Book Review: City of Bones by Cassandra Clare

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare My rating: 2 of 5 stars City of Bones is the first book in the successful ‘The Mortal Instruments’ series by Cassandra Clare. The cover art features a city skyline representing New York (that is where the story is set), with the muscular torso of a man in the […]