The being that Iho Grace is writing the book of poetry called, A Dance Called Dwarka for has been absent from my life experience for around six weeks. I ventured into the memory of that life more than once in that time to recollect the sensations, the feelings, and awe that the Mauritian merchant felt when he saw the being from a watery world in …
Markus, is a character from the Harmon Sueno novel, United, who came to me when I heard about the Pentecostal snake handlers in the Appalachian mountains quoting this verse from the Gospel of Mark, Mark 16:17–18 ‘17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick …
I have various degrees of affiliation with the characters of the books I write. The experience of being the character, occupying their bodies, mind, and spirit is not a unique experience unto me. Many, if not most writers of novels, short stories are granted this gift when they scribe the narratives of their stories. However, for me, this experience …
I just received the pencil sketch of the cover of A Flickering Light Called Fate, by Iho Grace from Amber Coubrough my cover illustrator today. She’s due with her third child, so the effort to get this sketch out is simply heroic. I’m so grateful that she has given me a glimpse of what the cover will look like. There is a …
Taking the Oho Ake universe into Amazon KDP exclusively wasn’t a move that I had strategised. With Draft2Digital, I would have had a wide distribution for the ebooks, across the world, including with Amazon, as well as dozens of other digital book retail stores. Due to their censorship of some of the content in the books (which was taken completely …
My whakapapa on my father’s father’s side of the family goes back to Opunake, Te Atiawa (Taranaki Maori Iwi/tribe). I’ve felt that connection flowing through my veins like a persistent warmth for my entire existence in my body, but not as strong as when I came back to Te Ika a Maui in late 2002 from Vancouver, …
In my writing process, I will often take nights, days, and weeks away from a narrative of a novel so it can formulate for me. Holding down a very physical day job means that I’m reluctant to come home and write at night. I wrote Sanctum (2nd edition) in a blur of nights, over months of toiling away as it flowed …
During the global smackdown, I have felt the call away from the hustle and bustle of the technological, residential, cultural mayhem of the city. I’m fortunate enough to live in a city that has nature coursing through it like veins of a great heart, one carved up until its parts remain in the highest and most inhospitable locales …
Part of my writing process is in-depth research. Deepening on whose writing through me, what I’m writing, whether its poetry, a horror/macabre/erotic dark fantasy short story, an inspiring, heartfelt emotive tale or a conglomeration of occult knowledge, science fiction, fantasy, conscious awakening, galactic magical realism, I’ll have to spend hours reading, discovering, and downloading into my being a plethora of facts to compile a book. It’s perhaps the …
The government’s enforced house arrest is all but over for me. My other job (when I’m not writing, researching, producing book trailers, doing voiceovers, editing, proofreading, and dealing with taxation departments and ebook platforms in the USA) is a trade, and I’m allowed to go work on the building site that me and builders, engineers, electricians, and …