Monthly Archives February 2013

Blog Integration

February 28, 2013 Articles and Opinions, News

After finding a theme I liked, I have finally managed to get blogs and books onto one site, which should make it a lot simpler to maintain, and hopefully leave more time for writing. Everything is now going to be under the vhfolland.com root domain.When I first switched to Wordpress I did not know what I was doing, which left me with two seperate installs (not even a multi-site) and managing two sets of logins, plugins comments, themes...it was a little overwhelming. Now? I am a lot happier with it, and I've found a theme that looks good and handles blogs and book pages well. You can see the new site now. All the blogs have been transitioned across, and now the last step is updating the feed to all the sites that have my blog syndicated.

Hope you like the new site, because I definitely

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Time Travel Stories and Paradox

February 25, 2013 Articles and Opinions

Ever since HG Wells, there have been stories of time travel. Each of them handle issues of paradox and continuity differently. Some just don't bother, while others work it in as an essential part of the story.
What I am covering here are some of my favourite stories where the element of time travel, continuity and paradox are handled in a science based and logical manner. These are all hard sci-fi, not fantasy.

1. Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany
What is there to say about this book, other than Read It! Multiple overlapping time streams, multiple characters developing at multiple periods, and the books that gave us the simplex, complex and multiplex view of the world. A book that tells its story off-screen and is no less gripping for

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How to migrate from Blogger to WordPress

February 21, 2013 Articles and Opinions, Off-topic, Uncategorized

Migrating content, particularly in this day of search engines and old links, can be tricky if you don't want to lose a lot of ground. However, I found the new Google interface difficult to use and awkward, which is why I started the new blog in the first place, and trying to handle comments was difficult. Ideally I wanted to get all my content in one place without breaking any third party links and losing visitors. Making any links to posts redirect to the new posts without having to manually recode them, or add the annoying "This blog has moved page" was the main target - and if I could get the search engines to redirect that would be even better.

It turns out there is actually a way to do this.

The process I used was based on this article from Digital Inspirations with a few

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Blogs and Updates

February 20, 2013 weekly round up

Well, the free day went well, and shifted several hundred ebooks. That's more than I expected for something I did spur of the moment with no promotion. With luck some readers will enjoy it.My rather larger update has to do with the blog: I'm migrating my old blogger content to this blog, having found a way to do it successfully with a redirect on the original pages so the links redirect instead of breaking. The small downside is that the importer has been rather too enthusiatic in creating new categories, so I'm going to be doing a bit of trimming once it has finished. Meanwhile, if you spot any other problems on the blog with the imported content, please let me know.Otherwise my spare time, if I have any today, will be spent writing. Unfortunately my current project switched genre on me

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Sample Sunday – Going Under

February 17, 2013 Uncategorized

For Sample Sunday this week, it's Going Under. Mainly because I have a new cover to show off and the book is free today.

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Going Under – finalised and upcoming Free Day

February 16, 2013 Uncategorized

The final cover for Going Under has come out, and will be working its way through the Amazon listings and feed today. I am a little nervous as there is a different formatting system in play for the ebook. It is meant to get rid of those annoying gaps between paragraphs, leaving blank lines as obvious scene breaks.

Anyone who picked up the pre-release copy should now have their update. If not, let me know.

And the Launch is tomorrow, when it will be free for a day, so don't forget to stop by Amazon and pick your copy up!

Image from Amazon.co.uk

The main problem I've had is the same as every other author: reaching readers. Going Under will be in Select for ninety days, just to try and broaden my reader

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A bitty week

February 8, 2013 Uncategorized

I've been writing solidly all week: my word count is up by 10,000 words and a lot of that is revision.  There's another novella almost out the door, and another Brooke's Vale story nearly complete (the last one I did is back from editing) and a fresh story started in my notepad: not to mention the 1,500 word short I still need to type up from last week.  Now I just need to decide whether to release the Brooke's Vale stories all as $0.99 shorts or finish the collection first. There's an interesting situation with reverted rights for some media tie-ins I did long before Fire Season was published (I'm fairly sure I mentioned this isn't my first penname), which is taking some sorting out: 14 finished novels, and either a media licence or an extensive rewrite required to publish them... Let's

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Free Standing Guard

February 1, 2013 News

Standing Guard is free to download on Amazon for the next three days: 30th Jan, 31st Jan and 1st Feb, world-wide.

Flying home from their display seems a perfect time for Jim to train his wife on radio procedures. An SOS on a non-aviation channel was the last thing he expected to hear. The laws of sea and air are clear: the person who receives a distress call is bound to assist.

Even if they are in a very old aircraft, over a very large ocean, looking for a very small boat.

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