Author Archives: Ken Magee

About Ken Magee

Most folk believe that technology rules their lives. They’re wrong. Dark conspiracies and ancient magic actually dominate this planet. My one mission in life is to open people’s eyes to that fact. My name is Ken Magee and I tell people I write contemporary fantasies which blend adventure and humour with technology and magic. My books live under the tagline ‘ancient magic meets the Internet’. I pretend that they’re works of fiction, because I’m afraid of the powerful people behind the conspiracies… I’m hoping a ‘fiction’ writer will slip under their radar. Up until the point when I discovered about the frightening plot which deliberately caused the recent global financial meltdown, I’d led a fairly normal life. I’d worked for many years in the computer industry in roles ranging from programming through to sales. In the middle of it all, I’d served in the Naval Reserve… which was hard work, but fun. Then in 2010, I decided to make time to finish Dark Tidings, the book I’d started many years earlier (writing not reading). I would have finished it sooner, but life got in the way. It’s finished now (the book, not life). Dark Tidings is book one of the series. The Black Conspiracy and A Darker Shade of Black complete the ‘ancient magic meets the Internet’ trilogy.

Festival of Drabbles 2015

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The amazing Micheal Brookes has come up with the idea of a festival of drabbles. In his words, here are his ideas so far and I’m certainly delighted to support his endeavours.

The first Festival of Drabbles will start on November 9th and run until the 15th. It will be a week long celebration of drabbles and the art of drabble writing including some of the finest drabblists in the world.

If you’re new to drabbles then they are a form of flash fiction in which the story is told in exactly 100 words. I’ve been a fan of the drabble form since they were introduced as a daily feature in the Indie Book Bargains newsletter (now Book Hippo) a few years ago.

As a writer it’s a challenge of economy and editing to tell a story in so few words. It’s also an excellent way to play with new ideas and to explore areas that you normally wouldn’t. As a reader I enjoy a bite sized tale in those few quiet minutes in the day. They’ve also introduced to me to new authors whose work I would otherwise have missed.

It’s a form that deserves greater recognition and so Michael is organising a week of drabble related reading and activities. He already has plans for how his blog The Cult of Me will contribute to International Drabble Week. He’ll share these nearer the time, but one thing is certain, it will include a drabble competition.

How can you help? For now the first job is to raise awareness for this first Festival of Drabbles, so if you have access to any of the following channels then please do the following:

If you have a blog or website then post an announcement for the Festival, you are free to use the logo and text for this purpose.

If you are on Facebook then join the event, invite any friends that you think would be interested and share the event on your timeline and any appropriate groups you participate in.

If you’re on Twitter then tweet a link to this event and if you can use the #festivalofdrabbles hashtag that would be great!

Learn more about Michael at his The Cult of Me blog or check out his guest drabble Clowns.

And don’t forget, if you fancy having a go at a drabble, please check out Are You a Secret Drabblist?

Good luck, Michael, I hope your Festival is a stunning success.

Collective Nouns

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What do you call a pair of crows? Answer – attempted murder.

This type of joke is from a genre called highbrow humour. Why… because you have to have some specific knowledge before you can understand the joke. In this attempted murder case (pun intended) you have to know that the collective noun for three or more crows is a murder. Ah, now the joke makes sense… and leads us nicely into what this post is actually about i.e. collective nouns.

It never ceases to amaze me just how many collective nouns there are in the English language. For example, we have a murder of crows (you knew that!), a belt of asteroids, a cackle of hyenas, a flight of stairs, a sentence of judges, an impatience of wives and a den of thieves. These ones are fairly normal and, I’d guess, fairly widely known. If you Google ‘collective nouns’ you’ll find a wealth of words describing nearly every group imaginable. Even with the abundance of official collective nouns, there are still a lot of groups which have yet to be allocated their own special word.

Here are a few suggestions which could fill the some of the gaps:

  • A blaze of firemen
  • A smothering of Social Workers
  • A gathering of combine harvesters
  • A shoal of nudists
  • A wunch of bankers
  • A collection of philatelists
  • A camp of bell-ringers
  • A heard of listeners
  • A number of mathematicians
  • A drift of castaways
  • A pouch of Chewbaccas
Any more for any more? For example, what is the above group of collective nouns called?

Best opening lines of a novel… ever

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I have been writing for more years than I care to remember. Mainly business writing – things like sales proposals, material for marketing collateral and web site content. I love writing.

However a few years ago I was given the opportunity to explore the world of fiction writing… and I’ve been learning more and more about the craft ever since. My first novel, Dark Tidings, was published in 2011 and since then I’ve completed and published two more.

Of course, I love my books and I think the opening lines create enough interest to make people want to read on… obviously it would be a poor show if they didn’t! But it made me wonder about the best opening lines ever… they say ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ but maybe it’s OK to judge it by its first lines.

The editors of American Book Review selected what they consider the most memorable first lines of novels… 100 Best First Lines of Novels. OK, there are a lot of classics there but none which strike me as the ‘best ever’. I would nevertheless have been very proud of – “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” It’s so good that I now feel I must read the book from which that line comes; William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

All in all, I think my favorite to date is from The Stranger by Camus – “My mother died today, or perhaps it was yesterday.” You just have to read on after that.

I also very much liked how Terry Pratchett opened The Light Fantastic… “The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.”

There are also some very special sentences in books which, had they been the first lines, would have been in contention to be the best in this particular competition e.g. Cathy Cash Spellman’s novel An Excess of Love – “He was as guarded as a virgin, but infinitely more experienced.”

And what about the worst opening lines ever? How about… how about we leave that for another time?

Compound words – a spelling lesson

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When my editor/proofer returned my manuscript of Dark Tidings, I was surprised to see so many corrections to, what I discovered later are referred to as, compound words. Compound words can be used as nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs and can be spelled as one word, two words, or hyphenated. It sometimes depends on how the word is used and where it appears in the sentence. For example, word processing… a PC used for word processing will usually run a word-processing package.

Apparently I had adopted a very ‘relaxed’ style, which means I had spelt words in the way I felt made it easiest for the reader. I actually liked the style, but my publisher wanted formal spelling rules to be followed.

This was quite traumatic because I had to check all the compound words in the book… and that was after I had researched the subject and discovered that there are twenty-one (numbers are always hyphenated) basic rules. Here is an example of one of the rules.

A hyphenated compound is simply a combination of words joined by hyphens. The hyphen unites, and separates, the component words in a way that aids understanding, readability and the correct pronunciation e.g. well-to-do. An open compound is a combination of words so closely associated that they convey a specific idea or concept, but they are spelled as unconnected words e.g. lowest common denominator.

As you can imagine, it took me a while to feel I had a proper handle on the ‘basics’. So now, with handle firmly grasped, I can write my books without the worry of revisiting (not re-visiting) the whole text later. A word of warning though, have a good dictionary to hand at all times because the rules don’t always give you the right answer.

And if you can’t proofread the whole text, at least spot-check it (are the compound words here right or wrong?).

That’s my confession, what about you? What type of words do you always struggle to spell?

If you’d like to know the basic rules, please read the full article – Compound Words – the basics