Category Archives: Games Workshop
An Old Friend Returns – Welcome back to Engage the Enemy!
Unfortunately, the free book promotion on Smashwords has ended, but thank you to everyone who picked up one of my books.
One of my favorite stories to tell about my forays into fiction regards a submission that I made to Inferno! magazine. It was a tale set in the grim darkness of the far future in Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer 40K, and it featured my favorite chapter of Space Marines, the Space Wolves. Anyway, I formed a partnership with my co-author who would later write with me as Lee Lightner. Here’s the amusing part of the story – my short story was rejected.
I had received it back and was basically told that it was unusable. I reached out and contacted the editor and to his immense credit, he took the time to tell me what he didn’t like about it (besides everything). I listened to what he said and asked if I rewrote it and returned it to him the next day if he would at least take the time to read it. He said yes. That evening I typed about as fast as I could and stayed up far too late for my own good as I reworked everything. The next day, it was accepted. Ultimately, it led to my two novels, Sons of Fenris and Wolf’s Honour.
Never give up.
Inferno! is long gone, but Engage the Enemy was republished this week by my good friends at Black Library. No royalties for me on this one, but I’m utterly pleased to see a story that meant so much to me reappear. Here’s the link.
June Update
My apologies for not getting much done on the blog this month. I’ve always read on blogs about how things come up to distract authors – now, I understand. I’ve included a little bit for everyone below.
First of all, work continues on all things related to the Crimson Hawks and In the Service of the King. I’m currently on track to have the book e-published before June 30. I’ve still got a bit to go on the second book, Ashes and Cinders, and the third book, Coins and Crusaders, was the subject of my Camp Nanowrimo attempt. It is currently stuck at a dismal 6000 words. Still, all in all, it should be a good month for the Hawks.
For my Games Workshop fans, I had a very good conversation with Jeff Smith, my Space Wolf co-author, earlier this month. I’m hopeful that we may be getting together sometime this summer to start work on another novel to propose to Black Library.
Souls of the Everwood has suffered some delays due to my distractions, but I’m thinking that it’s only about a month behind In the Service of the King. My current goal is to publish it before the end of summer. Krueger’s second book, tentatively titled Black Powder and Brimstone, shouldn’t be far behind.
I’ve made progress with getting some artwork for the cover of a superhero anthology that I’m working on with a couple of other talented writers.
White Wolf fans should check out the following blog. I’m excited about the possibilities of this new game, and hopefully, I’ll have a chance to work with a number of old friends and some very talented people.
Finally, I’m also close to seeing the publication of Charming, a novel that I’ve written with my friend John Peck. In this day and age of fairy tale mania, we’ve had our comedic fantasy novel written for a year and a half. With all the movies coming out about fairy tales, I promise that I have a story that will make you laugh and make you think at the same time.
Thanks for all the patience and I’ll see if I can’t get an excerpt from one of these works up here in the next week.
All the best!
Harry Heckel 