ED MCDONALD

ECM Creative Ltd, the company that owns the rights to BLACKWING, RAVENCRY and CROWFALL, is now offering manuscript structural editing services to fantasy writers.

Details on how to get in touch are given at the bottom of the page. Please read the contents of the page carefully before requesting a manuscript critique.

What types of editing are available?

• Package 1: Cover letter and synopsis review
• Package 2: Cover letter, synopsis and first 50 pages critique
• Package 3: Full manuscript structural edit

Continue reading “ECM Creative Ltd Editing Services” →

It is a strange thing to think about success, and what it means. In this blog I will attempt to explain a little about how I’ve come to think about the concept and what it really means to me now, at the end of my debut year. This is long, introspective, and full of pop-psychology.

Continue reading “The concept of success & writing” →

What epic fantasy fan doesn’t look forward to the big confrontational moments? I know, right? But one of the biggest mistakes I used to make as an aspiring author was getting confused about what it is that I was really enjoying in a fight or battle scene. In this blog, I’m going to use the fight between Hector and Achilles in the 2004 movie Troy to illustrate what it is that makes a story-fight work so well for the audience.

Continue reading “Writing Compelling Fight Scenes – Analysis of Hector vs. Achilles, Troy” →

Writing processes: everyone’s is different. What works for one may not work for others. It’s always best to be ultra-cautious when giving out ‘writing advice,’ since you don’t know whether what you suggest might actually be damaging to someone’s own methods, or might be taken as gospel when it’s only a suggestion. So rather than advise, this is just what I do, and what seems to work for me.

Continue reading “Grinding Ideas” →

Some various updates from the Misery and/or my brain, however those divide.

Continue reading “Updates – CROWFALL & new project” →

The third in my series of blogs about abandoned novels. This one involves a ship and wizards.

Continue reading “Abandoned Projects – 3” →

This year I’ve had difficulty getting to grips with writing a new series. I’ve written about 100k worth of false starts, not including 50k of a story that I’ve since abandoned. I couldn’t work out what was wrong with me: all I had to do was come up with a world, some people with swords, some conflicts and that was it, right? But nothing ever felt quite right.

This week I worked it out.

Continue reading “Writing what’s real in fantasy” →

So here’s the second of the books that I started working on but ultimately abandoned. This one features a female protagonist and is written in third person. Below, I provide my reasoning as to why this didn’t ultimately work as the first chapter of a book.

Continue reading “Abandoned Projects – 2” →