I had a bit of fun with ‘Facebook Shops’ recently. A recent attempt by the social media company to break into the eCommerce market, I’d generally avoided Facebook Shops in the past as it was simply too difficult to load products onto it. Remarkably complicated and driven by a clunky algorithm, it always seemed to… Read more »
As promised, Liath Luachra: The Seeking is finally being released today. It’s something of a ‘soft’ launch however (in that you wont see much fanfare) as the book will only be available in digital form through the Irish Imbas Books website (and in paperback form through Amazon) for the next month or two. After that,… Read more »
Recently, the Cherokee Nation in the United States gave notice to Stellantic – the company making ‘Cherokee Jeeps’ – that it was time to stop using their name and culture for commercial branding purposes. This followed actions by other American tribes (e.g. pressures on the Washington Redskins football team to change their name, the Navaho… Read more »
Attached is a short but interesting video on Brian Boru from an old television series called ‘Ancient Warriors‘. This being an American series, much of the pronunuciation of Irish names and terms is pretty dodgy and the producers seem to have got their locations badly mixed up. That said, they do cover the inter-tribal discord… Read more »
It’s interesting when you use different languages for what’s supposed to be the same thing or the same word defining the ‘thing’. The problem, of course, is that langauge is culturally-based and, often, a word cannot be directly translated or even explained without a good understanding of the culture in question. In English, the word… Read more »
You can’t really understand mythology if you don’t have the culture and the historical context – one of the reasons Western-based “internet mythology” remains an ‘entertainment’ rather than actual ‘knowledge’. When it comes to mythology, one of the biggest mistakes people tend to make is an enthusiatic and frenzied focus on individual events and records… Read more »
Attached are some conceptual images we used during the development of the Dark Dawn project. Here’s a bit of the draft media release: The latest product from IRISH IMBAS is ‘Caomhaoir Fuilsmeartha/ Dark Dawn’. An experimental narrative project, told in both Irish and English, it relates the story of a dying warrior’s attempts to protect… Read more »
In terms of plot patterns, ‘Peaky Blinders’ is probably one of the best shows on television at the moment and I’ve had a lot of respect for the writer Stephen Knight ever since seeing his startlingly innovative series ‘Taboo’ with Tom Hardy. This interesting interesting post from the Irish Times shows some of the links… Read more »
This was a snippet from Liath Luachra: The Seeking which I first put online this day a year ago. Today I sent the completed manuscript off to my editor for a final check prior to its release in March so it seems apt to put it out again. ———————————- Emerging from the cave, the warrior… Read more »
With crazy workloads and various schedule upsets last year (not looking at you, Covid!), Liath Luachra 3 (The Seeking) was one of the main projects I was working on to suffer unexpected delays. Originally, my intention had been to release the final book in December 2020, but the on again-off again nature of the way… Read more »
It’s hard to believe but it’s apparently been two years since this home-made trailer for the Irish Woman Warrior Series ( a series of books on the fictional adventures of an Irish woman warrior and her mercenary war party, Na Cinéaltaí – The Friendly Ones) first appeared online. It’s certainly been an interesting (and slightly… Read more »
I’m finishing up this year with a beautiful photo from Aida Pascual that summarises my feelings for 2020 and 2021 far more effectively than words probably could. 2020 was extremely hard for everyone and although there’s hope for stability and peace in 2021, for many that remains a distant goal across a dangerous traverse. On… Read more »
