News & Blog by HJ Harper
Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
One of the most serious afflictions that strikes down writers is Procrastination. The symptoms are taking a long time to get started, lurking on Twitter and Facebook, and saying you’ll get around to something tomorrow. I myself am a sufferer of Procrastination, a crippling ailment which knows no boundaries across age, gender, race or religion and strikes as many as nine in ten writers. When I...
Of all the members of the Star League, I’ve always thought Leigh Faunus’s powers would be the most useful overall. Her animancer powers let her talk to animals, and usually they do what she asks. If you had animancer powers, you could do everything from politely ask a bear or a crocodile not to eat you, to asking a spider to drop on somebody’s head as a joke. Leigh’s powers also let her work very...
I’m sure I’m not alone in saying I have a plan for the zombie apocalypse: kick out the upstairs window, jump onto the garage roof, then fight my way to higher ground. It pays to be prepared – after all, according to likely scenarios, Australia could be the first place to be overrun by the undead. However, if zombies like Roger Romero from Raising the Dead are the ones after us, I don’t think...
Since I’m about to spill some secrets about ninjas here, you should probably check to see that there aren’t any in the room with you right now. Look to your left. Look to your right. Look under your chair. No ninjas? WRONG! You forgot to look up, and if you had, you probably would’ve found a ninja waiting to strike. Don’t bother checking now, the ninja has already escaped out the window. Asuka...
When I was younger, my best friend and I desperately wanted to be werewolves. Unlike Star League member, Connor Lowe, who was born a werewolf, we were both utterly human. So we got a book about werewolves out from the library and studied the pages eagerly until we found what we wanted to know: apparently all you had to do to be transformed was sleep under a full moon. My friend and I looked at each...
Explosions! Car chases! Kung fu fights! As an author, I seem to spend a lot of time sitting in a chair in front of my computer, and so you’d think I wouldn’t have a lot to do with these sorts of over-the-top action scenes. Well, while I might not be the one busting out some awesome kung fu skills against a roomful of angry robots, action scenes are a very important part of my job. My first series...
