Category Archives: Article

From Humble Beginnings: 40k Short Stories That Deserve Their Own Series

There’s a long history in Black Library fiction – and Warhammer 40,000 in particular – of characters who started off in short story form and went on to bigger things. From the early Inferno! days of Gaunt’s Ghosts and the Last Chancers, to Severina Raine and Sister Augusta more recently, characters who started off in a single short story have regularly gone on to feature in novels and novellas of their own, or simply long-running series of short stories. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some recent-ish 40k short stories and pick out a few which seem ripe for developing into longer stories, and whose characters (or settings) could go on to be the fan-favourites of the future.

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EXCLUSIVE! Introducing: First Team by Robbie MacNiven

Today I’ve got something really special for you, with a Track of Words exclusive in which I can reveal the next book in Aconyte’s growing range of Marvel prose novels – First Team by Robbie MacNiven, the latest instalment in the Marvel: Xavier’s Institute series. I’ve been a fan of Robbie’s writing ever since I reviewed his first Warhammer 40,000 short story (check out that review here) back in 2015, and I had a lot of fun reading his first novel for Aconyte – The Doom of Fallowhearth – so I can’t wait to see how he gets on with this X-Men novel! It’s due to be published in ebook and as a US paperback on the 2nd February 2021, with the UK paperback following on the 4th March.

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Legacies: The Power of the Past – Matthew Ward Guest Post

Hello and welcome to the first ever Track of Words guest post – The Power of the Past – in which the fantastic Matthew Ward discusses the importance of legacies in storytelling. With the second novel in Matthew’s Legacy Trilogy just released via Orbit, I’m delighted to present this guest post as part of the Legacy of Steel blog tour, alongside some fantastic bloggers and SFF websites. I’ll link out to all the other stops on the tour at the end of this article, and I would highly recommend you check out all the reviews, interviews and guest posts that make up the tour.

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Monthly Roundup – October 2020

Welcome to October’s Monthly Roundup here on Track of Words – I hope you had a good month, in spite of the continuing craziness! For this month’s article I’m continuing to play around with the format, to try and figure out what works best. I thought it might be interesting to use this article as a way of collecting together all of the content that I’ve recently published here on Track of Words, so you can take a look through and see if you missed anything. With that in mind, I’ll quickly run through the reviews, author interviews and blog posts that I posted since my last roundup, then talk a little about what else I’ve been reading before giving a quick life update to follow on from last month.

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November’s 2020 Releases From Aconyte Books

Have you checked out any of Aconyte Books’ cool new tie-in fiction yet? Last month I put together an article showing all of the new novels coming out in October from Aconyte, and I’m going to keep banging the drum for this great new publisher with another article along the same lines. While not quite as hectic as October’s release schedule, it looks like November is still going to see a fair few new Aconyte novels, for four different IPs, so there’s lots of cool stuff that’s going to be available to read very soon. I’ll do a quick recap of October’s releases, then take a brief look at all of the upcoming titles for November – including links to author interviews where appropriate.

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A Traveller’s Guide to Peter Fehervari’s Dark Coil

With the release of the short story Altar of Maws (May 2023), Peter Fehervari’s catalogue of Warhammer 40,000 fiction – known informally as The Dark Coil – currently totals 18 stories. Every piece of 40k fiction is linked by taking place within a single shared universe, but The Dark Coil goes way beyond that. These stories share much deeper connections, between them forming a web of characters, locations, themes and recurring motifs that is gradually becoming more and more apparent as additional stories are published. One of the joys of reading Fehervari’s work is in unpicking these subtle connections, but it can be daunting to know where to start looking.

Welcome, then, to A Traveller’s Guide to the Dark Coil.

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5 Lesser-Known Warhammer 40k Stories

Warhammer 40,000 is a huge, expansive setting, and Black Library churns out dozens of new stories every year, ranging from standalone short stories to grand, sweeping multi-novel series. In amongst the huge mass of 40k fiction out there, it’s inevitable that some stories don’t quite get the attention they deserve, especially bearing in mind BL’s relentless release schedule and the opportunities for new releases to fall through the cracks. Just because something isn’t mega popular doesn’t mean it isn’t worth tracking down and reading, however. In this article I’m taking a look at a few examples of 40k stories that – in my opinion – deserve to receive far more praise than I tend to see them getting.

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October 2020 Releases From Aconyte Books

Over the last few months I’ve been having a lot of fun reading the first titles to be published by Aconyte Books – the new ‘novels division’ of Asmodee Games. While I’m not much of a board gamer, so I’m not really familiar (yet) with the worlds these stories are illustrating, I am a big fantasy and science fiction fan, so the idea of a whole heap of new settings to explore is pretty exciting! I mean, that’s the joy of reading IP fiction, right? Aconyte’s release schedule is absolutely packed full of great-sounding books, so I thought it might be useful to take a look at everything that’s coming out this month. For each title I’ve included links to my reviews and author interviews where available!

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Monthly Roundup – September 2020

It’s time for another look back at all the books I’ve been reading over the last few weeks, but this time I’ve taken a slightly different approach and called this a Monthly Roundup, rather than the usual Monthly Highlights. The main difference is that I’m going to include a quick sort of ‘life update’ as well as the reading recap, partly to provide a bit of a heads up about what to expect from Track of Words for the next few months and partly as a bit of an outlet for myself. Feel free to read as much or as little of this as you’re interested in – no obligations either way!

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Writing Resources on Track of Words

While Track of Words was originally conceived as a site purely for book reviews, over the years it’s expanded to include author interviews, blog posts, and various (hopefully) useful resources for readers and fans of science fiction, fantasy and horror. In the last couple of years I’ve also published quite a few articles and interviews aimed at anyone interested in writing SFF and horror, and I’ve got plans for lots more in this vein. With that in mind, I thought it might be useful to have a single source for all these resources, where I can link out to everything that I’ve created so far and keep updated as and when new resources become available.

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