Letters from Alifros

Interview: Adventues in SciFi Publishing

2012-01-18T09:21:00.001-05:00

Last fall at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego (my new favorite U.S. city) there was so much going on that I almost forgot that I'd been interviewed a few times. Now I've stumbled on a link to one of those interviews, which Moses Siregar bravely conducted as we marched into the chaos of the Tor house party.

This interview's just five minutes long. It's part of a longer WFC podcast, full of great conversations with Scott Lynch, Connie Willis, Patrick Rothfuss, Robin Sullivan, Elizabeth Bear and several others. It's amazing what people will say if you catch them in Con-mode.

Here's a snippet of my interview:

And here's the whole podcast (scroll down for the link). My comments start at 1:35. Enjoy!

Things I Won't Do to Support My Writing Career

2011-12-06T10:04:00.001-05:00

There's a side to the writing life we don't talk about, although thousands of us labor at it daily. I'm speaking of publicity, promotion, the fascinating selves we show the world. It's nothing new. Hemingway understood the value of his suntan and his safaris. Fitzgerald and Zelda knew what they were doing when the frolicked in Parisian fountains. Today we frolic in public for much the same reasons, and with the same studied care. We just do it with keyboards and clicks.

Don't let me fool you; I'm not made of nobler stuff. I'm vain, frivolous and incurably silly, and I crave approval like a golden retriever. And while I write for many reasons--love, longing, pain, generosity, selfishness, frustration--one of these is certainly the wish to entertain. Having been entertained myself several times, I can say with certainty that it's a pleasant sensation.

I hope, furthermore, to become a figure of preposterous influence in world affairs, and such power cannot be seized but through fame. Invisibility is death. Facebook is forever. This is especially true for writers. We must put ourselves out there. We must share far more than our work. Let the form be moving confessional or monkey caper, so long as it floats our name before the many. We must dance, we must post. And I shall.

~ HOWEVER: ~

There are capers I won't perform, sins I won't commit for stardom. Here's my initial list.

Things I won't do to support my writing career:

1. Lie.

2. Adulterate my writing. This includes such travesties as contests in which the prize is the winner's name inserted, like a goody in a box of breakfast cereal, somewhere in the text. Needless to say it also includes product placement of any kind--including, of course, Maggi soup.

3. Slander, stab, betray, poke or verbally puke on other writers. They are not "the competition." They're family. Of course sincere critique is another matter; I'm speaking here of unwarranted nastiness. I do, however, reserve the right to skewer anyone who goes out of his or her way to be a Frank Miller or a V.S. Naipaul (that is, a wanker or an asshole).

4. Write about anything I don't take genuine interest in, no matter how marketable.
4b. Attempt to repackage my writing to fit a current fad or hot subgenre.
4c. Inject popular motifs (ducks, zombies, iPads, etc.) where they don't naturally fit.

4. Ridicule the opinions of others.

5. Water down my own.

6. Praise work because it's popular, or because the writer is famous.
b. ...dismiss work for the same reasons.

7. Babble on (aloud or online) when I have nothing real to say, out of love for my own voice.

8. Think of my writing as product--or God forbid, content. This is the ultimate corruption.

I expect this list to grow--there are many sins to choose from, after all. Suggestions welcome.

Esquire / Aspen super-short short stories released

2011-12-06T09:49:00.001-05:00

A brief follow-up to the Esquire / Aspen Writers' Foundation flash-fiction contest: our 78-word micro-stories are now online. Scroll down to read my own 78-word magnum opus. And be sure to check out the other nine as well. It's actually startling how much you can say in a story less than twice as long as this post.

Seven Days in Neverland, Or What the World Fantasy Convention, Esquire Magazine and the U.S.S. Midway Have in Common

2011-11-04T20:08:00.001-04:00

You’re forgiven if you readthe following as a single, continuous name-drop. That’s exactly what it is,because the last week in my life has been all about other people—wise people,gifted people, astonishingly wonderful people. This is a gathering of mymemories of them, before my feet settle entirely on the ground.

The trip should have been simple: fly to San Diego,spend one hour on a panel and two days in the embrace of the fantasy community, bracket the convention with family time with my cousin Jon and hisawesome better half, Christy. That simple plan lasted about five minutes. Here's how it actually played out:

Two weeks before WFC: myniece Prachi announces her engagement (CONGRATS, you two!). Soon thereafter I find myself makingarrangements to rendezvous with her and her fiance the day after theconvention. No problem; can’t wait.

One week before WFC: a callerfloors me with the news that I’m a finalist in the utterly bizarre EsquireMagazine contest described in a previous post, and that they’re ready to fly me toNew York on Halloween day. No problem; I can cut the trip short and still seeeverybody.

Six days before WFC: finallyget my panel assignment. Going to be mighty well prepared.

Three days before WFC: mycousin gets called for jury duty. At least we’ll still have nights.

Two days before WFC: theweather gods announce that the northeast is going to be mauled by an earlysnowstorm. Blackouts guaranteed. I fly off worrying how my wife Kiran will keepherself and the animals warm.

Wednesday, 26 Oct: Hartfordto San Diego. Prepare for my panel. Listen to the audiobook of Graham Joyce’s TheSilent Land and am almost in tears.Dinner with Jon and Christy. Best Mexican meal in ten years.

Thusday, 27 Oct: ExploringSan Diego in the blazing sun. Drive to the beach at La Joya--sea lions,pelicans, osprey, tidal pools. Ask myself, bewildered, why I’ve been in NewEngland for fourteen years.

Arrive that night at the WFCconvention center (huge, hulking, green; visions of Gaddafi’s compound) withsand in my shoes. Registration desk abandoned. Undocumented, I go in search ofKaren Lord’s reading (from her World Fantasy Award-nominated Redemption in Indigo), meet her agent Sally Harding desperately seekingthe same room. Lord’s reading is brilliant and mischievous, and it’s a shameto slip away before it’s over—but my own panel’s starting.

Nothing remarkable here. Thewould-be moderator [I won’t name him; he has twice in my hearing introducedhimself as “moderately famous” and so requires no further boost] has failed tonotice the [m] beside his name in the panel description, and promptly hands offthat responsibility to Barb Galler-Smith, who rises nimbly to the occasion. Wediscuss “The Ship (or Dirigible) as a Fantastical Character” and I try to steerus away from the predictable question: “What if the ship is ACTUALLY ALIVE, youknow, with ITS OWN BRAIN and maybe A FACE, and, LUNGS, and KIDNEYS…” but thedraw of such questions is irresistible. The hour passes. I’m overjoyed (willalways be overjoyed) at the chance to sign some books.

Friday, 28 Oct: Mad joy.Writers, writers, writers. Bump into Lord early on and find she’s even smarterand funnier one-on-one. Coffee with Rani Graff (Graff Publications, Tel Aviv)and fantasist Kate Elliott; her son has told her she must read Red Wolf. More coffee with Jonathon and Shawna Burgess, ofAlaska. Jonathon is not only at work on his own fantasy novel, but has twentytimes my experience at sea, and I quake to consider the mistakes he may unearthin my books. Too late now. Quick hellos to Nalo Hopkinson, John Connolly,Mishell Baker, N.K. Jemisin. Great, boisterous panel with Connolly, GrahamJoyce, Pat Murphy and others, fighting about fairy tales. Went to DarylGregory’s book launch party (best beer & nicest host in the compound) andsaw Liz Argall, who I have missed for her bright goodness and knowledge ofanimals. Meet Rome Quezada, senior editor at the Science Fiction Book Club.Daryl is charming & deadpan funny, as ever.

Then comes dinner, with myown wünder-agent, John Jarrold; and Betsy Mitchell, outgoing and legendaryleader of Del Rey. Around our table lumber giants in the field--Tim Pratt, GregBear, Robert Silverberg—and I am a little boy again, agog.

Parties afterwards—loud,packed, overwhelming. Peat Brett and Sam Sykes are lobbing missiles of wit;they also introduce me to the incredibly impressive Myke Cole. Myke is awriter, soldier and three-tour veteran of the war in Iraq, with a three-bookdeal from Ace (Shadow Ops) soon toburst upon the genre.

Back home, the snow hasbegun.

Liz Gorinsky, Paul Kane, Guy Gavriel Kay, Diana L. Paxson

Saturday, 29 October: More,and more intensely, the same. Jonathon Burgess tells me of almost dying on hisfather’s fishing boat. Silverberg tells me that much SFF disappoints him at acraft level; “the music of the language” just isn’t there, he says. Lunch ispeanuts and dry granola. The hotel staff are trying to extort $150 from KarenLord to pick up her mail. There’s a panel on wishes and Faustian bargains,chaired by Guy Gavriel Kay, who is so erudite that the other panelists tend toanswer “Yes” [full stop] in reply to his long, qualifier-rich questions.

At happy hour I’m happy tosee Scott Lynch, however briefly; he is a mystery presence to be sure. Thenit’s an interview with Gillian Redfearn, editorial director of Gollancz, mybeloved U.K. publisher. I’d met Gillian only once (I work directly with SimonSpanton), but quickly discover that the Dread Power she holds over the heads ofwriters has not kept her from being the nicest person you’ll ever meet. As ourchat winds down I learn that she’s going to New York the same day I am. In amatter of moments it’s decided: she will be my +1 at the Esquire event. Minuteslater, alone among the Gaddafi flower beds, I begin to wonder what the hell Ithought I was doing. Why should this worldly editor waste her valuable New Yorktime at a party with some random author? Especially one hosted by a magazinededicated to the proposition that all men deserve Louis Vuitton.

Too late. Next panel. HollyBlack and Patrick Rothfuss discuss fairies. Apparently the better sort arenasty. Back home, no power; my dear wife is walking around the house inGore-Tex and gloves.

Dinner with Theodora Goss,now Professor Goss (as well as an amzing author). We take the tram to Old Town,San Diego, and have such an intense discussion that we don’t notice that therestaurant is filling up with the gory undead. A zombie crawl has ended here;when at last we look around us we see nothing but bloody, decaying mouthsgulping tequilas and chile relleno.

Parties follow, interminableand welcome still. At N.K. Jemisin’s event we play Twister, and I deport myselfacceptably until felled by Liz Argall, who goes on to fell all who come beforeher (lastly ScottEdelman) in this game she’d neverplayed before. Five or six people I wanted to see are mysteriously elsewhere,though. I am staggering home sore and puzzled when Karen Lord appears out ofthe foliage and tells me of “the British party,” on an upper balcony. Spottingmy hesitation, she tugs my sleeve decisively. The next phase of debaucherybegins.

Sunday, 30 Oct: Thank God I’ma lightweight drinker. No hangover to speak of, though I’m so exhausted I canbarely think. Still I recover enough to enjoy the day immensely when Prachi andher fiance, Shreyas, pick me up at Gaddafi Gate. We have a great meal at the SanDiego seaport, then march the waterfront under the blazing sun, stopping toadmire the Star of India(beautiful, ancient fore-and-aft rigged tall ship). H.M.S. Surprise (from the film Master and Commander) and the U.S.S. Midway (on which the Japanese surrender was signed; theseWWII aircraft carriers served as my size model for I.M.S. Chathrand, the giant sailing ship in my series. They areH*U*G*E when you stand in their shadow, but small beside today’s equivalents).

^^^^^^^^^^^ WORLD FANTASY COVERAGE ABOVE
vvvvvvvvvv ESQUIRE/NEW YORK COVERAGE BELOW

Monday, 31 Oct: Flight to NewYork. Gillian and Myke Cole are on the same airplane. When we land, Gillian takes off so fastI’m certain she’s rethinking this whole Esquire adventure. But there’s no escape from baggageclaim, and there I learn that she’s actually quite looking forward to it. Thisshould set my mind at ease, but doesn’t.

Trains to Penn Station, thena short march to the hotel, which is adjacent to the Empire State Building. Inmy room there’s a king-size bed, and Rihanna, staring up at me from the coverof a complimentary Esquire. She isdressed in chocolate shavings, or perhaps they’re strands of seaweed from LaJoya. Quick glass of wine downstairs with the other finalists, then a beer withmy friend David Bell, who is kind enough to journey all the way to the hotelvicinity after a work day that lasted until eight. David tells me that hisfather handed him Esquire in histeens, along with the stern explanation that it mattered, in the late 20^thcentury, how any serious man presented himself to the world. It had an effect,David admits.

Tuesday, 1 Nov: Ascent to the Esquire offices, in the Hearst Tower. The Hearst lobby is asilver double-escalator parting an aluminum tidal wave, flooded with light froma vast, remote upper atrium. Matrix agents (ear pieces & all) guard theentrance ferociously, but we are whisked inside and high into the stratosphere.Here, in the Esquire conference room, we work for three hours with ColumMcCann, National Book Award winner and one of the most amazing fiction writersalive. Colum is a passionate and generous teacher as well as a brilliant mind,and that time was just amazing. The other finalists, who I’m getting to know inmoments and snatches, are all delightful: strong writers from immenselydifferent backgrounds. One is retiring from 15 years on the radio in WestVirginia, another a smoke jumper who parachutes into Montana forest fires. Alltheir stories are superb.

Halfway through the workshop, I slip away & put on my glad rags in the men's room, fearing there won’t be time later on. DavidGranger, Esquire’s editor-in-chief,surprises me with my pants off. He is unflappable, not to say unaware of me.

Suddenly it’s five o’clock:time to meet Gillian downstairs & escort her up for a cocktail hour hosted by MrGranger, in his eyrie on the 44^th floor. But the drink is not to be.There’s no one to be spared to escort us through the bunker defenses at groundlevel: once outside, I’m out. That’s quite alright with me, actually: I feelsomewhat lost among the impeccably groomed.

There’s Gillian at thecorner, in good spirits and a cocktail dress. She’s not put out to be lockedout, and we have a pretty great time finding our way by train to the Brooklynwaterfront. I forget when I learn (but am amazed to learn) that this is herfirst visit to New York). Afterstaggering around in the windswept darkness awhile, we take shelter in a humbleItalian restaurant, down some beer and calamari, and then it’s showtime. A fewmore twists and turns, and we reach the Esquire Apartment.

Oh, that place. Picture ahuge, turn-of-the-century garment factory on the waterfront, crowned by animmensely wide, four-story tower with 14’ tall clock faces looking out theBrooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, lower Manhattan and the East River. Nowhollow out the inside, all the way to the roof. Run a big glass elevatorstraight up the middle, wrap a glass-and-hardwood staircase around theelevator, and build floating hardwood floors at various heights as one ascends.Place multiple delux bars and expensive sculpture on each floor. Glass in theclock faces, leaving the cast iron arms and frame in situ. Sprinkle withaquaria, light shows and hanging crystal spheres, add loud music and fancy horsd’oeuvres. Blow in beautiful people as one might insulation, until the place isbursting with them.

Gillian Redfearn on the roof

That’s the scene. I think I'm ready, having glimpsed the apartment’s website. As it happens I can barelyspeak. The best I can manage is to turn to Gillian and say, “Welcome to NewYork—we do this all the time, you know.”

We finalists read our tiny stories inrapid succession beside the Steinway. How anyone is able to digest all ten isbeyond me, but they seem to. People actually come forward and speak to us intelligently, and the compliments feel sincere. They’rereaders, these beautiful people. At the microphone, I think unaccountably of a green stuffed dinosaur that my poodle once disemboweled.

Events soon start to blur.Lisa Consiglio of the Aspen Writers Foundation (which co-sponsored the competition) makes a gracious speech,thanking Esquire for its 78 years of commitment to serious writing (acompliment very much deserved; forget the crack about Louis Vuitton).Don Julio (the tequila company) gives away all the tequila the masses candrink—including, if you ask especially, glasses of Don Julio 1942, aged in oak.Specially trained barmen smoothly transfer our drinks from glass to plastic(classy plastic) before we step out on the rooftop patio, lest we drop something lethally. I wonder if theywill be transferred back again when we descended (no).

Posing with Adrienne Celt, one of the finalists

A stranger high-five'sme. An old, white-suited man with a cane lets me help him down the Cinderellastaircase. A young woman lolls on a divan beneath a fur that could hide a grizzlybear. Jon Fine of Amazon stands on a landing, larger than a grizzly, powerstreaming from him like waves of heat.

After meeting Josh Ritter,who plays two f---king brilliant songs for us, I get up my courage to say helloto him and find an incredibly friendly, down-to-earth soul in the space filledby the unapproachable star a moment ago. His talent is shattering. So is thefall my camera takes when a stranger tries to take a photo of me with ColumMcCann—later I download some earlier shots, the Fuji’s last full measure. In afit of generosity the man presses five twenties into my hand, thenvaporizes—poof—before I can speak.

To my delight, Nate Ochs (thesmoke jumper) wins the competition: his story is beautiful, and he had notwritten a word in ten years. It will appear next year in Esquire.

Late that night, after Gillian catches a taxi back to Manhattan, and theAgents herd us gently out the doors, and Jon Fine doesn’t quite persuade us tojoin him at a bar called Superfine (or rather, as he puts it repeatedly,SUPERFINE!), we finalists drift in a dream back to the hotel.There we shed our glad rags and pull on pajamas, pile on & around Nate’sbed, toast him, and laugh & bemoan the writing life for so long that at last eventhe street below grow quiet.

The next morning we scatter,and real life resumes. My plan had been to cap the trip off with a quick tripdown to Occupy Wall Street. But to go there for an hour seems almost a shamefulact—that is to say, an act, not a commitment—and the truth is I long for home.I’m there by evening; Kiran and the animals and the restored electric lightsdraw me in. Fantasies are fine things, but I have stumbled, exhausted, back towaking life.

San Diego Bound

2011-10-26T10:53:00.001-04:00

So, it's off to World Fantasy, at last. Just signing off here. I'll be on a panel Thursday night at 9:00 PM: "The Ship (or Dirigible) as a Fantasy Character." Not a bad subject. With any luck I'll feel a bit like a dirigible myself at that hour, with plenty of hydrogen (if not hot air) to float me through.

Feeling very, very happy at the prospect of connecting with the SFF community again. And there's family waiting in San Diego too. I'm one seriously lucky guy. See you all soon.

Esquire Magazine Short Fiction Smackdown - I'm a Finalist (!?)

2011-10-21T12:54:00.000-04:00

Sometimes worlds are just bent on colliding.

This man can write.

To my great surprise (and bewilderment, frankly), I've just been informed that I'm a finalist in Esquire Magazine's short-short fiction contest, administered by The Aspen Writers' Foundation. The lovely prize is a day and night in New York--the day spent partly in a workshop with the superb writer Colum McCann (!! Ta tu go hiontach !!), and the evening at the Esquire Penthouse in Brooklyn, where the ten finalists will first be made drunk, and then pitted against one another in a ring for a fight to the death with genuine medieval knives, flails and axes...no, no, that's too easy. We'll actually be competing before a live audience of literary heavyweights, and trying hard to invest our short-short-short stories with appropriate gravitas. And I do mean short: as this is Esquire's 78th anniversary party, our stories had to be exactly 78 words long. The ~~survivor~~ winner gets a truly awesome prize: an expense-paid week at the Aspen Writers' Foundation summer festival & workshop. In Aspen. That's Aspen, Colorado. Where the foothills are taller than anything in Massachusetts.

The funniest part is that Esquire is flying me straight from the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, where I'm headed on Thursday. In the space of 36 hours I'll go from discussing enchanted pirate ships to Proust.

I would love to share my immortal words with you here--I could put it in 36-point bold and not fill your screen--but it is the property of Esquire now, and I'm secretly hoping it will appear next to a photo shoot of Elena Anaya in a future issue. Pray for me.

-------
Update: pictures of the Esquire party pad here. It'll do.

Cool new cover art for Book II Polish edition

2011-09-18T09:10:00.001-04:00

I don't even have a hardcopy of this myself yet (nor have I quite mastered Polish), but I'm really loving these paintings. I'm fairly sure that this one, too, is by Damian Bajowski, though I haven''t been able to confirm that yet.

At first glance you may only see two ships in this painting. The wow-effect strikes when you notice the third.

The River of Shadows: Review of Reviews

2011-09-12T11:49:00.003-04:00

Here (as of 9/9/2011) are all the reviews I’m aware of for Book III. Some of these quite slipped past my radar as I was completing the draft of Book IV!

Most of these are quite positive (unhappy reviewers may have simply jumped ship after Book II) but I've left the fair and the foul side by side. For the print magazines, the link takes you elsewhere on my blog for a preview.

Fantasy Book Critic

Fantasyliterature.com

Realms of Fantasy

SciFiNow

SF London

SFX

Black Gate

The Barnes and Noble Review (scroll down after clicking link)

Bookgeeks.co.uk

The Insatiable Critic

The SF Site

Falcata Times:

Lowly’s

(Know of another review? Please leave a comment for me here & I'll add it).

Night of the Swarm Cover Art!!

2011-08-21T20:52:00.001-04:00

Another thing of beauty is born. My editor has forwarded me the amazing new cover painting by Edward Miller. I can say right now that this is my favorite of the four.

The demon (or more properly, maukslar) here depicted plays a very significant role in the last Chathrand novel. Scroll down for a little taste of the scene wherein it first appears.

Thasha snapped awake. The raft was not moving. ‘What happened? Did we wreck?’

‘Softly!’ whispered Hercól. ‘We are not wrecked, but beached in the shallows, and we are all of us blind. Ramachni’s vision-spell has ended. There was a strange sound from behind us. Like thunder, or a monstrous drum.’

Thasha groped along the edge of the raft. Perfect blackness; every one of them blind except Ramachni. ‘Where’s he gone?’ she asked.

‘Up a tree, with Ensyl,’ said Bolutu. ‘We couldn’t talk him out of it – or very well prevent his going. Hark!’

This time she heard it: a deep rumbling, far off but furious. The sound seemed to carry through the very fabric of the forest. When it ended the silence was profound.

‘Ramachni’s singing,’ Pazel whispered. ‘I think he’s weaving a new spell. And that wasn’t thunder, Hercól. It was a voice.’

‘A voice.’ Dastu spoke with undisguised scorn. ‘You’re mad as mockingbirds, you know that? What sort of voice?’

Pazel made no answer, and the silence lingered. Then he said, ‘A demon’s?’

Even as he spoke, light appeared, a stabbing red light that made them all recoil. Wincing, Thasha forced herself to look: the glow came from about a quarter-mile away, at the height of the forest roof. Already it was growing, spreading. ‘Tree of Heaven, that’s fire!’ said Corporal Mandric. ‘The mucking forest is on fire!’

‘Do not move!’ said Ramachni suddenly. Thasha heard the mage and Ensyl scrambling aboard, felt Ramachni’s sleek shoulder brush her arm. ‘Be silent, now,’ he said, ‘and whatever happens, do not leave the raft. We are in unspeakable danger.’

The light became a sharp red ring: the leaf-layer, burning outward from a central point, like dry grass around a bonfire. The fire’s glow danced on the river beneath it, and soon the red-rimmed hole was as wide as the river itself. But there it stopped. The blinding light faded, leaving only a fringe of crackling fire, and another light replaced it: pale blue and gentle. It was the Polar Candle, the little Southern moon. The fire had burned through all four leaf-layers and opened a window on a clear night sky.

Oh Gods, it’s true.

In the fiery gap a monstrous head had appeared. A hideous sight: part human, part snake, a head twice the sized of an elephant's. Fire dripped from its jaws, dark runes were etched upon its forehead, and its eyes were two great yellow lamps. A long neck followed, snaking in through the burning hole. The lamp-eyes swung back and forth, casting the trees in a sickly radiance. When they passed over her, Thasha felt a prickling in her mind. She shuddered. Now it was Pazel’s turn to reach for her, pull her close. The lamp-eyes returned. When they touched the raft again they grew still.

Beside her, Ramachni tensed, bearing his tiny teeth, flexing his claws one by one. Then the creature roared: a deafening, complex blast of noise that shook them to their bones. Beside her, Pazel’s face showed a horror unlike that of the others, and suddenly she knew that he was understanding. His Gift had given him the demon’s language. There was meaning in that sound.

--------------

And with that, dear readers, it's back to the book for me.

Wonderful Realms of Fantasy Review of The River of Shadows

2011-08-18T12:02:00.000-04:00

This is a preview (first two pages) of a long and exceptionally thorough review in the August 2011 Realms of Fantasy magazine. If you're not a subscriber (and yes, there are digital subscriptions available) to ROF, I suggest you take a look. It's been the standard-bearer for fantasy for a long time, with good reason.

Click on the images to expand.

River of Shadows SFX Review (print)

2011-08-01T11:51:00.000-04:00

Another great one.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow Pt. 2: Selected Complete Speaking Parts

2011-07-25T11:50:00.016-04:00

Mum's the word, 'arry.

***Spoilers & Nothing But Spoilers Below.***

Like a handful of other people scattered across the globe, I was excited about the last Harry Potter movie. I am a fan of the books and the films, though unevenly in both cases (the books peaked for me with Goblet of Fire; among the films, Alfonso Cuaron’s Prisoner of Azkaban towers over the rest). But I’ll freely admit it: I’m a sucker for any epic with both brains and heart, and Rowling's epic has both. I feel a sense of loss knowing that our time with these characters, and the actors who portrayed them so vividly, is over.

Deathly Hallows Part II was respectable. Its shortcomings, like its strengths, are largely present in the book as well. The greatest weakness for me in both was the calamitous rush, that left extraordinarily little room for the quirky and sometimes fascinating characters that are the lifeblood of the story. A few of the side characters, like Maggie Smith’s wonderful Prof. McGonagall, were featured somewhat prominently. The vast majority were not, and the participation of some was literally reduced to a wordless syllable or two.

What a way to say goodbye.

Note that the quotes below are drawn from memory, after a single viewing of the film. I await your corrections.

------------------------------

Robby Coltraine (Rubeus Hagrid):
1. “Harry, nooo! What the frak are ye dooin’ here?”
2. “Haaaarry.” [big fuzzy smile]

Gary Oldman (BAFTA Winner, Emmy Nominee) (Sirius Black):
1. “Quicker than falling asleep.”
2. “Until the end.”

Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy):
1. “I’ve missed fruitlessly snapping & sneering at you, POTTER!”
2. (moments later) “I think that’s my magic thingy you’re holding, POTTER!”

Jason Isaacs (Golden Globe Nominee) (Lucious Malfoy): 1. “My lord, is this attack not the most, most ridiculous…” (2) “I don’t know…”

Helena Bonham Carter: (Emmy Winner, BAFTA winner, Oscar Nominee) (Bellatrix Lestrange):
1. “Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
2. “Is he dead?”
3. “HA HA HA HA HA….URCH!”

Jim Broadbent (Academy Award winner) (Prof. Slughorn). *mumble mumble* “My robes!”

Emma Thompson (Double Academy Award winner) (Prof. Trelawney): “Gaaa!”

Devon Murray (Seamus Finnegan): “That’s nothin’ to go on.”

Katie Leung (Cho Chang) “Harry—”

Natalia Tena (Nymphadora Tonks): [Tell me, somebody! Surely she spoke before her death?]

Miriam Margolyes (BAFTA & L.A. Critics Circle Award Winner, Olivier Award Nominee) (Prof. Sprout): “Aaaaaah!”

Dave Legeno (Fenrir Greyback) “My Lord.”

Oliver Phelps (George Weasley): “You all right, Fred?”

James Phelps (Fred Weasley): “Yeah.”

Julie Walters: (BAFTA & Emmy Winner, 2X Academy Award Nominee) (Molly Weasley): “Not my daughter you BITCH!”

Mark Williams (Arthur Weasley):*sniff*

Bonnie Wright (Ginny Weasley): “Hello.”

Talking fantasy writing, MFA programs, and the conclusion of two epics: my chat with David Anthony Durham

2011-07-19T09:22:00.000-04:00

Novelist David Anthony Durham and I have been friends for a few years now, since getting acquainted over a Korean dinner at Readercon in Boston. We were even neighbors for a while, and I'm selfishly sorry that he's moving back to Scotland with his family (though it sounds like a GREAT place to live).

Our books differ immensely, but we've always had a lot to talk about. This two-way interview & conversation ranges all over the place, and gives a few glimpses of the conclusions of both our sagas. Check it out over at FANTASY BOOK CRITIC.COM.

Muppet from hell

2011-06-22T13:58:00.000-04:00

**** DISCLAIMER: THE FOLLOWING DREAM WAS JUST THAT – A DREAM. IT DOES NOT REFLECT MY VIEWS ON SEXUALITY, SESAME STREET OR JUST ABOUT ANYTHING (except possibly the dangers of television). FOR THE RECORD MY SINGLE TRUE HERO IS MAHATMA GANDHI.

I present the dream here just as I had it. You could call it evidence of what deadline pressure & the resulting insomnia can do, even to the gentlest of souls. ****

Last night’s dream:

I turn on a big television (intending to watch Star Wars I think) and there is Grover from Sesame Street, but wearing a sombrero and holding a machine gun. He looks into the camera and says, quite amiably: 'Saludos, amigos! I am Emiliano Zapata, the only Mexican revolutionary to marry a fellow soldier. Oh, here he is now!'

Enter Kermit. Grover, hysterical with joy, begins to hug him and make kissy-kissy sounds. Then things start getting weird.

KERMIT: Grover, sheesh.
GROVER: Not Grover--Zapata! I missed you! I missed you! (This part may have been in Spanish).
KERMIT: OK, enough. People are watching.
GROVER: I missed you! Drop your pants!
KERMIT: WHAT? No!
GROVER: Drop your pants! Drop your pants!
KERMIT: Grover, get off me! I think you need to see a doctor! Let go!

They fight. Grover is thrusting with his pelvis. Finally Kermit breaks away and stalks offscreen.

GROVER: AH HAAA HAAA HAAA HAAAA!

He fires the machine gun. The camera pans left and Kermit is being blown to fluffy green smithereens. Grover is very, very thorough, and still howling with deranged laughter, and there is the sound too of innocent bystanders crying out as smoke fills the air. When the camera pans back he is in extreme close-up, still firing, and then he swivels triumphantly and points the gun into the camera and fires again, and the glass of the TV breaks.

Grover is then able to fire into the room where I sit watching. I don't know how I escape that room alive but I am pinned down in the next by the gunfire, which destroys my windows and the turtle tank. The firing stops but when I peak around the corner the TV is hobbling forward, like R2D2 with restraining bolts, and Grover's face is still on the broken screen. Someone whispers that he's reloading. I can't move, suddenly, and realize that it's because I too am a muppet and whoever was operating my wires has dropped me and fled. Then I wake up screaming.

**** SEE DISCLAIMER ABOVE ****

A full-page RIVER review: SciFiNow Magazine

2011-06-08T18:01:00.000-04:00

This one really made me smile. But I can't help feeling I've missed an opportunity, as Mr. Rundle finds the so-far-anonymous editor only "sometimes" maddening. To me the editor's maddening always. Worse still, he won't get help. Maybe when he's forced at last to attach his real name to his opinions in Book IV we'll see a little accountability. Hmm, that gives me a GREAT idea [fade to evil laughter].

Cheap 18-Year Highland Whiskey! Download Now!

2011-06-06T13:19:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I read a friend’s Amazon reviews, and was glad I was barefoot: otherwise I’d be out of a laptop. He’s a brilliant writer and a challenging one. His books are a blast. They’re also quirky and dark. Predictably his reviews are all over the place. But the one that set me off did so because it so perfectly captured a disconnect that is hurting just about everyone who reads, writes or has any other passionate relationship with books.

The review was pure vinegar. It whined about cover art and about the table of contents. It carped at publishers for “extortion”—I imagine someone’s dog was kidnapped, not to be returned without 100 proofs-of-purchase. But the reviewer saved his real venom for the author himself. He was getting faster at his trade, but was still “nowhere near” fast enough at providing sequels. At the same time his book was “rushed” and “insufficiently edited.”

Given that the reviewer himself had several hundred (insufficiently edited) Amazon-review notches to his belt, you might assume he preferred quantity to quality. But you’d be wrong. I explored his dungeon of disappointments. One review after another lamented shoddy editing, unresolved plot details and other artifacts of haste. And every sequel arrived too slowly. The reviewer was a tragic victim of unscrupulous hacks and the industry that made them rich. He deserved better, and he deserved it RIGHT NOW.

If this Power Sniveler ™ stood alone in his crankiness I would have nothing to say. Unfortunately he’s only an extreme example of a common malady. The glut of “free” content (in truth no more free than clean air and water, but that’s another rant) encourages us all to act like fiends. We want novels our way. That is, we want them brilliant and beautifully written and polished and instantly completed and cheap—or free, to judge by the proliferation of steal-this-book clubs. We want novels to flow like tweets and read like Cervantes. We want old Scotch whiskey at Budweiser speeds, and at the turn of a tap. We will never get it, however, and we need to stop pretending that we should.

I have scores of writer friends: published and unpublished, genre and mainstream. A few are somewhat rich, and of those, a very few are so because of their writing. Like two. Most are quite the opposite: they are financially desperate, and work like sled dogs. Except of course that writers work alone, hauling their massive sleds with everything they’ve got, paws bleeding, eyes on some blizzard-shrouded horizon they may never reach.

There’s no one standing on the sled with a whip, of course. Nobody forces us to be storytellers, after all, like the gaming-slaves in Chinese prisons. Many of my friends (even those less favored by the fickle god of sales) consider themselves fortunate to be writing at all. I certainly do. There’s a joy in this work that I’ve never found elsewhere: a joy that led me to write invisibly for two decades before my first publishing success.

Indeed it’s that very joy—and my belief that good things need not be produced like bad beer—that occasionally nudge me to speak up. Writing is not doomed. The house we’ve built is not rotten; it’s a good house, actually. But the furnace roaring day and night in the basement, pumping hot air into every room, irritating and distracting us from what we love: that should scare us. I’d encourage everyone to resist the logic of the machine.

Right, back to Book IV with me. I’ve got a deadline after all.

On flawed characters, growing up in Iowa, and the end of The Chathrand Voyage: my interview on Fictional Frontiers

2011-05-21T14:28:00.000-04:00

Here's the Dolby noise-reduction version of my (really fun) interview with fictional frontiers host Sohaib. This show originally played on WNJC-1360 AM Philadelphia.

This is a long one, guys--35 minutes. If I have time I'll post a few highlights here in a week or two.

New River of Shadows Audiobook Clip (read by a professional, rather than, well, me)

2011-04-30T21:56:00.002-04:00

Tantor Media has been kind enough to provide this 8-minute clip from the unabridged audio version of The River of Shadows, read by actor Michael Page. I think this man's amazing.

The clip comes from Chapter 3, called "The Orfuin Club." It's one of the strangest things I've ever written. For those of you who've read the first two books, you'll hear from an old friend by the name of Arunis, but the other characters are all new to Book III.

The whole book takes a whopping 24 hours to narrate, I understand. Big thanks to Liz Ellis for creating & sharing this clip.

Here's the clip:

file storage online

New Interview on Mira Bartók's Blog

2011-04-24T20:20:00.000-04:00

Artist, writer and all-around wonder-worker Mira Bartók has just posted an interview with me on her great blog Mira's List. She gets me talking about the shape of The Chathrand Voyage so far, the writing of The River of Shadows, the value & pitfalls of MFAs, and several other startling matters.

If you're not familiar with Mira's new memoir The Memory Palace, I urge you to check it out. The book is an exquisitely written, loving and creatively imagine account of Mira and her sister's difficult relationship with her troubled but artistically gifted mother, and the complicated turn this takes after Mira herself suffers a brain injury. As the title suggests, the book is also a subtle exploration of memory itself.

And for artists of any sort interested in fellowships or grants, Mira's List is a fantastic resource.

Guest Post at Grasping for the Wind: Daring to Be Imperfect

2011-04-19T21:22:00.001-04:00

A plea for more risk-taking in epic fantasy.

This guest post was just published yesterday at Grasping for the Wind. It's long, but I promise it's chock-full-of-nuts. Here's a taste:

We all know what makes “a good read.” Some elements...we can train ourselves to produce on demand. Others we must chase, like bright, sassy birds. The latter include coolness, irony, “attitude,” the essential twist, the careful darting beyond the reader’s moral comfort zone (far enough to shock, but never to appall). You need all these skills, but don’t worry—you can have them. They’re for sale. The old chestnut informs us that writing can’t be taught, but that is guff. Writing is taught everywhere, endlessly, like plumbing and architecture. Writing instruction is a massive business, and it thrives because it works.

Up to a point.

Because what can’t be taught are the furious intangibles. Vision. Benediction. Existential terror. Deep wonder. Aching need. These are not for sale. These things—however secular your orientation—you must pray for.

And a bit about Tolkien:

Just imagine the disaster if someone had persuaded Tolkien to tinker—to correct the aforementioned flaws... Lose the elvish, lose the birthday party, lose the talking trees! Man those hobbits up! You can’t seriously expect us to publish twelve hundred pages about some helpless, hairy gnomes! Cut the travel-talk. And for God’s sake, let Aragorn and this Arwen babe get their hands on each other. Couldn’t they hook up in Chapter Three?

Any and all of these “improvements” might have been urged upon Tolkien (the rookie Tolkien, the nobody) if he had written The Lord of the Rings today. They might well have been given as preconditions for being taken seriously, let alone published.

You can read the full, ranting, raving behemoth of an essay here.

Felthrup Speaks: The River of Shadows CD audiobook on sale (and Reviewed!).

2011-04-18T09:30:00.005-04:00

UPDATE: Liz Ellis at The Insatiable Critic has just reviewed the audiobook, and her verdict is seriously positive. Read it here.

This one caught me by surprise. With 24 hours to go before the book & ebook publication, Tantor has made its unabridged 19-CD audio version available for early purchase directly from its website.

At this link you can hear a 3-minute clip, read by actor Michael Page. Not the most action-packed three minutes, to be sure--but quintessential Felthrup. And Page does that rat so well.

I'm expecting to be able to post a longer clip from the audiobook (a whole chapter, in fact) sometime this week. Stay tuned!

The Gollancz hardbacks cometh!

2011-04-13T10:26:00.001-04:00

The box just arrived, with a delightfully heavy kathump on my front porch. Six days to publication!

Fantasy Book Critic's Review of Book III

2011-04-08T09:59:00.000-04:00

Robert Thompson and Liviu Suciu share their responses to The River of Shadows. It's a very positive review, but also very well written, so I'll resist the urge to pull out all the aw-shucks lines & just urge you to have a look at the whole over at Fantasy Book Critic.

The River of Shadows: Two Brief Excerpts

2011-04-06T10:12:00.005-04:00

With two weeks (wheeee heeee!) to go until publication, I'm offering a series of short excerpts for readers anxious to get started.

Here are two. The first is taken from the very beginning of the book (the same few pages that I recorded recently, minus the rambling story-so-far introduction). The second occurs much further along, in a moment of crisis, and contains mild spoilers.

I hope you enjoy them. Soon enough the whole book will be available, and you won't need these anymore....

Excerpt One (Beginning of Book III):

online backup

Excerpt Two (from Chapter 23, "Stealing the Nilstone"
mild spoiler alert!)
):

file upload storage

The River of Shadows Liftoff Party

2011-03-28T20:53:00.000-04:00

If you're anywhere near Western Massachusetts (or can arrange to be) I very much hope you'll join me, Kiran and many friends in a seriously overdue celebration:

Party

to celebrate the publication (at long last) of

THE RIVER OF SHADOWS

Book III of The Chathrand Voyage Quartet

HAPPY HOUR, FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 5:30-7:30 PM, at Amherst Books
8 Main St, Amherst MA

Drinks (booze and other) • Indian Snacks • Cake • Books for Sale

---------------------------------------------

This time around I’m going to mix it up a bit. I’ll read briefly—promise—and then do a Q&A / informal chat, in which I hope other writer-friends will help with the tougher questions. After that it’s just drink—mingle--sign books--return to step 1.

We will also squeeze in a game or two, including a “most over-the-top reading of a single rant, argument or other extreme moment in the series” contest. There will be PR IZES, so brush off your dramatic skills!

Open to everyone, so share this info as you like. Please RSVP here or at my public email address: robertvsredick [ack!] gmail [duht!] com.

Audio Clip: First Pages of THE RIVER OF SHADOWS

2011-03-18T16:00:00.000-04:00

I promised some time ago to provide an audio excerpt or two from The River of Shadows, Book III of The Chathrand Voyage. Here’s one at at last. All it took to get me to the microphone was the deep silence that swallowed this house when Kiran flew off to India for two weeks.

This excerpt is very short: just the first five pages of the novel. I made myself stop just before the first, seriously enormous, spoiler. I truly hate spoilers. Even when someone asks for one ("Come on, just tell me who you kill off this time around") I find it nearly impossible to deliver.

That said, well, here’s a SPOILER ALERT: the long version of this recording begins with an eight-minute of “Story So Far” freeform ramble. I hope it may be useful for those who need a reminder of what went down in The Red Wolf Conspiracy and The Rats and The Ruling Sea (Books I & II). It’s more of a skeleton-sketch of the plot than anything else. But I know I wouldn’t want that skeleton in my head, if I were coming to the series for the first time.

Both versions are up on filedropper, and can be downloaded by anyone. No sign-in necessary.

Short version (first pages of The River of Shadows):
http://www.filedropper.com/rosfirstpages

Long version (“Story-so-far” ramble + the above):
http://www.filedropper.com/rosfirstpagesseriesrecap

There will be more goodies (written and/or recorded) before the April 19 publication. Enjoy!

Evie Ng's Chathrand Voyage Sketches

2011-03-17T12:32:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, graphic artist & book illustrator Evie Ng sent me a great surprise: a tapestry of wonderful sketches she'd just made of Pazel, Thasha, Neeps & various others from The Chathrand Voyage. The image is pretty big, so I'm just posting some details. You can see the whole thing by clicking here.

"I am not falling for that look."

I'm honored that Evie felt inspired to draw my characters, and impressed by how much emotion she captures in every face. I told her I'd have to find more occasions for Mr Bolutu to look as happy as she draws him. In fact it wouldn't harm any of them to feel this good again before the series concludes... fingers crossed.

Evie tells me she doesn't have an online portfolio yet, but I hope that will soon change. Meanwhile, Evie: any chance I can persuade you to give Sandor Ott a try?

River of Shadows ARC

2011-03-02T10:08:00.000-05:00

So happy to be holding my third-born at last. This is the Del Rey edition, which will wear the ghost knife (Plazic Blade) cover when it hits the shelves April 19.

Live weight: 574 pages.

First sentence:

It might have been a palace window in Etherhorde: round, red-tinted, firelit from within, but it was a living eye set in a wall of sapphire lunging east through a cobalt sea.

On the shelves in the U.K. and the U.S. APRIL 19.

Meanwhile I'm recording a chapter in my best (not-quite-Richard-Burton) reading voice. It should be online very soon, along with excerpts in PDF form. Right, back to birthing Book IV

For Egypt

2011-02-03T11:53:00.000-05:00

I have nothing to add to the message in the photo. Except that Chloe has a very cold nose.

Durham's Acacia #3 A Big Step Closer

2011-01-10T09:19:00.001-05:00

This is less a posting than a personal yelp of joy. Fantasy and historical novelist David Anthony Durham has just announced that the third & final book in his Acacia trilogy has been delivered to his editors.

If you haven't read Acacia or The Other Lands (Books I & II respectively), you've got something special waiting for you. David writes with terrific flair, intelligence & generosity. His characters are complex & mercurial; heroes erode into villains; villains compete for our sympathies even when their actions make us cringe. The world they inhabit is fascinating and diverse. The books show just how much epic fantasy can accomplish, how resonant it can be with our own lives. I can't wait for the final installment.

Book III's provisional title is The Sacred Band. You can read about the trilogy over at David's blog.

The Ruling Sea (Book II) now available in Mass Market Paper

2010-12-27T22:00:00.002-05:00

As 2010 gasps to a close, here's something to buy with all that returned-merchandise credit you've got on hand:

You can buy The Ruling Sea at your local bookstore, or through Indiebound here or Amazon here. If you'd like to read more about it, just head to the Book II page on my website.

The Ruling Sea may keep you busy awhile--it's a hefy 672 pages in the MMP. And I'm delighted with Del Rey's choice of a bonus chapter from Book III, The River of Shadows, included at the back of the novel.

Happy New Year & Happy Reading.

-----------------
P.S. Non sequitur: Locus Magazine has just released part of my interview from the December issue online:
http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2010/12/robert-v-s-redick-sorcerers-apprentice/

Book III, The River of Shadows, Firm Publication Date

2010-12-12T15:17:00.001-05:00

A few people know this, but I'd like to announce officially that THE RIVER OF SHADOWS (The Chathrand Voyage, Book III) will be published on April 21st, 2011, in the U.K. and two days earlier (April 19th) in the United States.
Some of you may recall that the book was originally scheduled for a February release. This would have been everyone's preference (!), but the fact is that things got slowed down at the copyediting stage. When this happens in publishing you simply have to wait for another space in the tightly-choreographed release calendar to open.

I'm thankful, at least, that nobody's suggesting Book III be released in March, under the shadow of Mt. Rothfuss.

Meanwhile, there's a nice interview with me in the December LOCUS. Oddly enough the mag's editors remove all the questions, which gives the impression of walking in on a mad, context-switching babbler. Space efficient, though.

Watch this space for some excerpts from Book III (coming soon). Better yet, grab the mass market paperback of Book II when it's released on December 28th and read the chapter called "The Orfuin Club."

THE RIVER OF SHADOSW is very, very different from its predecessors ("very, very different" is a pretty common response to my writing overall, for that matter...hmm) but then so is the world that Thasha, Pazel, Hercól, Neeparvasi and the rest of the gang find themselves confronting. For the young folk, childhood is decidedly over. And there's a ground-turning-to-quicksand-beneath-us sensation for just about everyone: that at least is how it strikes me. I can't wait for April.

Book III Growing Pains: Quest for a Title

2010-10-27T11:12:00.004-04:00

I’ve mentioned elsewhere what an unholy cage-match-with-Lucifer Book III turned out to be--although now, with a book I love in hand, it all feels worth it. Here’s evidence of the ghastly fight: a brainstorming worksheet of possible titles, made over the course of a frustrated week. There are some 220 below, and this is not the only such list. Eventually I narrowed the list to 30, then 15, then five. I settled, of course, on The River of Shadows. I’ll never know if that weird River grew more central to the story because I chose the title, or whether I discovered the title at last because my subconscious knew all along that it would be.

Anyway, here are the rejects. Some of these are colossal stinkers; a few I still rather like (The Ghouls in the Nursery! Keep your little darlings away from this one, Mom & Dad!) One or two might even, one day, find a use….

The Chains of Fire, The Garden in Ashes, The Shadows on the Heath, The Spectres on the Heath, The Rage of the Sleepers , The Banquet of the Sorcerer, The Canvas of the Spider, The Mercy of the Elements, The Tournament of Spiders, The Journey’s Shadow, The Burning S_________, The Burning Stream, The Buried Fire, The Mirrored Serpent, The _______ Mirror, The Crystal Spiders, The Blinding of the Mage, The Pyre of the Mage, The Pyre of the Sorcerer, The Blinding Shadows, The Blinding Shadow, The Visible Shadows, The Blinding Shade, The Blinding of the Gorgon, The Blinding of the Manticore, The Blinding of the Gryphons, (Sphinxes, Ogress, Trolls, Serpent, The Blinding of the Magi, The Blinding of the Judges), The Rules of the Spider, The Peddler of Shadows, The Shadow Market, The Infernal Market, The River of Shadows, The Trail of Shadows, The Blades of the Seraphim, The Verdict of the Spectres, The Trail of the Spectres, The Path of the Sorcerer, The March of the Spectres, The Parliament of Fiends, The Guild, The Burning Realm, The evil, The Highway of Shadows, The Shadow Tide, The Tournament of Shades, The Pyre of the Seraphim, The Splendour of the Necropolis, The Angels and the Spider, The Mirrored Serpent, The Blades of the Seraphim, The Spider in the Flames, The Feast of the Manticore, The Ruins of Eternity, The Eternity _______, The Spoils of , test, Furnace, Kiln. The Opening of the Kiln, The Spider in the Kiln, The Spider in the Furnace, The Savage Mariners, The Looted Sanctuary, The Plundered , The Hunting of the Spider, The Artistry of the Spider, The Spider’s Artistry, The Wasp on/in the Mirror, The Stars in the Mirror, The Spectres in the Mirror, The Infernal Forest • , The Beasts of the Infernal Forest, The War of the Scavengers, The Savage __________, The Conquest of the ___________, The Tears of the __________, The Beasts in the Garden, The Feast of the Jackals , (too much like a feast of crows), The Gorgon’s Stepchildren, The Children of the Gorgon, The Gorgon’s Banquet, The Demon’s Stepchildren, The Garden of the Scorpions (Basilisk?), The War of the Jackals, The Children of the Manticore, The Jackals of Twilight, The Carnival of Madness , The Pyre of Animals, The Children of the Gorgon, The Children of the Basilisk, The Dream of the Scavengers , The War of the Scavengers, The Thieves in the Garden •, The Outcasts and the Thieves •, The Kingdom of the Jackals, the Lair of the Jackals, the , The Dream of the Jackals, The War of the Jackals, The Prey of the Jackals, The Prayer of the Jackals, The Smile of the Jackal, The Coils of the Serpent, The Tears of the Serpent, The Ghouls in the Temple, The Cabinet of Spiders, The Country of the Spiders, The Dream of the Glass Spider, The Dream of the Spider, The Spider’s desire (barf), The Nectar of the Underworld, The Nectar of the Seraphim, The Stain on the , The Feast of Forever, The Banquet of Eternity, The Feast of Eternity, The Nectar of the Firmament, The Nectar of the Underworld, The Nectar of the Seraphim, The Nectar of Shadows, The Shadow of the Basilisk, The Tears of the Basilisk, Why tears? Who’s the basilisk? The eguar, of course. And are they good, are they sorry that they’ve destroyed the world? Not to judge by the one on Bramian, The Shadow of the Gorgon, The Tears of the Gorgon, The Children, The , Something suggesting the defection from the herd that all our heroes must go through, And something with another social animal? Perhaps a mythical animal?, Plunder. Siege, Scavengers. Survivors, The Four-, The Bleeding of the Sorcerer, burning of, trial of, Arunis comes from Agaroth. He cannot go and get the wine, because if he ever returns he will be trapped there. So when someone (Ott?) brings the wine back, it is his dream come true, Spider, Serpent, Beast, [Scorpion], Vulture, Gorgon, Basilisk, Manticore, Hydra, Minitaur, The Rage of the Scorpions, The Coils of the Serpent (gag), The Kingdom of Serpents, The Laughter of the Serpent, The Test of the Scorpion, The Trial of the Scorpion, The Testing of the Spider, The Quarrel of the Spiders, The Envy of the Scorpions, The Tears of the Spider, The Dream of the Spider, The Tunnel of the Spider, The tunnel of the Scorpions, The Valley of the Scorpions, The Torches of the Seraphim, The Blades of the Seraphim, The Tears of the Scorpions, The War of the Spiders, The Children of the Gorgon, The Kingdom of the Spiders, The Spiders in the Garden, The Beast in the Temple • Sanctuary, The Beasts in the Temple • Sanctuary, The _____ of the Underworld, The Enemies of the Spider, The ____ of the Spider, The Burial of the Spider, The Induction of the Spider, The Initiation of the Spider, The Apprenticeship of the Spider, The Spider’s Ressurection (?!) The Gift of the Scorpion, The Trial of the Scorpion, The Gift of the Spider, The Promise of the , The Banshees in the Garden, The Wolves in the Garden, The Scorpions in the Garden, The Lust of the Spider, The Test of the Spider, The Hunting of the Spider, The Rage of the Spider, The Dream of the Spider, The Spider’s Ambition, The Envy of the Spider (s), The Tournament of the Spiders, The War of the Spiders, The Ravens in the Choir, The Ghouls in the Orchestra, The Ghouls in the Choir, The Ghouls in the Palace, The Ghouls in the Nursery, Hospital, Fortress, The Ravens in the Choir, The Ravens in the Temple, The Ravens in the Garden, The Tournament of the Ghouls, What monstrous animals might feature in the story? Basilisk [last word only], dragon [no], banshee, The Ghouls in the Meadow, The Jackals in the ____, The Trial of the Scorpion?---

The River of Shadows, The Night of the Swarm: An Update

2010-10-26T10:49:00.014-04:00

Mind Flayer painted by gamefusionstudio.com

Writing is hard.

Let me rephrase that. Writing is a blood-sucking, mind-flaying, eyestalk-wiggling, barbed-mandibled monster of a job. It eats you. It eats your friends. It eats your family and your health and your sunny days and your bank account and it eats Deborah Harry’s guitar.

Which is not to say that I don’t love it. Certainly I do. After all a good part of it can happen in your pajamas--although that could also be said, God help us, of the authorship of cruise-missile code.

Right, so this is a lead-in to my apologia to everybody who used to follow this blog, and slowly drifted away when no letters from Alifros were forthcoming. Thanks to all of you who sent messages of support, good humour or inquiry. I think I answered everyone, but if I failed to, please forgive the oversight. I have an excuse, of course. I’ve been writing like a demon on Jolt.

Specifically, I’ve been at work on Book IV, The Night of the Swarm. It’s going well, traumatic as it is for me to contemplate saying goodbye to Pazel, Thasha, Neeparvasi, Felthrup, and all the rest. We’ve been together a long time, now, and they, at least, have grown wiser. But there’s no escape. The story does end, calamitously and totally, with Swarm.

At the same time a good part of the last year went into revisions of the first, furious draft of Book III, The River of Shadows. Although just a little slimmer than II, River was the most challenging novel yet. As those who’ve read Book II know well, the plight of the Chathrand’s crew is terribly dire at the end. So dire, in fact, that III became an exercise in rescuing at least some of them from hell--before daring them, almost literally, to go back.

The good news about III is that I’m thrilled with the final cut. The story is going places I barely dreamed of, back in the nineties (in my unibomber shack in Florida) when I jotted down those early notes. The whole of the book takes place in the previously unvisited southern hemisphere, and for the first time the story veers inland: some characters actually end up with mountains, rivers, and high plains between them and the sea. This change of pace brought all kinds of new energy to the writing process, and I hope to the story overall.

My old mentor John Casey likens writing to autohypnosis: you work hard to get yourself into that zone, and when you succeed you’re elsewhere, doing something mysterious and opaque. Then you snap out, and it’s over for the day. No use fussing. Revise a bit, or better still walk the dog.

That’s a fair description of how I live. But spending a chunk of every day hypnotized, deeply absent, brings troubles aplenty. You may forget the laundry, or the appointment you made at 4:00 PM. Or the year, country, world you’re living in. And when you’re trying to write a book you can be utterly proud of--a book that matters to you personally, one that comes from a deeper part of yourself--the memory of that hypnotic state may follow you, clutching at you everywhere, like a wraith on your heels.

Or like (and this is my last gripe of the day) the noise from the factory across the river from our otherwise overwhelmingly awesome new house. The name of the business says it all: CHEMIPLASTICA. They make the compound for Melmac plastic dinnerware, the same stuff my grandmother served home fries on when I was small and pudgy. Now I lie awake, listening as CHEMIPLASTICA whines and howls and rumbles, and ask myself who in God’s green earth wants so much plastic dinnerware. Especially as the stuff from Grandma’s time is so frakking indestructible that it will doubtless be unearthed after doomsday and put to use once more.

Such are the fardels we bear, my friends.

Cover Art! The River of Shadows

2010-09-29T09:03:00.002-04:00

Today I'm very pleased to be able to share with you the cover art for Book III of The Chathrand Voyage Quartet. I love them both. This time around both the U.S. and U.K. editions will have the same title:

The Gollancz (U.K.) edition with cover art by World Fantasy Award winning artist Edward Miller (yes, the scene depicted is fairly close to one that occurs in the book)...

.... and the great Del Rey (U.S.) edition. Here, too there's a detail straight from the novel: that ghostly knife.

Both editions are set for a mid-February debut. I'll be posting some preview material here soon, though, so keep in touch. Meanwhile I am busily writing the fourth and final novel in the series--in which the story and the voyage come to a definitive end.

Stephen Deas' The Thief-Taker's Apprentice: We Wants It, Precious

2010-09-22T15:36:00.000-04:00

You’ve heard how married professors occasionally split a position, sharing both the work and the pay? Well, Stephen & Michaela Deas (in my humble opossum) share the position of All-Around-Coolest-Person-in-the-SFF-World. On my last trip to London they passed up an opportunity to share an evening with Viggo Mortensen to go pub-crawling with me (I may never get over the guilt).

So it’s with joy that I read Faren Miller’s praise for Stephen’s latest novel, The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice, in the September issue of Locus. You can’t read her review online, so here’s a taste for those non-subscribers:

Stephen Deas is “an electrical engineer working in the aerospace and defense industries” in his native Britain. So shouldn’t he be writing SF for Analog and Baen? Not Deas. He used his knowledge of aerodynamics and the military for the creatures and warriors of last year’s fine debut The Adamantine Palace, and this year’s equally impressive The King of the Crags: unsentimental fantasies of dragons subdued by men, where one violent species exploits the ferocity of the other.

Miller goes on to provide an irresistible glimpse of TTTA, noting that in writing his first YA novel Stephen “hasn’t compromised his stark vision or toned down his prose.” I won’t try to summarize the story here, but suffice it to say that the two characters (master and student) evoked by the title both sound fascinating, multidimensional and utterly to be avoided in shadowy streets. For such a good guy, Deas does devilish like nobody’s business. That's why he looks like this:

E.M. Forster Invented Facebook in 1909

2010-07-26T22:53:00.002-04:00

Some years ago I took a class at the University of Virginia called "The Rhetoric of Utopia." It was a depraved little academic experience. There were just six of us, including the professor. He was young but leaned forward like a vulture, eyes fixed on us, unblinking. His skin was pale and waxy, his voice flat and barely audible. His white hands pressed down on the edge of the table as though he were preparing to leap over it in sudden violence. The cumulative effect was one of menace, if not actual demonic possession, but for all that he was as harmless as a sheep. The danger, I realized too late, resided not in the courier but the message itself.

In those days (drunk on fiction, crazed with hope and fear for the planet, yo-yo’ing through the week on caffeine and booze, constantly horny and heartbroken) you could say that I was rather excitable. I climbed trees and hooted like a gibbon. I worked diligently to perfect a gray wolf howl atop the local parking garage, broke into song in crowded hallways, or walked around the university in slippers with my nose in The Brothers Karamazov. A newly discovered book would get me babbling, celebrating it to anyone who’d listen or pretend to listen or at least refrain from silencing me by force.

Vanity and terror and hormones and wealth: of course it was all that. But at its best it was a little bit more. I was Open to Ideas. They went through me like lances, then, and no armor of self could turn them aside.

In the Utopia class, ideas came in a frenzy. Day after day we devoured, debated and (surely) often misunderstood a grand parade of musings on the fate of humankind, from St. Augustine’s The City of God to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Some ideas were beautiful: only in a healed world, says William Morris, can one bare to contemplate sharing a heart. Others—from the dystopian tradition--were ghastly. To the young Gandhian I was then, Professor Waxy brutally observed that in Stalin’s Russia the Mahatma and his movement would have vanished without a trace.

We read the classic dystopias as well, of course: Orwell, Huxley, Zamiatin. They were scary enough in places, especially Zamiatin’s city of glass. But all these works paled in comparison to a little short story by tweedy old E.M. Forster. That story, “The Machine Stops,” chills me to this day. I began to think of it as simply The Nightmare. Not because it is graphic, or fails to show its age. In fact it is because of its age—101 years, now—that it frightens me so. If you read it, try to bear it mind that it was written by a bookish young man in London before the era of routine radio communication, to say nothing of televisions, airplanes and computing machines.

The true frightfulness of the story, though, is a product of the ferocity of the author’s vision. Like any great SF writer, Forster’s imagined not only technological change, but how that changed world could plausibly feel, in all its quirky, tortured specifics, in the hearts of a mother and a son. He wrote well, in other words. He made the story hurt.

I have never been able to ponder the Internet without recalling “The Machine Stops.” With the advent of Facebook (and a new mental disorder, so The Machine tells me, which manifests as a compulsion to be forever online) we move one step closer to the world Forster glimpsed in 1909.

Read it if you will. Then breathe some fresh air and play with a dog and kiss your loved ones. Life should not be squandered on screens.

Yes, Mr. President, It Was Your Katrina--Three Weeks Ago. Now It May Be Your Chernobyl.

2010-05-23T22:39:00.008-04:00

Dear Mr President,

You’re a man of vision, intelligence, stamina and nerve. And you’re blowing it. A hemorrhage of poison is sickening the Gulf of Mexico. And has been, for a month. What action have you taken? What direct response have you made?

Friends, enemies, drillers’ families, fishing families, anyone and everyone who has been appalled by the ecological horror show: we are all asking you this question. At first you gave us a rhetorical performance, a promise to be tough, while BP invested as much effort in limiting information and liability as it did in limiting the extent of the spill, and coast guard vessels continued to monitor plankton drift on the far side of the Gulf. We don’t deserve the insult of your obfuscation. No law allows you to intervene? Rubbish. Did that ever stop a president from pursuing his notion of national security? Did it ever stop you? And if a crippling blow to the Gulf ecosystem and economy doesn’t constitute a national security threat, what does?

You have every freedom to act. The heartbreaker is that you’ve chosen not to. Maybe your usually-flawless political senses told you this was a losing bet. Maybe you were overworked, overtired. Maybe your daily briefings from the Gulf produced a spike of denial--“it can’t be as bad as they say.” I don’t know, or deeply care. I couldn’t do you job. But you, Mr President, spent eighteen months and countless millions of dollars telling us you could.

What you did not do was soberly and responsibly decide to leave BP in charge of the disaster response. Of that I’m certain, because no such sober, responsible conclusion could possibly be reached. A child (or a fiction writer) could have told you that BP had long ago--weeks ago--proven themselves duplicitous and inept. They are naked, and so is your failure. We have cringed before this farce, even as we cringe before the sight of oiled beaches, dying birds and fish, dying hope for a way of life.

Every day, tens or hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil are belching from that open wound on the sea floor. This is a vast, underwater chemical burn, a massive trauma incident, a body blow to America. You’re treating it like a tickle in the throat. You offer stern words and stoic looks and a carousel of indignant underlings on the talk shows. Today it’s a blue-ribbon commission. Bipartisan, of course. The better to protect you and your circle, if nothing much else. The insults accumulate. The denial marches on.

This isn’t about spin or power or next fall’s elections or the predictable sleaze of a largely-above-the-law behemoth like BP. It’s not about you or your legacy--though the latter may well be written on the poisoned waters of a marsh. IT’S ABOUT THE GULF OF MEXICO. Period. It can’t wait. You cannot, must not wait. Don’t let another day go by.

Robert V.S. Redick

The Oil Spill's Cause is No Mystery

2010-05-01T10:12:00.012-04:00

The BP spill didn’t happen because of bad luck, or bad weather, or anything one might call an "act of God." It happened because this sort of operation lets a few people get filthy rich while risking nothing they can't live without. If you want these obscenities to stop, change that: pass a mandatory minimum sentence for all oil company CEO’s—say one hour in jail for every 10 gallons spilled, which would imply about 57 years (and counting) for BP’s Tony Hayward—and there will never, ever be another negligent disaster.

Short of such consequences, there will be.

Just a little subversive thought on this (International) Labour Day.

UPDATE: BP saved $500 grand by not installing a remote-controlled shutoff valve:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html

I rest my case.

One More Interview from Utopiales, November 2009

2010-04-08T20:58:00.008-04:00

Even Luddites can post video links these days. I conducted this interview with Clément Bourgoin way back in November, in France. But it still seems worth sharing--and besides, it was great fun. The questions, are in French, but don't worry: my answers are in English.

And yes, you're right: those nonstop gestures are standard Mzithrini sign language.

Ending the Speculative / Literary Fiction Divide ONCE AND FOR ALL

2010-03-13T18:46:00.001-05:00

Last week I published a little essay on Suvudu.com, designed to lay this vexing, divisive and painfully pointless matter to rest. The essay includes six suggestions on how else we might subdivide the phenomenon we call fiction, including: Books You Date Vs. Books You Hook Up With, Books in Which Nothing Happens Which is Not Dull Vs. Books With Elements of Excitement and Books by Earnest Awkward Writers About Earnest Awkward Writers Vs. All Others.

I hope we may agree that nothing further needs to be said on the matter. By anyone. In any language. On any planet. Ever. Again.

Just Completed the Draft of Book III, The River of Shadows

2010-03-02T12:33:00.007-05:00

OK, it's still way too cold to do this in Massachusetts, and I'm about 100 miles from the nearest beach, and that's not me. Or my dog. But the feeling's spot on. Sunday night at midnight I finished the first full draft of Book III of The Chathrand Voyage series, THE RIVER OF SHADOWS. The novel weighs in at 185,000 words--halfway between the first and second volumes in length. More importantly, I'm happy with it. I stayed true to the characters, the language, the story, the world. And yet the book whacked me silly with surprise after surprise. That's the greatest joy of the first-draft process for me, though sometimes it's hard to slow down and feel it.

Oh, I'm happy. I wrote 82,000 words in 57 days, through the last two-thirds of a cold New England January and February, and now the sun is out, and I'm permitting myself a morning in a coffee shop before the revisions begin. It feels like being reborn.

A brief digression, now (regular readers will expect no less). Writers, you may have heard, are supposed to be cool. That's horse hockey. Stand-up comics are cool. That's their job. It is not a writer's job. But there's a growing consensus in THE INDUSTRY that a cool persona is the best marketing tool a writer can hone. Without anyone requiring it of us, we writers dance the dance, perform the self, suggest to the world that it find us fascinating. The internet didn't start us playing this game, but it has made it feel almost compulsory.

The trouble with the game is simply stated: it's dishonest. Subtle, stylish dishonesty is still dishonesty. We're supposed to look for emotional truth; we can't do that if we forget how to recognize it in ourselves. My point here is not to condemn the game altogether (entertainment is entertainment, after all) but to note that it has nothing to do with good writing, or goodness at all. Be as cool as you want; to have a hope of mattering, however, you'll have to do more. This is a warning to myself first and foremost. I finished a draft; so what? I'm sculpting a story in a little world called Alifros; so what? Carl Sagan, that prince of squares, may have put it best: "We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers."

And you thought you'd get through this post without a rant.

The Chathrand Voyage Series - Latest News

2010-02-16T09:46:00.003-05:00

16 FEBRUARY 2009: The day dawns at last: The Ruling Sea hits U.S. shelves!

Cue the heavenly music: The Ruling Sea is out in the United States. I've been waiting so long for this day, and am full of dumb goofy smiles when I think about it. And yes, as I predicted, I will spend it (a) shoveling snow (b) chasing my dog around in the snow and (c) getting the survivors of Book II--yes, there are several--one day closer to the finish line with Book III.

A big round of thanks to my superb U.S. editor Kaitlin Heller, and the whole barnstorming team at Del Rey. If you want to buy the book online, here are some options.

And meanwhile, here's the latest review to cross my desk.

(In a slightly unrelated development, investigators have recently discovered that Jabba the Hut was poorly served by his translators, including C3P0. The new analysis makes it clear that the conflict was misunderstood by all parties. At one point Mr Hut even attempts to speak a human language, and explains his grievance: 'You stole my foamy bath-scrubber, Solo.' Bath scrubber, not Bantha Fodder. I hope this will inspire all of us to take language training more seriously.)

On Dreams, Dungeon Mastering, Naval Fantasy, and Politics in Literature

2010-02-05T18:16:00.012-05:00

Long Interview on The Hathor Legacy (A Very Cool Feminist Site)

With ten days to go before The Ruling Sea hits shelves in the United States, Maria Velazquez and I talk about the writing of Books I-III, the courage and the myopia of fantasy novels, and the psyche as crowded metro-station, among other curiosities. A snippet:

You have something urgent to share, and you hunt for the right form in which to share it. Inevitably this becomes a question of honesty: with the reader, and even before that, with yourself as a writer. You only know so much. You’re human, and thus a receptacle for both the sublime and the obscene; you have viciousness and love within you, selfishness and generosity, intelligence and instinct, and in that deep thicket you search for some clearing where a rite can be performed, and you call that rite your story.

And if you don't know Hathor, check out the rest of the site. I for one felt better about the state of the genre after my first ten minutes there.

Two Honors for The Red Wolf Conspiracy

2010-01-27T15:32:00.004-05:00

Just got the great news that The Red Wolf Conspiracy was a finalist for The American Library Association's 2009 Reader's List Award. There were four titles on the short list; the award itself went to Ken Scholes for Lamentation. Congratulations, Ken!

I'm also very pleased to note that the judges for the 2009 Crawford Award for First Fantasy Novel singled out Red Wolf (along with Michal Ajvaz's The Other City) for special commendation, although the book was ineligible for the prize because the U.K. edition originally appeared in 2008. I'm very honored to have been cited by the judges. More delightful still is the fact that the award went to such a spectacular book: Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection. If you don't know Jed's work--well, there's a rare, sly, beautifully-written book out there waiting for you.

Mass Market Paperback of The Red Wolf Conspiracy Released

2010-01-27T15:16:00.004-05:00

The pocket-sized (MMP) edition of The Red Wolf Conspiracy, Book I of The Chathrand Voyage Series, has just been published by Del Rey. I'm really delighted with this edition. The cover art is delightful. Even better, at the back of the book you'll find two new goodies:

• Several pages of entries from The Merchant's Polylex, providing background and clues to the overall story, and more detail about the world of Alifros.

• The first chapter of The Ruling Sea, Book II of the sequence (UK title: The Rats and the Ruling Sea), to be released next month by Del Rey.

Best of all, it fits in a fanny pack. Enjoy!

Great New Reviews for The Rats and the Ruling Sea

2010-01-16T16:53:00.009-05:00

With one month to go before Book II hits the shelves in the United States, it's great to see that the book's generating some excitement on line and in print. Along with Fantasy Book Critic's #2-for-the-year ranking, a number of other reviews of The Rats and the Ruling Sea [U.S. title: The Ruling Sea] have come out recently. Here are some highlights:

• Publisher's Weekly: "This exciting follow-up to 2009’s The Red Wolf Conspiracy features enough plot twists and double-crosses to satisfy the most demanding lover of suspense. The powerful Nilstone, most recently held by a living statue who was once an insane god-king, is sought by a wizard who wishes to destroy humanity by sparking war between empires. The whole world believes the ship Chathrand to be sunk, but it secretly survives and carries the Nilstone to the fabled lands of the south beyond the Ruling Sea, while a ragtag group of conspirators battle not only the wizard but their own empire and captain in a desperate attempt to preserve the world. Vivid characterizations and Redick’s brilliant depiction of the microcosmic world aboard Chathrand will captivate readers." [link]

• Only the Best SF/Fantasy: With this book Mr. Redick continues on a high level with his a mouth-watering universe full of mystery and wonder . This is one of my top fantasy reads of 2009. [Full Review]

• Bookgeeks: "All hands on deck for Robert Redick’s excellent follow-up to his debut, The Red Wolf Conspiracy....What is so clever about this book is the choice of setting – the Chathrand is a huge ship, which provides lots of scope for hidden meetings, factions, whispers of mutiny, and characters not to see each other for days at a time. On the other hand, it is still a ship sailing in to peril, so to whatever extent the characters may dislike one another, they are sometimes compelled to co-operate." [Full Review]

• Walker of Worlds: "The world building and characterisation that Redick gave in the first book was something that hooked me and...made me want to read The Rats and the Ruling Sea so much. Despite being longer, this book is just as enjoyable and opens up some very interesting situations by the time the last page is turned... This is one series that I'm thoroughly enjoying." [Full Review]

Book II: The Rats and the Ruling Sea Named Second Best Fantasy of 2009 by Fantasy Book Critic

2010-01-16T16:38:00.006-05:00

I'm delighted to announce that Fantasy Book Critic ranked The Rats and the Ruling Sea as their second-favorite fantasy novel of 2009, out of a whopping 280 books read and considered. You can see the complete list of books here (Stephen Deas' excellent The Adamantine Palace is also in the top ten).

Also check out the site's review of The Rats and the Ruling Sea.

The Rats and the Ruling Sea will appear in the United States on February 16, published by Del Rey. The title will be shortened to The Ruling Sea.

Emergency Relief Desperately Needed for Haiti

2010-01-12T23:05:00.005-05:00

The worst earthquake in 200 years has just struck the poorest nation in our hemisphere. An immediate and powerful response is critical. Oxfam is not the only experienced group rushing aid to the area, but it's one I can vouch for as a former employee. Please help if you can.

The World's Most Awesome Readers

2010-01-04T20:29:00.004-05:00

To those of you who've been writing to wish me luck with THE RIVER OF SHADOWS writing marathon--and to forgive my unreachability and the dormant state of this blog--my message is

YOU ROCK.

I write alone; I live in a deep winter nowhere with a valiant partner and a few animals, I wake up and stumble through the gates of a dreamworld at the door of my study. I truly love my job, but it's so much easier to love every time I learn that the books have done something for somebody.

Energized, now, I'm rushing back to an attempted beheading on the lower gun deck. Yours, manic as ever--RVSR

The Silence of the Blog

2009-12-15T09:53:00.008-05:00

Just thought I should post a little note about my lack of posts. The reason's simple I'm writing. And writing. And writing. Since returning from Europe, I have become a word-gushing machine. This blitzkrieg-behavior (let the project roll over everything in its path) inevitably happens as I enter the home stretch with a novel, but this time (as I complete Book III, The River of Shadows) it's been more intense than ever before.

Last night Sandor Ott, the old imperial spymaster, threw himself down a hatch to avoid being killed by a black-powder explosion. He lay there with the smoking debris raining down on him softly, not yet sure if his back was broken, calculating how he could best exploit this act of sabotage. I felt we shared something: monomania, in a word. He lives and breathes conspiracies, I live and breathe this writing process. I'm dense about nearly everything else.

Fortunately my poodle, Chloe, takes me out for fresh air. Here she is last week, reminding me how to play in the snow.

Red Wolf Conspiracy/Rats & the Ruling Sea European Mini-Tour, Part II

2009-11-08T14:51:00.022-05:00

Okay, I’ll be straight with you: I’m home and recovering. Eleven days in France passed in a happy dream. For the first six, Kiran and I were having the Paris experience: first time around for both of us, and a good excuse to act like 18-year-olds on the backpack circuit once again. We did a number of predictable things (Café de Flore, Sacre Coeur) and a few not so predictable, like spending seven hours in the gardens of Versaille with our NYU/art history professor friend Christina Vankoehler. It was amusing to learn of the messages Louis XIV intended to convey with all those incredible sculptures. Here, for instance, are some Lycian peasants becoming frogs. The myth is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; the peasants are turned into frogs after they muddy the water where Latona, mother of Apollo and Diana, wanted to drink. Louis was sending the aristocracy a warning: don't mess your betters or you'll end up squashed into the nether mud-zone. Let them eat flies.

The place we rented was in Montparnasse, a short walk from the Jardins du Luxembourg. It had a little kitchen (helpful in a town where a sandwhich on the street can run you $14) and even came with a neighborhood cat (I half expected her collar to have a tag identifying her as property of the Ministry of Tourism).

Then came Utopiales ’09, the big SF/F celebration in the city of Nantes. I had an absolute blast. Like any conference or convention, the greatest pleasure was the people. I found the attendees kind, smart, enthusiastic and hungry to debate ideas. Who could ask for more?

In addition to my incredibly cool French editor Bénédicte Lombardo and her equally brilliant partner Olivier Girard (also an editor & co-founder of the journal Bifrost), I had the good luck to spend time with scores of other authors. Among them were Ugo Bellagamba (who moderated a number of panels and can speak volumes about pirates), Michel Pagel (who is also my translator, and a prizewinner at that, as well as a terrifically smart guy), Pierre Bordage, Stephen Baxter, Sarah Ash, Hal Duncan (who apparently draws energy directly from gravitons or cell-phone signals or the nearest wall socket, because the man just doesn't sleep), and Stéphane Beauverger, who took the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire for his novel Le Déchronologue (never have I seen a happier soul). Also loved meeting writer, journalist & lit student Annaïg Houesnard, who took me and Hal visit a jaw-dropping steampunk menagerie, “les machines de l'ile de Nantes”. Words fail me: these creations are works of art on an industrial scale, beautiful fusions of wood and iron sculpture—and they do things! Here’s a shot of the Grand Elephant, which actually walks, blinks, moves her ears, blows steam from her trunk....

I also had the great good luck to be interviewed seven times during that week. The footage of one of these is already online (only my answers are in English, however). Odd how many fingers my hand seems to grow each time I gesture.

All told, a splendid sojourn, and a much-needed breather from The River of Shadows: my only serious pause in six months, I hasten to add. The idea, see, is that a clean break like this can recharge your batteries even as it empties your bank account, so that you return freed from the temptation to indulge in further distractions, and so stimulated by the good company that you're twice as productive as before—as long as you keep the post-travel blogging to a minimum.

Rats and the Ruling Sea Now on Sale - and to celebrate, a creepy flash intro...

2009-10-30T05:38:00.002-04:00

At very long last--Book II is on sale from all UK sources, bookstores and web-stores alike. And thanks to Zavada design, you can see a weird and halloween-appropriate intro flash at RULINGSEA.COM . Murophobics beware.

Rats and the Ruling Sea/Red Wolf Conspiracy European Mini-Tour, Part One

2009-10-27T04:34:00.005-04:00

What a whirlwind. Blogging had just not been in the cards. I have fifteen minutes in this Paris apartment before handing over the key to the landlord & moving on to a hotel. Just enough time to post a few snapshots from the awesome Forbidden Planet pre-release event for The Rats and the Ruling Sea. Very nice turnout. Incredibly nice people. FP has a superb SFF book collection as well--far superior to the New York store of the same name (apparently there was a legal & territorial split some twenty years ago, creating two independent companies with the same name but different management).

[The group shot, left to right: SF novelist Stephen Sweeney, fantasy novelist Stephen Deas, Michaela Deas, Murad Hajeebhoy, RVRS, and visiting Oxford research professor Laurel Plapp. Digesting an incredible nouveau-Mex meal in "Wahaca" (yes, that's how it's spelled), Covent Garden, London.]

The French side of things is just beginning, but already Bénédicte Lombardo, my wonderful publisher here, has taken me for coffee to the Paris home of Michael Moorcock and his wife Linda. Had a marvelous, merry time in their great old flat with a view of the left bank rooftops.

Tomorrow the French interviews begin! Mon Dieu.

Departure Memo

2009-10-14T20:55:00.006-04:00

I'm off tomorrow for London. Four days in my old stomping ground--the first city I ever lived in, or remotely got to know--before going on to Paris, a city I've never seen at all, and then Nantes and the Utopiales mega-con. Hope to send dispatches from both. If you're in London on Friday night (Oct 16), come on by Forbidden Planet between 6 and 7pm and say hello.

In Alifros, meanwhile, everyone on the Chathrand seems to have reached the ends of their ropes. Yes, the ship is sinking and the Gulf is full of warships, but those aren't the fundamental issues. Reality has caught up with these castaways. They're in an unknown world, ten thousand miles from the lands and people the love, and surrounded by legions of murderers. I don't know what to tell them. Pazel is heartbroken; Bolutu is nearly suicidal; Thasha is staring into a personal abyss. Felthrup is holding everyone together. I'm sure you'll agree that it's a lot to ask of a rat. And the darkness just keeps growing.

Sting is correct. There has to be an invisible sun.

Red Wolf Conspiracy Audio Book On Sale

2009-10-14T20:47:00.002-04:00

It was a very long time coming. But I knew the wait had been worth it as soon as I heard actor Michael Page's reading of The Red Wolf Conspiracy begin. Mr Page has created an astonishing repertoire of voices for the characters of Alifros--and as an editor who shall remain nameless once observed, my characters (human, nonhuman, semi-human) talk a lot. So as I rush off to Europe, here's a quick toast to the reader. Hard to believe there's only one of him.

The Rats and the Ruling Sea - Prologue

2009-09-27T12:26:00.011-04:00

With one month to go before the U.K. publication of The Rats and the Ruling Sea (Book II of The Chathrand Voyage), I'm very pleased today to be posting this first, brief taste of the novel. If you've already read Book I, The Red Wolf Conspiracy, you'll find the subject of these three pages quite familiar. If you haven't read Book I, this prologue will introduce you to the world, the story and the stakes. Here's how it starts:

A cup of milk tainted with blood. Pazel looked down into the steaming chalice and felt trapped, an actor in a part he never wanted, in a play full of violence and rage. They were waiting for him to drink: the priests, the princes, the three hundred guests in the candlelit shrine. His best friends were waiting, and a few men who wished him dead, and one man who wanted everyone dead and just might get his wish...

You can view or download the PDF via Google Docs at this link. If you prefer a smaller version without the cover art, click here instead.

The Rats and the Ruling Sea - Forbidden Planet London - Exclusive Signing & Early Sales Event on Oct. 16

2009-09-22T15:07:00.008-04:00

If you're a little confused here, believe me you have my sympathies.

As it turns out the general release of The Rats and the Ruling Sea is October 29, not October 15 as earlier announced (ours not to reason why...).

BUT FEAR NOT:

London's wild and wonder-packed SFF store Forbidden Planet will have a large number of copies available for sale on Friday, October 16. The reason? I'll be appearing at the bookstore to sign, chat and hang out with readers (I'm seriously psyched) from 6:00 to 7:00 PM that evening.

Hoping to meet a lot of you there. But if you can't drop by the megastore (179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8JR) you can order a copy from Forbidden Planet, and it should reach you well before the general release.

The Great SFF Blog Link-Up

2009-09-04T09:13:00.008-04:00

John at Grasping for the Wind has put together an astonishing list of blogs that review speculative fiction. I thought I was familiar with a lot of the best sites until I saw it. You can apply to add your blog to this ever-deepening trove, or just enjoy the beautiful diversity of styles, tastes and obsessions. Here's a sample. Head to Grasping for the Wind for the complete list.

The Accidental Bard
A Boy Goes on a Journey
A Dribble Of Ink
Adventures in Reading
A Fantasy Reader
The Agony Column
A Hoyden’s Look at Literature
A Journey of Books
All Booked Up
Alexia’s Books and Such…
Andromeda Spaceways
The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
Ask Daphne
ask nicola
Audiobook DJ
aurealisXpress
Australia Specfic In Focus
Author 2 Author
AzureScape

B

Barbara Martin
Babbling about Books
Bees (and Books) on the Knob
Best SF
Bewildering Stories
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Star Trek: The Abandoned Frontier?

2009-06-29T00:40:00.006-04:00

I’m having a little episode, here. I have just watched The City on the Edge of Forever, some 49 minutes of Star Trek originally broadcast in 1967, the year I was born. It’s good. I’m tempted to say, miraculously good. More than good enough to make me feel cheated.

There’s a long rant about Star Trek boiling away inside me, and it will have to boil on for now. In lieu of that essay I’ll just make a statement, and hope it matters to someone out there.

Star Trek has given meaning to my life. The original series embraced reason and the hope of peace, and made a hero of a man named Spock whose twin ambitions were knowledge and psychic emancipation (or Zen stillness, if you prefer). If you flipped to other channels you’d find people smoking and spitting, cooing on sitcom couches, gunning engines, gunning each other down. The original Star Trek, at its best, countered all that with a never-ending carousel of wonder, wrapped up in an ongoing argument in defense of the human spirit.

Best of all, it gave us these treasures not as theories but as lived moments. For Star Trek was also a cosmic opera house built for three. McCoy, the passionate humanist. Spock, the fortress of intellect, besieged from within and without. Kirk, the royal ego, charged with balancing these two princes, leading them forward, making them work as one.

You know all this. You know too how much there was to choke on in the original show: its chauvinism, the one-in-three episodes that seemed to be written by a team of stoned clowns, Shatner’s occasionally hideous hamming. But when the show worked – oh, how it worked! No one had ever seen anything like it. And rarely – very, very rarely since the sixties – have we seen it again.

Which brings me to an impertinent question. What has Star Trek been since 1969? What do all its movie and TV reincarnations amount to?

Not even for myself do I have an answer: tomorrow I may wake up and doubt (or even delete) the words I’m about to write. But I suspect they amount to a small, smoldering compost heap.

Granted, millions upon millions in rich leftovers have been dumped on that heap. But it’s never really worked. The process of decomposition has been too quick. Almost everything thrown at the heap has broken down quickly into pungent soil.

Almost? Yes, almost. The gold nugget was The Wrath of Kahn, because Nicholas Meyers' script was not written for imbeciles, or those so starved for the joys of the original that they would feign imbecility in exchange for references – references, by God, inside jokes, allusions! – to the show’s remembered strengths.

Wait! cries the critic, fresh from the theater. All that embarrassing schlock is behind us! All those Next Generation bridge scenes with Rick Berman’s mannequins delivering lines as though reading warranty statements. The makeup on Mr. Data so thick it seemed applied with a trowel; the costumes made of hotel bedspreads. The winks at the audience; the painful cameos. The aliens more poorly imagined than those in Buck Rogers. The very name “Mr. Data.” The agonizing solitude of Patrick Stewart, crying, raging, thrashing about night after night in his vain hunt for someone to act with, some scene worth completing. The dull, stale, meaningless drivel about deflector dishes, holodecks, antimatter containment diddlywhacks and Wesley Crusher’s puberty. It’s all gone! The bridge has been swabbed clean! J.J. Abrams himself gave the order.

But did he?

That’s a rant for another night, perhaps—long after I turn in Book III of The Chathrand Voyage. I’ll just leave you with another question, this one about Abrams’ own film:

What was good? The film itself, that adrenal blur? Or the memories of something great that it did not so much build on as exploit one more time, in expensive, dumbed-down, risk-free fashion?

Could it be that Star Trek since 1969 is one vast money-gobbling machine, fueled by our hunger for what we glimpsed back then, by our nostalgia for a world that could dream such dreams, by our surrender of the future?

Again, I don’t know. But here’s one way to test the notion: wait and see if Trek boldly goes ANYWHERE the series hasn’t gone before, ever again. Wait and see if its corporate mandarins permit such a rash adventure, instead of prudently recycling our fathers’ inspirations. I for one pray the journey continues.

The Rats and the Ruling Sea (The Chathrand Voyage, Book II) Delivered

2009-06-18T08:42:00.003-04:00

I'm happy to announce that The Rats and the Ruling Sea has left the editing rooms and is in production in both London and New York. Advance Reading Copies (ARCs) will be available soon from Gollancz in the U.K.. Stay tuned for more information and a firm publication date. I'll also be posting an excerpt or two on my website as soon as possible.

Four New Reviews

2009-06-14T18:59:00.007-04:00

In addition to Gavin Grant's wonderful review of The Red Wolf Conspiracy in the L.A. Times, a number of others have appeared recently. Here are the links, and some excerpts:

“A vivid, masterful picture of a conspiracy [and] a great debut novel in the fantasy genre for Mr. Redick. You will be unable to put this book down.” - Kevin Winter, Sacramento Book Review. Read the full review.

“What really sets this novel above the norm, though, is the quality of Redick's writing. Like most fantasy novels, this book contains a huge number of characters. Amazingly, nearly all of them are three-dimensional. Even characters with "bit parts" are fully-developed.... His descriptions of life on the sea and of the tall sailing ships seem dead on, and his action sequences frequently leave the reader breathless.”
- Kim Kovacs, Bookbrowse. Read the full review.

“The writing is top-notch throughout. Redick writes with a Dickensian flair: stylistic, powerful, and with a fair serving of melodrama. The young tarboy—and protagonist—Pazel Pathkendle easily connects with the reader, winning over your heart as he struggles with an ever-growing mountain of adversity, spirited and plucky in the face of each new challenge. He’s a character you’ll root for, and find yourself caring about.” - Paul Stotts, Blood of the Muse Book Reviews. Read the full review.

“This is an amazingly fun book…. Alifros parallels Mieville’s New Corbuzon in terms of vitality and inventiveness.’ - The Hathor Legacy. Read the full review.

Transcript of Chat Available on Suvudu

2009-06-03T12:49:00.004-04:00

My chat on Thursday with Peter V. Brett (The Warded Man), my Del Rey editor Kaitlin Heller and a host of readers was great fun. Awesome questions and enjoyable troublemaking. If you didn't get a chance to participate, the whole funky transcript is available here .

Los Angeles Times Reviews The Red Wolf Conspiracy

2009-06-02T12:26:00.000-04:00

Today I have a reason to smile through the lumbar pain: Gavin Grant, co-founder and publisher of Small Beer Press, has written a glowing review of The Red Wolf Conspiracy. The review appears in the June 5th edition of The L.A. Times. Here's a link to the full text. Below are a few highlights:

[Redick] casts his tale off from the historical period so well detailed in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin novels and then seemingly tosses in every fantastic idea that has ever crossed his mind. (Yes, there are zombies.) But there is never a moment when Redick's masterful storytelling wobbles; even his throwaway lines deepen and open out the world he has created, moving the ever-more involving story onward.

The novel is immediately and satisfyingly complex. Characters are introduced in passing in the middle of events. They have personal histories and relationships, many of them not at all friendly. The reader is dared to keep up with the never-ending stream of action and it is both a delight and a challenge that does not end until the final page.

New Interview in Clarkesworld Magazine

2009-05-03T15:17:00.002-04:00

Fellow fiction writer Jeremy L. Jones threw some great questions at me for Clarkesworld. At one point, for example, he asks me if Red Wolf was about what happens when differences collide. My answer:

The collision of differences is near the heart of Red Wolf—but it's more than that, I'd say. The old buzzword, the old cultural goal, used to be tolerance. And there's nothing wrong with tolerance per se. It is, however, far from the best we can aspire to. Tolerance is rather flimsy: I'll tolerate you this far, but don't get out of line.

In the case of Pazel and Thasha and Felthrup and Dri, tolerance certainly won't keep them alive, or help them defeat Arunis or Sandor Ott. This book is about not just learning to tolerate and comprehend difference, but sometimes to choose it over the familiar. In other words, this is a book about questioning the community you're born into, and in some cases choosing, building, a new one that reflects the person you're trying to become.

Photos from The Red Wolf Conspiracy Book Launch Party

2009-05-03T14:20:00.012-04:00

A few snapshots from the event on 5/01/09 at Amherst Books. Obeisance to Nat Herold for being the consummate host, and to my dear partner Kiran Asher for introducing me & making it back from India in time, and to friends old and knew who braved the Pork Plague (That Knows No Pork), and a stormy Friday to celebrate with us.

Kiran (and the eyes of Chloe the Terminator)

Diego Zamaolla-Chion and Daniel Zamaolla, in a surprise performance after the reading.

New Red Wolf Conspiracy Website Launched

2009-04-27T18:10:00.003-04:00

The Red Wolf Conspiracy has a brand-new home on the net. The URL remains the same (redwolfconspiracy.com) so don't forget to hit the Refresh button on your browser if you've visited my old site.

In addition to updated reviews, lovely artwork, Polylex entries and the like, you can also listen in to the sounds of life on the Chathrand on several pages (hint: the Editor's Greeting clip is by far the longest).

Happy cruising! So to speak.

The Countdown Begins (No, not to Star Trek...)

2009-04-20T09:19:00.000-04:00

Well, it’s happening: in a matter of days I’ll be able to walk into a bookstore and see The Red Wolf Conspiracy on the shelf. How do you feel, what are you thinking? asked a friend last night. The answer turns out to be complex.

First, extraordinarily lucky. Nobody with home, health, a loving family and a three-striped Florida mud turtle should feel otherwise, in my humble opinion. On top of that I have the good fortune to be doing something that I deeply love each day: namely writing. And on top of that I have readers -- extraordinary, thoughtful, challenging readers. None of us merit our fortune, good or bad. I am a lucky dog.

More interesting to some, however, may be the fact that I am shredded. Don't take this as a complaint, but rather as field notes. I am currently doing promotional work for Book I, editing Book II for the last time, and furiously writing Book III. To any of these tasks I could easily devote all my waking hours, and still feel behind. The attempt to do all three well and simultaneously has given new meaning to Master Bilbo’s self-characterization as butter scraped over too much bread.

I switch on the computer in the morning before I've properly opened my eyes. I feel guilty about stopping work long enough to look for clean socks. I have an appearance of outward calm that is almost somnambulistic, but my insides are a haphazardly stuffed cavern of poorly processed anxieties. I crave caffeine; I drink it, and my stomach goes haywire. When I switch off the light at night, the list of tasks I haven't attended to descends like a swarm.

This amuses me most of the time. The aforementioned blessings make it easy to laugh at the absurd. I get a particular chuckle when I think of the skills I've never developed. Take speed. During my fourteen years in the wilderness, when fiction writing was what I most cared about and least succeeded in, one thing I always had was time. Nobody on earth was in a hurry to receive my fiction! I wrote with slow, elegant abandon. A day spent on three sentences brought no frustration, only a deep sense of my own integrity.

All changed, changed utterly, as the poet says. But isn't this what I was working for all along?

Yes. No. Unfair question!

These conundrums dependably throw me back upon a chance encounter I had with a multimillion-bestseller author who shall remain nameless. I had not been long in the wilderness. He had. And over the course of an evening, alongside some good West Virginia cooking, he digested the not-so-startling news that I planned to devote my life to fiction. I think now that he spent hours trying to come up with some advice for me. But when at last he began to speak, he merely explained that for a decade, while working other jobs, he had faithfully put his novel manuscript in one cardboard box after another, dispatched it to some agency or publisher, and waited for the rejection. In the latter he was never disappointed. He repeated the ritual 43 times and had long since stopped mentioning it to friends. Not one of those 43 rounds of submissions gave him the least reason to hope. And the 44th made him a household name.

As he got up to leave the table, he put out his hand, and we shook. “Write ‘cause it’s fun,” he said, and walked away.

That's what I do, and it never lets me down. When you invest in your own delight, you're guaranteed returns. It’s the one thrill of the writing life on which you can absolutely depend.

Doomsday is Not a Foregone Conclusion

2009-04-03T19:04:00.000-04:00

In Book III of The Chathrand Voyage (still very much a work in progress) I am struggling to inhabit the minds of people who believe they're witnessing the end of the world. Quite a challenge, especially for someone who hasn't. But the real world, tragically, is proving instructive.

Yesterday, in the frankly excellent Virginia Quarterly, I read that many scientists now believe that the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet may collapse this century, and that among the probable results would be (sit down) a weight shift so massive that the angle of the earth's axis would change by about half a kilometer. That change, along with the newly displaced seawater, would raise Northern Hemisphere sea levels far more than the worst predictions to date. Consider the effects on the U.S. alone:

Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and the nation's capital would be submerged. Likewise, most of the California coast--from San Francisco to San Diego. Much of southern Florida--Orland, Tampa, Miami--would simply vanish into the sea, as would the cities of the Gulf coast... As many as half of our forty most populous cities would face catastrophe.

It's hard to settle on words to describe the threat we're under; every choice seems inadequate. "Threat" for example, suggests an affliction we're yet to suffer. Not so: millions are already paying for the carbon load in the atmosphere. They pay with their flooded villages, burned forests, withered crops, empty aquifers, blighted lives.

Given such mega-downer news, I try also to keep up with its opposite. Energy efficiency is a bright and hopeful frontier, as Amory Lovins proves each time he harvests bananas at 7000 feet in the Rockies in a house without a furnace. And it is with great satisfaction that I read in the Guardian about a serious, science-backed and likely benign mitigation campaign. This particular idea (more reflectivity in built structures = more heat reflected to space = lower global temperature) is simplicity itself, but it's not the grand solution we'd all love to find. As the scientists themselves point out, mitigation cannot substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions--that point must be constantly stressed--but it could buy us some time to avert disaster.

It's gratifying that an idea laymen and carpenters and SFF lovers have long talked about over beers is turning into a policy movement with climatologists' backing. We writers ought to be part of the wider effort. We're in the vision business, aren't we?

P.S.: Just came across this new blog by wonderful SFF writer Vandana Singh, where she discusses the recent Earth Hour project, with great details from Asia.

Happy as a Vulcan in Love

2009-03-26T13:42:00.001-04:00

Yes, that's me. Just celebrating a good week in the ongoing game of review-roulette: starred reviews from Kirkus and Library Journal, and a great writeup from Publishers Weekly. The text and links can be found on my website's press page.

If this means a few more libraries may end up stocking my book, I am officially thrilled. Almost ready to join Mr. Nimoy in the tree, or perhaps in a rendition of his Ode to Bilbo. Almost.

Don't Call it Ignorance. Call it Racism.

2009-02-20T17:28:00.000-05:00

The New York Post prints a political cartoon depicting two men with smoking guns over the bullet-ridden body of an ape, and the tag line suggests a connection between this ape and President Obama. Am I dreaming? Is it possible--here, today--that any paper with a circulation greater than five could publish such a drawing, at best contemptuous of its racist undertones, at worst covertly celebrating them? Have we misunderstood? Surely there’s a less nefarious way to look at all this?

Of course there is. Indeed, there are half a dozen less nefarious ways. And countless ways not to look at all, not to see the damning disgrace of what was printed on 18 February. What I cannot find--and challenge anyone to assert with the tools of reason--is ignorance on the part of cartoonist or publisher as to how that cartoon would be perceived. There is no such blessed innocent in New York City, least of all in publishing.

The Post offered a grudging, pugnacious half-apology. The editor, Col Allan, defended the cartoon as “a clear parody of a current news event” (that event, so ripe for parody, being the hideous mutilation of a Connecticut woman by a chimpanzee). The cartoonist himself has voiced no misgivings, any more than when his previous cartoons suggested that gays shag sheep, or that Paul McCartney's former girlfriend was a laugh riot because she'd lost a leg. Rupert Murdoch, the Post’s owner, has maintained an imperial silence, as he did when a co-anchor on Fox News (another imperial asset) ended a broadcast during the campaign with a chuckled proposal that “somebody knock off Osama, um, Obama--well, both, if we could.” [UPDATE 2/24: Murdoch has apologized "to any reader who felt offended"]

But as disturbing as any of these is a remark that keeps surfacing, in one form or another, all over the blogosphere. The remark begins, “Even if he [cartoonist Sean Delonas] didn’t realize how this would appear” or “Even if this is sheer stupidity on the part of the Post” or “Even if they didn’t know what they were doing--”

STOP. They knew. Any person who has ever entertained a thought about U.S. history will know. Anyone who has ever thought about racism of any kind, anywhere, will know at a glance. Any survivor of sixth-grade recess and eighth-grade social studies will have context enough to be shamed—if they have any shame at all—by innuendo half as blatant as that cartoon’s.

What is being excused here is a bald obscenity. A drawing that cannot fail to evoke something of the history of such images for any American who did not grow up in a sensory-deprivation tank. A drawing that will indisputably and instantly be connected with the president, in which the figure so connected has just been shot dead.

Let me (in Obama’s already-somewhat-grating phrase) be clear: I am making no legal argument, no assault on free speech. I do not think that crude, hate-driven, irresponsible, untalented boor of a racist doodler should be barred from publishing his pinch-brained little jokes. Nor do I think his worthless fishwrapper of a newspaper should face legal sanction. Nor do I think the ambitious neocon Padishah who owns the paper and rewards the boorish doodler should face harassment by the FBI (though a little chat might be in order).

But there are a few things I do hope for:

First, that Messers Murdoch, Delonas and Allan develop boils, shingles, piles, intolerance to their favorite foods, bunions, impotence and a knack for showing up just when other people of my persuasion feel compelled to exercise their First Amendment rights, preferably in front of these gentlemen’s dates, fans or children.

Second, that no one capable of sanctioning such ugliness dare hide their naked racism behind the washcloth of “not knowing any better,” ever again.

Third, that our national addiction to violence and the tools of violence somehow abate.

Lastly that we stop driving the same old roads, into the same old axle-breaking ruts. In other words that history—presidential history, racial history, the history of firing guns at what makes us uncomfortable—be given no more odious nudges in the direction of a replay.

God damn it.

The Covers Cometh

2009-02-09T18:51:00.001-05:00

Two lovely new covers to share with you: for the U.S. edition of The Red Wolf Conspiracy and the U.K. edition of Book II in the series, The Rats and the Ruling Sea. I am thrilled by them both. They are my children, after all! Red Wolf will hit the shelves in the U.S. on April 29. Rats, alas, is still some months off: it will be available in the U.K. on August 20th, and somewhat later in other countries (and no, I will never call them "markets." You can't make me).

UPDATE: I've just learned that my UK illustrator, Les Edwards (aka Edward Miller) has won the 2008 World Fantasy Award for Best Artist. Congratulations, Les!

Vericon: Harvard on the Lhûn

2009-01-29T17:08:00.000-05:00

I just got back from my first Vericon, Harvard's annual SF/F con, organized by the Harvard-Radcliff Science Fiction Association. It was a great con: smart, relaxed, intimate, thoughtful. I saw some friends from previous cons, including the wonderul writers Sarah Smith and Greer Gilman, and had lunch with Kaitlin Heller, my wonderful Del Rey editor, and her partner Steven (an editor at Tor).

The informal conversations are always the best part of a con for me. But I also enjoyed the keynote talk on global warming and activism by guest of honor Kim Stanley Robinson (pictured; he also noted that the invention of agriculture was bad for our species' sex life), the reading by Catherynne Valente (exquisite, strange and poetic), the good local beer, my own reading, and the marvelous panel discussions, led by:

Elizabeth Bear

Yvonne Carts-Powell

Paul di Filippo (who also gave a great unscheduled reading during the semi-official milk/cookies/Chewbacca-doll pajama-party reading event [yes we were all confused] on Saturday night)

Don D'Ammassa (whose mind is an astonishing SF database)

Allen Steele

Marie Brennan (whose Midnight Never Come has got to go on my shortlist of books to read)

the aforementioned Kaitlin Heller (who is also a HRSFA alum)

... and yours truly.

Many thanks to Jason Brodsky, John Bestoso, Kirby Haugland and the entire volunteer staff for taking such good care of us all. I wish I'd gotten to know these mysterious, hard-working people--do they write, what do they read, where are they going with their SF/F enthusiasm?--but they were too busy helping everyone to stop and chat. What a team.

Blushing

2008-11-26T14:51:00.000-05:00

A few wonderful events in recent days. First came a tremendously humbling endorsement of The Red Wolf Conspiracy, from fantasy grandmaster Terry Brooks:

"What can I say about a book as exciting and fresh as The Red Wolf Conspiracy? I can’t remember when I’ve been so enthralled. Maybe when I first read Philip Pullman. Wow! This was one terrific read."

No need to elaborate on the joy those remarks generated. Then came word from Calgary-based mystery writer Sharon Wildwind, who tells me that Red Wolf was cited on a panel of authors and editors considering "The Best Fantasy of the Past Twenty Years." I had to read that about twenty times before I believed it.

The next morning, Kaitlin Heller, my editor at Del Rey, informed me that Karen Miller has also taken a fancy to the book. At this point I started to get light headed. And last but certainly not least, I see that the book's been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award. To make it to finalist status, however, the book needs votes, so if you enjoyed Red Wolf, please head on over to the website and cast a ballot. Voting's open to all, and starts the day after Christmas.

Not even the graphite-grey New England skies can get me down at the moment.

One demon can ruin your whole week

2008-11-14T22:32:00.000-05:00

Have any readers out there (and I believe in your numbers, you are infinite, I can feel it) actually met a demon? Short of that, have you considered what it would be like to confront one? Even a small one? Even briefly?

Well I hadn't, until I sat down to write the scene I finished tonight. Holy cats, what an experience! I mean, there's a heirarchy of traditional monsters, and demons are way up there on the nastiness scale. Demonic: what is that supposed to mean, exactly? Something a lot worse than horns and scarlet skin and bad fingernails. A real Dantesque demon. Not a flickering FPS game presence to be dispatched with the twitch of a gamer's thumb. Not a little dancing imp. Not a smirking reptilian hominid who flits around a wizard's lab on Tinkerbell wings, sporting a cocktail pitchfork and the nose of a proboscis monkey. Oh no. What I imagined was a DEMON. Something that's an outrage to creation every second it exists. And I had to go and let it lose in Chapter 8.

What a terrible mess. Suddenly there's blood and fire and scalded hands and old men getting their beards scorched off. Dead people. Gouts of burning blood. And the demon itself: it is very unpleasant, I declare, to try to image what it feels, how it thinks of itself, the torture its own consciousness must be.

I tried to think back on how it started, in the early draft. Was there a moment when I said to myself, "You know what you need right here, Rob? A demon, that's what. A shrieking, psychotic, mass-murdering little fluffball from the black beyond! Go to!"?

Getting rid of the thing was significantly harder than shooing the blackbird out of my house last winter, after it came down the woodstove pipe.

Please, gentlefolk: don't invite a demon into your book unless you're prepared to entertain it.

Book II: Speculations Abound

2008-11-14T19:38:00.000-05:00

Readers of a previous post were up in arms at the news that a major character dies in Book II, The Rats and The Ruling Sea. A few have been kind enough to add their guesses, fears, or seance-acquired glimpses of the evolving plot. Here are some of my favorites:

Thasha dies at her wedding, and continues to play a part in the story as a ghost.
Thasha does not die, but falls in love with Neeps. Pazel is consumed with jealousy.
Thasha and her new husband, the Mzithrini prince, elope together and are picked up by the Chathrand. Pazel is consumed with jealousy.
Arunis begins turning crewmembers into rats (hence the title), forcing Pazel and friends to surrender.
Oggosk sticks a poisoned needle into Pazel's neck when he fails a test of courage, and then the ghost of Frank Herbert rises up and drags me off to that corner of hell reserved for plagiarists.
Taliktrum steals the Nilstone and uses it to overpower the human crew. But each time he uses it he must sacrifice one ixchel life.
Lady Diadrelu is sentenced to death, when her clan decides she has betrayed them to the humans.
Captain Rose's fragile sanity finally snaps. He is straightjacketed. Uskins and Fiffengurt vie for control of the ship.
Arunis makes a servant out of Felthrup the rat. When Felthrup realizes the evil he's been forced to do, he leaps into the sea.

Alright, I confess: a couple of those are mine. Had to do something with all those discarded plotlines. One of the above, moreover, is perfectly true. Back to the ouija boards!

Life Sentences

2008-11-02T07:45:00.001-05:00

They had wanted him to be a Van Gogh, Jesus Christ and Zapata all rolled into one.

The line is from Peter Carey's Bliss, and "they" are the hero's madly idealistic parents. Carey is one of my favorite writers--and his books perfectly support a notion I'm convinced of: that all great novels have something fundamentally wrong with them. In other words, the very creative gunpowder one holds a match to in the hope of creating something unforgettable tend to become the force that knocks the book into the zone of the quirky. Carey, for example, goes spectacularly haywire. The first half of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith has some of the most compelling prose and fascinating characters I’ve ever encountered. The second condemns its midget narrator to wearing a Mickey Mouse suit (all the time) and becoming a fetish object for the degenerate powerful.

That line in Bliss got me thinking about the art of saying volumes about a character in a single sentence. Here's another example, preposterous and irresistible (to me at least), from García Márquez:

Florentina Ariza, on the other hand, hand not stopped thinking of her for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out of hand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months, and four days ago.

Gabo might just have more of these per novel than anyone who ever lived. A few pages earlier in Love in the Time of Cholera, describing the wedding night of Dr. Juvenal Urbino and the doe-eyed Fermina, he sums up her cloistered past in ten words: "He was the first man that Fermina Daza heard urinate." What more needs to be said?

I thought I'd make a collection of these zingers. Any favorites out there?

Yerba Mate: for that all-day happy feeling!

2008-10-26T21:45:00.000-04:00

I want to plug a very good drug, my favorite for writing marathons. As it happens it’s also perfectly legal, though by the difficulty of finding it in parts of the U.S. you’d think it was on a USDA blacklist. I’m talking about the national drink of Argentina, that blessed, innocuous, life-giving member of the holly family, yerba mate (pronounced YAYR-buh MAH-tay).

Right, you say, the Starbucks stuff.

Uh, no. The Starbucks yerba experience can be more cheaply had by taking a cigarette butt from the pavement and asking for a cup of hot water to soak it in. A good mate is something else altogether.

I realize that for many, this just ain’t news. Yerba’s gone mainstream, in the sixteen years since I had my first trago (in the headquarters of the Argentinian National Parks Administration). But there’s so much disinformation out there that I just want to set a few things straight.

1. You don’t get it in tea bags. The good stuff comes loose, by the kilo, at your neighborhood Latin grocery store, or your buddy from Buenos Aires down the street, or an online store like ma-tea.com. Good brands include Rosamonte, Taraguí and Cruz de Malta.

2. You don’t boil it. The moment boiling water touches mate leaf, you’ve got the cigarette-drink all over again. You bring the water about 80% of the way to a boil (known to science as the bubbles-in-the-bottom-of-the-pot stage), pour it into a thermos (or somehow hold it at just that temperature), and pour an ounce or two at a time into the cup with your mate leaf. Of course this necessitates having a bombilla , or metal filter-straw, to drink through. Get that where you got the yerba. And usually it also involves spitting out the first, dusty mouthful.

3. You don’t have to drink it out of a gourd with a little sunset-on-the-pampas scene painted on the side. I shared many a round with Argentinos who preferred a simple, hard-to-tip over ceramic cup.

4. Yes, it has caffeine, but it won’t pull the same nasty tricks on your body and brain that coffee does. Yerba isn’t acidic like coffee; it doesn’t spike and then vanish from your system, leaving you feeling like roadkill with half the day still in front of you. It won’t give you the crazy shakes. What it can do is make you feel ready to spend the day marching through a subtropical forest (as I did after my second mate, in Parque Nacional Iguazú, Argentina) without getting tired or even particularly hungry. I assume this explains the arrival of the Yerba Mate diet.

That said—please use common sense. It’s a stimulant--and it lasts a LONG time. It will leave you blinking, bouncing, baby-fresh, brightly awake at three a.m. if you’re not careful.

But if you’re going to trade sleep for productivity, why not do it with style?

Dreams are No Escape

2008-09-30T18:26:00.000-04:00

Last night I dreamed I left the trilogy behind, and flew away with my family to some impossibly lovely beach, where rappenans (armadillo-sized creatures with elephant heads) scavenged in the dunes. But having crossed the world for this vacation, we found that the little bungalow we’d seen online had been replaced by a 17-story resort, with a doughnut-shop theme. We moved in, deeply depressed. A poster in the lobby promised “doughnut fireworks” at midnight.

Well before then I found myself in the resort’s theater, listening to a vampire attempt a stand-up comedy routine. It was certainly an edgy show. He was a notorious vampire, and we were afraid of him. Each time one of his jokes fell flat he became violently angry, and cursed us at the top of his lungs. At last we grew so nervous that we would burst into deafening laughter before he could get anywhere near his punchlines.

He lost control. He ran from the stage, and returned wheeling a machine that hummed and sizzled. It had a switch for every seat in the theater, and he began to throw them one by one, with shouts and flourishes. Each time he did so an audience member died. Needless to say this killed the laughter too.

I rose and fled before he could throw my switch. But even as I scooted past the corpses in my row, he pointed at me from the stage: Writer! I’ll get you! You can’t live on donuts alone!

This dream contains a profound and timeless lesson. And I have no idea what it is.

Zrobiłbym to jeszcze raz, choćby jutro!

2008-09-24T09:51:00.000-04:00

I'm very pleased to announce that the first translated edition--Polish--of The Red Wolf Conspiracy is now in print, and indeed has already been reviewed numerous times. Great new cover art as well.

I'm a bit worried, however: readers in Poland have already complained that my invented languages are too easy to pronounce. ;)

Sprzysiężenie Czerwonego Wilka is published by MAG Publishing House.

Brooklyn Book Festival

2008-09-11T14:47:00.000-04:00

One of the coolest bookfests I've ever heard of is happening four hours to the south of metropolitan Three Rivers, and yours truly will be stuck right here, working on Book III. If you're anywhere near Brooklyn and live even somewhat for books, check it out. They don't come any more star-studded than this - 150 authors, talking, reading, signing copies, getting lost among the brownstones.

And here's the kicker: it's free.

Thanks to Suvudu for putting this on my radar.

McCain and Palin: A Match Made in Dis?

2008-09-04T11:04:00.000-04:00

At the risk of disappointing the countless U.S. citizens who rely on fantasy to help them choose a president, I’ve decided to keep my political opinions mostly to myself. This blog is a place of pure aesthetics. Facts should be spare and spunky. Did you know that rats (I have grown very fond of rats) can squeeze through any opening large enough for their skulls?

As everyone who has never read a fantasy novel knows, fantasy readers are afraid to think about the “real” world (you know, the one where Americans borrow billions from China to spend in Iraq trying to kill Saudis hiding in Pakistan) and its grubby, grown-up particulars. That’s why they’re so clumsy in it. That’s why they prefer asking questions to declaring answers, and lurk more often in bookstores than in bleachers, roaring for the team. And of course, that’s why they read books as comforting as John Gardner’s Grendel or as simplistic as Ian McDonald’s River of Gods. Why Brazil and Blade Runner impress them more than Rambo or Robocop.

So no, I won’t be distracted by politics. Besides, my world of Alifros is in trouble enough, with its own wars of predation and regimes built on fear, lies and hubris (don’t read anything into that last comment, pray).

And yet, as a major figure in the intellectual life of this nation, I feel a duty to speak out. Here, then, is my moderate, focus-group approved statement on the prospect of a John McCain/Sarah Palin administration.

Ten Days in the Belly of a Rat, or How Not to Finish a Fantasy Novel

2008-08-07T11:13:00.000-04:00

Hyperbole has a long and splendid history in my family. I get a lot of teasing about my penchant for referring to “the most amazing chocolate” or “the worst airplane seats ever invented.’ So I’m on my guard as I list, with deliberate understatement, the trials of the last ten days in July, during which I finished a draft of The Rats and the Ruling Sea:

July 21-25 Thunderstorms, often for hours. Forced to turn off computer for part of every day. Temperatures 82-92, 100% humidity. No AC in this house. I’m a good month into a bout of insomnia as of today.

Mon, 28: Smashing thunderstorms off & on all day. In the afternoon, a surge protector explodes in my face, spitting a tiny, red-hot piece of metal against my leg. Laptop showing signs of morbidity; switching full-time to a desktop mac.

Tues, 29: Power failure. Wild electrical storms in the afternoon. Prolonged brownouts (the lights are noticeably dim). Working in basement to escape the heat.

Wed, 30: Power out for nearly seven hours. Writing by hand. Dog runs (swims) through a muddy field recently plowed with the most organic of bovine fertilizers. The flies follow us home.

Thursday, 31: I disturb a wasp’s nest in the tool shed; stung multiple times. My left ear turns pomegranate red. No internet service. Power fails in evening. The dog runs away.

Friday, August 1st: First thunder-free day. So tired I’m hallucinating. I am less than an hour from sending the draft when, for reasons best known to Satan, the power dies again. I decide to drive into the town of Amherst and set up my computer in the library, at least long enough to retrieve the file. It’s the hottest day in weeks. I carry machine, monitor, keyboard, mouse and cables to the car, fit them in snugly for the half-hour drive, and the power returns. Ninety minutes later The Rats and the Ruling Sea arrives in England.

My advice to writers everywhere: don’t be seduced by whippoorwills and dewdrops on spiderwebs. Embrace the smog and the squalor. Live in town.

No exit but one

2008-07-25T12:45:00.000-04:00

When you kill a character you love it is awful, a loss of self and hope and promise and delight. You want to ask forgiveness of something; you want to believe you can still go back and make the words disappear. But that choice doesn’t really exist. If you’ve done your work right you’ve already tried to let that person escape, through any and every door, and found at last that they’re all locked, and locked for a reason. You’ve locked them yourself—or the story has, if you prefer. That’s no solace, though. The character won’t ever dance with you again.

Sleep/Reason/Monsters (a dream as the deadline nears)

2008-07-15T14:47:00.000-04:00

I'm in a city of my own creation. The populace is out in the streets, milling, marching. Is it a banquet, somebody's wedding reception? The city is built against the sea; the wind smells of salt and tar, fish scales and algae.

But night is falling, and the mobs of interesting people are all succumbing to demonic possession. It occurs whenever one of them falls asleep, and there’s a sort of peer pressure to do so, to join the lost-soul majority. Hence the whole population, as it tramps about, is chanting with a kind of military imperative: "Sleep-y-time! Sleepy-y-time!"

I can assume this sort of thing will only get scarier in the days ahead, as I near the end of Book II.

Concision Envy

2008-07-01T09:32:00.000-04:00

When my powers as a writer reach their glorious zenith, a few years before senility sets in, I will write something short. The proverbial Little Gem of a Book, or perhaps short stories. Meanwhile I’m glad there are people out there like the mysterious Lowly of Lowly's Book Blog, who can elegantly summarize a sprawler like Red Wolf in so few words. I particularly like his encapsulation of the politics of Alifros (two empires, both utterly evil, small indy islands getting munched) and the circumstances of the main characters (i.e., Thasha the “bribe/bride”). Nice work, whoever you are.

Worldstorm, Pt. II

2008-06-15T10:42:00.000-04:00

I raise my head above the fictional waters of Rats for an instant, and learn that my other home town, Iowa City, is suffering through the second 500-year-flood in fifteen years. My friends and their families are apparently safe, but there is only one bridge left in service over the Iowa River. In Cedar Rapids, 27 miles to the north, 400 city blocks are underwater.

The walk I used to take from my house in the Brookland Park neighborhood, across the Burlington St. Bridge, through a corner of the University of Iowa and to the downtown hobby shop, where Dungeons & Dragons miscellanea could be had (or at least craved) is blocked by a river gone mad and walls of sandbags.

Once again, I'm writing about this not because I think what touches my life is unusual, but precisely because it is not. This storm is everywhere, and it is wounding us far more than carbon limits ever could, and we may be confident that it will not simply go away until we find the will to stop feeding it. To paraphrase Loren Eisley: there is nowhere to hide; there is only a place to start from.

Worldstorm

2008-06-07T09:18:00.000-04:00

A storm of terrific intensity has just swept through my home town in Virginia. This occurred at the same time as the storm of terrific intensity in Minnesota, the ongoing rash of such storms across the greater Midwest, a massive deluge in China, wildfires in California and North Carolina, the first stirrings of what’s predicted to be a bustling hurricane season in the Caribbean, the start of the 7th summer of drought in Australia, a new drought in Ethiopia, and the ongoing mass death in Burma following the cyclone.

Such crises pass increasingly unnoticed by anyone, except those caught in their path. They are suddenly everywhere, like cicadas in a year of concupiscence. They spawn typhoons, tornadoes, floods; they tear out power lines, plunge us into darkness, wreck our cities, punish our coastlines, destroy our homes.

This particular not-very-noteworthy killer storm in Virginia happened to drop a centuries-old oak tree on the home of one of my best friend’s parents. The next day my friend's father tried to remove part of this tree himself. He tried too hard, suffered a heart attack, and died.

I am sick beyond words of hearing that climate change is too expensive to address. That we will all have to go slouching off to the almshouse if we take sensible steps to cut back on the carbon we dump into the air, the fuel for this atmospheric engine revving out of control. Battalions of thieves and liars will continue to peddle this fear, or any other that might keep us from acting, until there's not a place left on earth that hasn't been scoured, blighted or burned by our collective denial.

Of course we can’t know if any one storm resulted from global warming, any more than we can know if any single cough by an emphysema sufferer resulted from his chain-smoking. Is it wisdom to ignore the cough, to learn not to hear it at all?

The evidence of global warming’s costs to this world lie about us in heaps. Like the evidence of duplicity by the paid mouthpieces of industry, elected or otherwise.

I wish I could say the Worldstorm that destroyed civilization in Alifros was just a fancy. I wish (now and then) that my novels could be merely an escape.

Why make up a world?

2008-05-29T15:33:00.000-04:00

Response to a non-fantasy reader’s question.

I rather like the rational mind. Too often we disparage it, saddened as we are by memories of its failures, by centuries of spectacular hubris conducted in its name. Ruins atop ruins lie beneath our feet: the deep strata of stupidity born, among other progenitors, of too much faith in rationality, and too little imagination.

Nonetheless it’s a good mind, within its limits, and certainly the best item in our species’ little toolbox. So when the rational mind tells me that the world around me is the only world, I treat that verdict with respect.

And then dismiss it. There is an Elsewhere I believe in, a twilight kingdom or a phase-shifted universe, or a province reached in the grip of delirium or dream. I look for this place in books, of course, but also in certain music, the noises of animals, the dregs of the wind. I have a feeling this is an odd thing to talk about in a blog.

Alifros is naturally my attempt to get back to this place and stay awhile. To go there is, for my money, one of the purest privileges of being alive, and one of the least corrupt. The paths there are the common achievement of a volunteer band of imagineers (writers, readers, actors, roleplayers, storytellers of a hundred kinds) who seek never to fence it off into private property but only to nurture its beauties, repair its footbridges, prop up the wooden signs at its crossroads.

Sometimes the land that opens before me is Tolkien’s. Quite often in dreams I’ve strayed down Tolkien’s paths, and off them too, into woods and vales on which The Lord of the Rings spares only a sidelong glance. The Mountains of Mirkwood. The Ice Bay of Forochel. There were younger entry points too, notably CS Lewis and Susan Cooper, both of whom are currently being rather ill-served by Hollywood. At other times it’s been a land first charted by le Guin or John Crowley or Italo Calvino, or sung by Lucilla Galeazzi, or captured in a line of Yeats: Give to these children, new from the world, rest far from men/Is anything better, anything better? Tell us it then:

No, nothing is better, in a world wearied by the iron certainties of the powerful, the efficiency regimes, the petty caricatures of Divine Will that spew from a million mouths for a million reasons, the Keep Out and Keep In and Keep Busy signs that practical people are hammering up in our imaginations anywhere one can sink a nail.

When we go elsewhere, we reconsider, with the most generous part of our minds, the possibilities latent in both human and inhuman nature. That is the path to redemption, if such a path exists. That, for the record, is why I love what I do.

A Shocking Discovery

2008-05-18T12:53:00.000-04:00

18may08 - My dad wrote science fiction in his youth. I’ve never seen a word of it. He’s a political scientist and the director of a very down-to-earth community foundation. His research gig is nuclear weapons and international law; invented worlds and far-future science claim no part of his life beyond a stack of books on the night table. But he wrote the stuff, caramba. For over thirty years I suspected nothing; then a lunatic who used to play high-speed chicken on the backroads of Albemarle County, Virginia (and who is now a Texas neurosurgeon), spilled the beans. This runs in your lymphatic, kid, etc..

Why the secrecy? Was it because I was setting out to write [let’s all be solemn, now] literary fiction? Did he hope to spare me the family vice?

What about my grandparents? How far back does this go? I’m starting to feel like I’ve stumbled into an HP Lovecraft story.

Commencement rant

2008-05-18T12:21:00.000-04:00

18may08 - Novel writing's a mad addiction. Haven't I known this for years? Yes. No. There’s knowing and knowing, after all. Do you ‘know’ something if you can summon the idea to mind, but still act as though you held the opposite belief? Who was it first said (can anyone remind me?) that if, during your brief time on earth, you can stand to do something other than write, you should?

Pazel’s just been beaten up again. What sort of hero gets the curds beat out of him every other chapter, I’d like to know?

Chloe the Thunder Poodle is bashing around the yard, gnawing things, incensed at the length of my stays in this chair. Better not tell her I’m on the web.

Four practical suggestions for fantasy writers.

2006-10-24T12:57:00.000-04:00

Read.

Hope.

Face your life.

Write your dream.