52 Book Reviews

Interview With Wesley Chu

2015-05-08T20:20:00.000-05:00

Wes Chu's novel, The Lives of Tao, has been one of my favorite debuts of the year. Chu delivers a thrilling concoction of science fiction, spy thriller, and buddy comedy that is sure to connect with readers across multiple genres. Wes was kind enough to agree to an interview and answered questions about Lives of Tao, the upcoming sequel and his experiences as a debut author. I hope you find his answers as enjoyable as I did. Wes was a pleasure to work with and I am certain he will have a long and fruitful career if his first novel is any indication. So with great pleasure, I give you Wes Chu.

52 Reviews: Though I’m sure you’ve answered this question in countless interviews, can you tell us a little about the genesis of The Lives of Tao? And how did it change from inception to final product?

Wesley Chu: The Lives of Tao started off as an alternate history book that not so much changed history, but changed the reasoning behind why things happened in our past. I always found the why of something happening much more interesting than the how. Having the Quasing war allowed me to create an entirely new narrative.

While world building though, I made a few interesting rules that changed the story.

1. I decided that the Quasings inhabiting the hosts couldn’t control them. They could only speak with them.

2. The Quasing couldn’t leave the host until the host died.

Suddenly, the story became less about the aliens changing the world (though still a great backdrop to the story) and more about two personalities stuck with each other trying to make things work out (and not get killed in the process). Suddenly, the relationship that grew between Roen and Tao became the most interesting part of the story.

52 Reviews: I like to think of The Lives of Tao as a genre bender, mashing up science fiction tropes with those of spy thrillers. Chuck crossed with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, if you will. Was the decision to cross genre lines your intention from the very beginning or was it something that developed naturally over the course of writing the novel?

Wesley Chu: It definitely was a natural progression as I fleshed out the characters and plot. I really didn’t think about genres that much. I knew having aliens automatically put it in the Sci-Fi category, so I just shrugged and went with it. The Lives of Tao has been called urban fantasy, a comedy, and a science thriller. My agent has even categorized me as a romance (bromance) writer. I’m all right with all those classifications.

52 Reviews: Your choice of protagonist is an intriguing one. Roen Tan seems to be emblematic of a generation of adults who work soul crushing jobs, not because there are no other options but because they lack the ability to take a risk to change their lives into something different and more fulfilling. Was this an attempt at social commentary, a reflection on your own personal journey, or simply a gold mine for humor?

Wesley Chu: Yeesh. I’ll take all of the above. I admit to be a closet political activist who doesn’t have the balls to actually run for office or try to make a difference. Let’s face it, there are only so many fights one can get involved in on the Huffington Post comment boards before one want to put a fist through your computer.

As for it being a personal journey, I was talked out of becoming an English major by my English Professor father. He basically told me that if I did follow in his footsteps, my “life will suffer.” I took the practical route and studied computer science, and have been trying to get back on this path ever since. It only took about twenty years, but hell, better late than never. In the end, having the corporate career I had afforded me some luxuries (like being unemployed) that I probably would have struggled with if I tried to become a novelist straight out of college.

52 Reviews: One of the things I liked best about The Lives of Tao was the banter between Roen and just about every supporting character in the book. Humor is notoriously difficult for many writers, what advice would you offer to those that struggle with this aspect of fiction?

Wesley Chu: Writing’s not exactly the most social endeavor. Novelists spend their days mostly alone sitting in front of a computer. If it wasn’t for my dog, Eva Da Terrordale, my ass would never see the sun. Humor is one of the most difficult human interactions to nail in a book. I believe that’s why it is underrepresented in SFF.

To do humor well requires a lot of practice socializing with others. Talk to people. Hang out with different sorts of folks. Be stupid and have no shame. Humor is all about timing, and to get a good grasp of that timing, you have to hang out with a lot of people. For me, a lot of the responses Roen had in the book are how I would have reacted honestly with my friends. Yes, I lead a pretty stupid life sometimes.

52 Reviews: Was your decision to turn one of the supporting cast members into a Prophus bearing agent at the conclusion an attempt to demonstrate the hero’s journey from a very different point of view in the sequel, or do you have more sinister plans in mind?

Wesley Chu: What happened at the end of Lives was a setup for the second book. The focus in Deaths will be a little different from Lives. Lives was all about coming-of-age. Deaths will be about consequences.

Let’s just say the complexity of the story is tripled in the sequel. And yes, things do get more sinister, but not the way you think. Let’s just say their five hundred plus year old war might finally be coming to the end. For everyone.

52 Reviews: What can you tell us about the sequel to The Lives of Tao that is dropping later this year? Are there plans for even more novels featuring Roen, Tao and Company?

Wesley Chu: I can tell you The Deaths of Tao is dropping Oct 29, 2013. The ante’s been upped. The new villain, Enzo, is nuttier than Sean and even more deadly. Jill gets more involved in the story and she’s not quite as nice as she was in Lives. That’s all I can say.

As for the third book, that’ll depend on the hive mind and the readers. So, let’s make it happen!

52 Reviews: What is the biggest lesson you learned with Lives? How did it impact the writing of Deaths? And did Deaths teach you something new?

Wesley Chu: The biggest lesson I learned from writing Lives was that there’s a life outside of writing. When I began to write, I quit martial arts, stopped hanging out with friends, and essentially became a hermit. Seasons passed, friends got married and had kids, Duke Nukem actually came out, and people actually paid to become virtual farmers! Uh…wut? So yeah, have a life outside of writing.

I carried that lesson over to Deaths by getting a dog and trying to actually see my friends once in a while, though all I did when I saw them was answer the question, “dude, what happened to you the past five years?”

52 Reviews: The Lives of Tao appears to be widely well received, what has been the most surprising and rewarding aspects of your time as a debut novelist?

Wesley Chu: What I enjoyed the most about the entire experience was meeting and hanging out with all these other writers. Like I said earlier, writing is a pretty damn lonely career. I spent the better part of a decade wandering from café to café in Chicago. I was like a transient tourist going from coffee shop to coffee shop.

Once I went to my first convention and met all these great people that loved books as much as I did and understood me, I was hooked. Or as I often like to say, I felt like a hobbit returning back to the shire.

52 Reviews: The use of the Prophus to tie the events of real world history into the narrative world of the novel was one of my favorite aspects of the book? Is there a chance that we might see a more detailed account of the Prophus and Genjix in a historical setting?

Wesley Chu: I originally had a completely separate plot line with Tao in the historical settings. My editor felt that the second plot slowed the story a bit too much and asked to reduce them to the historicals at the beginning of every chapter. Not gonna lie; cutting out the 20k+ worth of words hurt, but the robot masterminds were wise. It did speed up the story.

I do plan to release the full historical chapters as either short stories or on my website sometime in the future. Stay tuned.

Tainted Blood by M.L. Brennan

2015-01-05T00:31:00.001-06:00

I normally don't read books with vampire protagonists, but when I do they're written by M.L. Brennan. Vampires are probably the most overused trope in urban fantasy, and many discerning readers turn their noses up at books that focus on the vampire as the hero. I am one of those readers, by and large. M.L. Brennan's Generation V novels are the exception. With a protagonist that is far from the popular image of the brooding, preternatural predator, flawless and unconventional world building and a light-hearted sense of humor that keeps me in stitches, these books have earned a proud place on my overflowing bookshelves. The latest installment, Tainted Blood continues to deliver everything I come to expect from the adventures of Fortitude Scott but takes great pains to remind both readers and protagonist alike that being a vampire isn't all superpowers and wisecracks.

In the third Generation V novel, Fortitude Scott proves that working with family can be deadly…

Former film student Fortitude Scott is finally gainfully employed. Unfortunately, said employment happens to be with a group of sociopathic vampires—his family. And as much as Fort is loath to get too deep into the family business, when his brother, Chivalry, is temporarily unable to run the territory, it’s up to Fort to keep things under control.

So when the leader of a powerful faction of shifters turns up murdered, Fort finds himself tracking down a killer while navigating dangerous rivalries, longtime grudges, and hidden agendas. Even with the help of his foxy kitsune sidekick, Suzume, he’ll need to pull out all the stops to hunt for the paranormal assassin.

But as he calls on fairies, witches, and ghouls for help, he discovers that the problem is much bigger than a single dead werebear. The supernatural community is preparing for a massive shift in power within the Scott family leadership—and Fort has landed right in the middle of the gathering storm.…

Once again, Fortitude Scott's involvement with the family business is on the rise, with him taking over for his older brother while Chivalry comes to terms with the death of his most recent human bride. His investigation of the murder of the head of the metsan kunigas or werebears, if you prefer proceeds along at a rapid pace, with Fort once again relying on his brains over his increasing physical capabilities. As expected, his allies in the supernatural community play a large role in his investigations, As far as the murder plot, there are some nice twists and turns but those are far less compelling than the progression in the larger story arc of the series.

Tainted Blood is a novel about transitions and Bhumika's death and Chivalry's reaction to her inevitable demise serve to underscore the darker side of the vampiric lifestyle. Fortitude's growing dependency on his mother's blood and the lessons he learns about the exact nature and manner of fulfilling his dietary needs once he transitions into an mature vampire provide a darker undercurrent to this installment, nicely balancing the witty repartee and pop culture references that make the series such a joy to read. All in all, the tone of Tainted Blood sits in the perfect sweet spot between the more serious Harry Dresden series and the laugh a minute style of Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid Chronicles. Fans of either series should give Fortitude's adventures a read,

There's a bit of a middle book feel to Tainted Blood, because of Fort's status as a fledgling vampire on the cusp of more power, responsibility, and his place in the shifting hierarchy of the supernatural community. With his mother's power on the decline, the various factions are looking to Fortitude as a possible ally to mitigate the harsher sociopathic tendencies of his elder siblings. Even Fort's relationships are in flux. His relationship with Suzume, his kitsune partner in crime, is on the edge of romance and his relationship with his siblings, Chivalry and Prudence, are likewise shifting. Chivalry finally begins to see Fortitude as more than a child and Prudence actually takes a sisterly role in his supernatural education which adds a welcome level of depth to their family dynamics, disfunctional as they may be. My only complaint is that Fort seems completely removed from the mortal society around him, with his human connections set aside for the time being.

Brennan's world building continues to impress, with the addition of the werebear community and more information on both the witches and the elven communities featured in the previous books. Brennan never takes the easy route, using mythologies from around the world to compliment the supernatural denizens of her world. No creature ever feels like a two dimensional monster from central casting, and stereotypes are consistently broken to engaging effect.

I'm eager to see where the next volume, Dark Ascension takes Brennan's unusual cast of characters as Fortitude grows in power and the stakes promise to get more serious on all fronts. Brennan continues to be one of the most engaging and unique voices in urban fantasy. Don't let the beefcake covers and bloodsucking protagonist fool you.

Prince of Fools by Mark Lawrence

2014-12-30T00:49:00.000-06:00

Mark Lawrence is one of those authors that I've meant to review for a long time. I thoroughly enjoyed his debut Prince of Thorns after picking it up as an impulse buy from the Science Fiction Book Club what feels like eons ago. When the SFBC didn't offer the subsequent books in the series, I allowed my OCD need to have all the books in a series in the same format stop me from reading the rest of the series. I know it's weird but I promise, I'm mostly sane. So when the first installment of his second series Prince of Fools hit shelves, I snatched it up. Then life took a turn for the busy and I stopped reading almost entirely. Fast forward almost a year, and here we are.

Prince of Fools has everything I loved about Prince of Thorns with a much more relatable protagonist than teen sociopath Jorg Ancrath, so readers with more delicate sensibilities can rest a bit easier. Lawrence's tersely elegant prose and well crafted characters are in full evidence and the world building is just as effortless as readers of The Broken Empire have come to expect. I suspect some of that is due to the connection to the previous series, Though my long gap in reading Lawrence as well as having not finished the previous series (a situation I expect to remedy in the coming months) rendered all but the most obvious connections meaningless to me. Even as a standalone, Prince of Fools is a joy to read and readers who haven't read the previous series can start here with no significant disadvantage. Just dive in and enjoy, I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

The Red Queen is old but the kings of the Broken Empire dread her like no other. For all her reign, she has fought the long war, contested in secret, against the powers that stand behind nations, for higher stakes than land or gold. Her greatest weapon is The Silent Sister—unseen by most and unspoken of by all.

The Red Queen’s grandson, Prince Jalan Kendeth—drinker, gambler, seducer of women—is one who can see The Silent Sister. Tenth in line for the throne and content with his role as a minor royal, he pretends that the hideous crone is not there. But war is coming. Witnesses claim an undead army is on the march, and the Red Queen has called on her family to defend the realm. Jal thinks it’s all a rumor—nothing that will affect him—but he is wrong.

After escaping a death trap set by the Silent Sister, Jal finds his fate magically intertwined with a fierce Norse warrior. As the two undertake a journey across the Empire to undo the spell, encountering grave dangers, willing women, and an upstart prince named Jorg Ancrath along the way, Jalan gradually catches a glimmer of the truth: he and the Norseman are but pieces in a game, part of a series of moves in the long war—and the Red Queen controls the board.

Based on the publisher's blurb, it's clear that Jalan is about as far from Jorg Ancrath as Lawrence could get. This prince is no warrior at all, prefering comforts of the flesh to conflict of any kind. A self proclaimed coward, Jalan is the last person anyone would call a hero, and yet this unlikely hero is what made this novel such a standout for me. Lawrence infuses Jalan with enough wit and easy charm that reader's can find him likeable in spite of his pathological need to take the easiest road available, His cowardice is far more relatable than Jorg's sociopathy and while he never quite manages to find enough spine to brush the surface of heroism there are glimmers of the man he could be. But as we all know, old habits are the hardest to break and most people only truly change when given no other choice. Luckily there are more of Jalan's adventures on the horizon.

Since a cowardly prince can hardly provide the action and bravado that is necessary to support a epic fantasy series, Lawrence wisely ties Jalan's fate to a hero after most fantasy fan's hearts. Snorri Snagason's very name means attack and the fierce and larger than life Norseman is the perfect foil for the yellow bellied Jalan. On a mission of vengeance, Snorri brings to mind the larger than life heroes of David Gemmell and gives the reader a hero they can cheer for as Jalan slowly finds himself becoming a better man for his forced, pants-wetting association. Snorri is the irresistible force in this story, but it's Jalan who shows the more compelling character arc. Whether he'll become a hero despite his best efforts to the contrary remains to be seen, but I'm certain the journey will be as full of breakneck pacing and internal tension as Prince of Fools.

If you like your fantasy with bloody battles, a touch of horror, and a generous helping of complex engaging characters you should definitely give the opening chapter of The Red Queen's War a place in your to read list. I'll be watching my doorstep for the second and third volumes of The Broken Empire to arrive.

The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

2014-07-17T00:54:00.000-05:00

After an accidental hiatus from reviewing, I’ve decided that it’s time to put butt in chair and hands on keyboard again. I almost didn’t. For the record I never stopped reading, just writing about what I read. There were several excellent novels that were consumed during my quiet period and I may try to review those novels properly, but given the amount of time that has passed, it’s probably more realistic to say that they’ll appear in an upcoming Trending Ten post. Which brings me to the book that snapped me out of my malaise and reminded me why I enjoyed reviewing and interacting with other readers, writers, and reviewers.

Sometimes a novel, just kicks your legs out from under you and holds you down until you’ve devoured every single word. And then you’re sad because your plate is empty and you’re already on the hunt for another novel to take the edge off of the hole closing the back cover left inside you. M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts was that kind of novel for me. Carey gifts readers with an unexpected coming of age story that is surprisingly intimate, heart warming, and sobering despite the zombie tropes and apocalyptic scenery. Fans of Neil Gaiman should take special note as Carey’s prose has the same simple elegance and off-handed lyricism as Gaiman’s best.

The Girl with All the Gifts follows Melanie, a precocious little girl who lives her life under lock and key, and only allowed out her cell for meals, showers, and her daily lessons. If the cell wasn’t enough, she is strapped to a wheelchair any time she is allowed beyond its four walls. Carey leaves readers in the dark about Melanie’s true nature and the real function of the prison in which she is kept, but not for long. We find out the truth even as Melanie does. The world as we know has ended, destroyed by a exotic fungus that has crossed the species barrier turning the infected into mindless, killing machines, that serve only to spread the fungus to new hosts. These “hungries” are reminiscent of the infected in The Last of Us, but don’t worry about the story being derivative. Carey packs the novel with deep characterization and an amazing amount of emotional heft all while delivering the horror and action sequences that fans of zombie and apocalyptic fiction will expect.

Carey goes to great lengths to humanize his cast, even the hungries are not without very real sympathetic moments. Hungries are not evil they are simply a danger of the environment and the characters view them like one would a dangerous animal. But there are moments of surprising humanity even among these shambling once-people. When examining evil, one has to look to the human cast but even then, there is no black and white. In a world built on the ashes of the one before everything is a shade of gray. All of the principal characters are fully realized people, with flaws both large and small. Even the primary antagonist isn’t someone you can truly hate, because despite the horrific nature of her plans, the rationale behind them is hard to dispute. You’ll come to care about characters you least expect to, and you’ll empathize with them all.

Based on what I’ve said so far, you might think that The Girl with All the Gifts will certainly be missing the suspense, tension, and action that you would expect from a novel about the end of the world and a hungry zombie (no pun intended) around every corner. Carey’s pacing mirrors that of a thriller, with short chapters, and plenty of tension. I devoured the novel and was truly sad to reach the final page.

Carey gets everything right, but it’s his prose that makes The Girl with All the Gifts such a remarkable novel. Sparse and beautifully clear, Carey’s prose manages to have weight despite the narrative structure that resembles nothing so much as a classic fairy tale. He manages more with the negative space in the narrative than almost anyone, drawing the reader into the story by tipping his hand just before the reveal so they’re almost always in on the plan, but almost as often I found myself surprised just as readily as I would be in any thriller. The result was an absolute pleasure to read and I plan checking out Carey’s Felix Castor novels a run in the future. Carey’s turned in one of the best books I’ve read this year, and will be a major player in the Trending Ten post to come. So if you’re on the fence about this one hop down and join the party. You won’t regret it.

Round Table: Writing the Sequel Part Four

2014-04-15T17:58:00.000-05:00

As promised, here's the next installment of the Writing the Sequel Round Table. We're talking about responding to criticism and how the writing may or may not be affected by the effect of writing for a known audience. Mileages, predictably vary. I found these responses to be some of my favorites. I'm sure you will too.

If you haven't read the proceeding installments, you'll find them below.

Writing the Sequel: Part One

Writing the Sequel: Part Two

Writing the Sequel: Part Three

52 Reviews: Is there any pressure to address any criticism that you may have received from reviews or comments from readers when you sit down to work on the second installment in a series? Or do you view criticism as nothing more than a way to focus the inevitable growth most writers experience over time in a specific direction?

Jeff Salyards: When I first started agent hunting two and a half years ago, Scourge was almost 70,000 words longer than what ultimately went to print. While I had agents request partials and fulls, they all passed in the initial rounds. And while no one overtly said, “Hey, bucko, unless you’re Patrick Rothfuss, you ain’t clearing the gatekeepers with a 170,000 word debut,” the feedback implied that the book was too long, or at least that the pacing was off (there was a lot of the central character’s back story woven in). So I started tweaking the submission as I went, cutting, cutting, and still no dice. A lot of interest, a lot of passes.

With less than a third of my agent list left, I decided to really revisit the manuscript. I concluded that by trimming the “real time” story and the backstory together, I was just watering down both. So I scrapped that version and made the very difficult choice to excise the backstory completely and patch the remaining story back together. That wasn’t just killing some choice darlings, it was genocide. It was rough and a ton of work. I drank a lot. But I did it, and low and behold, I had two offers from agents almost immediately after shopping the truncated version. I chose one, and got a deal for the series not long after.

Did this happen because I was open to feedback and made the requisite changes? Or would I have landed the agent offers anyway if I kept shopping the book the way I originally wrote it and intended?

Who the hell knows. But sometimes I hear the ghosts of that entire city of dead darlings cry out and I wonder. Still, it seems more likely that by taking criticism on board, I improved the writing. Some writerly folk contend that reading reviews will lead to madness. You can’t please everyone and shouldn’t try, and it’s awfully easy to forget the six good reviews you got in a row and fixate on the lousy one. But if you are discerning and open, who knows, maybe you’ll identify a trend in some reviews, a critical refrain. And if so, it might be worth reexamining your stuff and at least considering the validity of the criticism, weighing it against your own estimation of what you thought worked or didn’t.

So I can’t say any reader comments or criticism created pressure to write Book 2 a certain way, but it probably informed the writing a little bit, especially when I heard a few critiques crop up more than once. Of course every writer wants raves and stars and swooning readers. But the idea is to continue growing, and while that might happen naturally just pounding away at the keys, I think being aware of how your work is perceived, how readers respond, can be useful. In moderation anyway. Which I suck at. But hey.

M.L. Brennan: Oh, absolutely. If something like 90% of your readers noted that your main character acts like a doormat for the first two-thirds of the book *cough* *cough*, that'll definitely stick in your mind, even if it was a deliberate choice. The question of whether or not to address that criticism in the next book comes down more to whether what was pointed out was something that was deliberate and necessary (like your character getting mugged by Bruins fans, say) and part of your overall plan, or if it was unintentional and something that can be adjusted. Or perhaps just something that you were surprised was an issue.

Criticism is a necessary part of the writing process -- after all, otherwise editors wouldn't exist, and believe me, when my editor tells me that something is a problem I definitely get right to work on it. But at the same time an attempt to write to please everyone can be a very dangerous impulse. I'm the product of an MFA program, and I loved my time there. But I saw more than a few novels die horrible deaths as their authors responded to workshops by trying to make every individual reader happy -- and in the process lost all sight of their own project. So I try to really weigh whether a criticism should be addressed.

I ended up sticking to my guns for the most part on my character's slow growth, but here's an area where comments and reviews helped me notice a gap -- I was very committed in my series to making sure that there was good representation of gender and ethnicity -- but there wasn't a single openly LGBT character in the first book. It was pointed out, and it was a valid point -- I'd had plans for a specific character to appear in Book 3, but I moved his introduction into Book 2 to address the lack of representation. I thought that was a useful critique, and it helped me as a writer.

Jay Posey: Not sure I'll have much to add that hasn't already been covered, but I won't let that stop me from talking anyway!

Qualified feedback can be very useful, and I would count "qualified" as meaning either a) from someone I think of as a Trusted Ally (e.g., an editor, another writer with a good sense of craft, etc.) or b) from a trend across multiple readers.

I've found for me personally it's not especially healthy to read every single review of my work out there. But if I see a trend developing across multiple reviews, then it's definitely helpful to look at the big picture and make adjustments; if, for example, even positive reviews are saying they wish there'd been more backstory for a character, or that the action scenes had been more tightly written, or whatever, that's good information to keep in mind.

I do have a handful of readers whose individual opinions I trust because I know that they've got good instincts, and generally when something doesn't sit right with them it's likely that something will also affect many other readers. But that's a pretty select group of folks who tend to be insightful about books whether they're writers or not; people who may not agree with my opinions, but who always bring interesting thoughts and perspectives to the table.

So coming from either of those sources, yes definitely feedback on initial works can affect my approach to later works. I think the big trick is discerning when your own particular voice might suffer for requested changes; sometimes I've had suggestions that seemed fine at an intellectual level that ultimately just didn't work for me at a gut level, and I think you have to be able to find that line when changing might start to encroach on personal style. But it's a learning process, and you can't find that line if you don't start by listening to feedback.

There's a danger, though, in over-correcting if you allow those critiques to sit too far forward in your mind while writing, so I think it's important to absorb the feedback without obsessing over it.

Jeff Salyards: ML and Jay nailed it, both in trusting your own direction/voice/choices when evaluating reviews to see what makes sense, and in not over thinking or over-correcting based on feedback (well, unless it's your editor cracking the whip).

Even responding first I end up thinking other answers are better! The order doesn't matter for me at all!

M.L. Brennan: I like Jay's term Trusted Ally. I'm going to steal that from him. It has a delightfully Nixonian connotation to it. Soon I'll be dispatching hired goons to riffle through the desk drawers of select reviewers. (*significant look*)

Jay Posey: Yes, to be honest, the quickest way to achieve Trusted Ally status with me is by telling me exactly what I want to hear and/or offering substantial bribes. In fact, I should probably offer subscription opportunities on my website ... hmmm. :D

Jeff Salyards: I like the term "rifle through." I'm pretty sure it predates firearms (rifles, at least), but I'm too lazy to look it up. Regardless of the etymology, I always dug it.

Django Wexler: Looking back, I have to say I haven’t received a lot of actionable criticism from readers. Complaints about The Thousand Names in reviews and so on have pretty much fallen into three categories:

1.Non-specific negative comments, like “this was boring” or “I didn’t like the characters.”

2.People who didn’t like the basic nature of the book. For example, “It was all battles and fighting!” I may like or dislike those things, but I can’t disagree that the comment is true!

3.People who didn’t like specific elements I’d included in the book: the Sweet Polly Oliver story, the swearing, the gay characters. (Oddly, no one has complained about the horrific violence. I guess that goes with the territory these days.)

I don’t know what to change to address #1, can’t really address #2, and generally don’t care to address #3. (People are free to like or dislike elements, but I’d rather not let it affect me.) So I can’t say that reader response has been a big factor in changing the second book. (Obviously, that’s not including my own beta readers, who give me much more specific feedback and are always greatly appreciated!)

Douglas Hulick: As others have said, there's criticism, and then there's Criticism. I rely on my writer's group, beta readers, and my editor for the lion's share of the latter. As to the former, it depends on the reason behind it and the source.

Many of reviews you find online tend to be what I call "gut level", in that the person is basically explaining why the did or didn't like the book. The reasons for those reactions can vary widely. Among other things, I've had people love/hate: my use of first person POV; the pacing of the book; my world building; the swordplay & action; the criminal elements; the plot; characters names; and so on. And that's fine. If, as ML said, you get a lot of people loving/hating the same aspect of your work, then that can tell you something. It doesn't mean you have to act on it, of course, but its good feedback nonetheless. We're all of us writing to be read, so reader reaction can't be ignored.

Of course, some reviews/criticisms go beyond that: some dig just that much deeper or turn the lens at just the right angle and find something you didn't think of. Those are great reviews, whether you agree with them or not, because they get you thinking. I love that. But again, that doesn't mean I will necessarily listen to them. Hell, I don't always agree with the critiques from people in my writer's group, my beta readers, or my editor, and I have a professional relationship with them.

Each suggestion, each criticism, has to be weighed not only on its own merits, but against the rest of the work as well. Each has to improve the work in some way. Is it possible that a reader comment or on-line review will meet that criteria? Of course. Never say never and all that. But usually I will tend to stick with the Trusted Ally that Jay mentioned above. At the end of the day it's my name on the spine of the book: if for that reason alone, I can't bend to every wind that blows.

Jay Posey: I think Django's word choice there is excellent - criticism has to have actionable components, and very often general feedback is mostly personal opinion. Even in writing groups sometimes feedback can be of the "I would have done such and such differently," or "I didn't like so-and-so" variety, and isn't actually much help in knowing why something isn't working or how to fix it, if it does in fact need fixing. That's the key to the Trusted Ally for me; these are people who know how to give specific, constructive, actionable critiques, who understand structure and can help you identify both the source of the problem and possible solutions.

Round Table: Writing the Sequel Part Three

2014-04-14T15:33:00.002-05:00

So, sorry for the delay. Life has gotten supremely hectic. But the round table still has two more installments to go, If you haven't read the previous entries follow the links below and enjoy. I will post the next part tomorrow. Happy reading.

Part One

Part Two

52 Reviews: Excellent answers, everyone. There's lots of insight from a variety of angles. Many of which, I'd imagine were completely unexpected. Which brings me to my next question, while I'm sure writing a second installment of a series is easier in terms of world and character building as you've got some baseline information well established, what would you say is the most unexpected difficulty in returning to the scene of your success?

Jay Posey: For me it was undoubtedly the anxiety over whether or not I'd be able to produce another work at the same level of quality that wasn't just a rehash of what I'd done before. One part was that I thought that certainly by having written a complete novel before, it would be easier the second time around, but as I mentioned before I actually found myself struggling with the idea that maybe I'd only had one good idea and I'd already used it up. That was purely self-imposed fear.

The other part for me was wanting the second book to have its own tone and feel while still feeling like a consistent and logical part of the story that Book One had begun. I didn't want it just to be more of the same, but obviously I didn't want it to veer off in some unexpected direction either. It took me longer than I would've liked to find my footing in that regard and that was a bit of a surprise to me.

Also, on a lesser scale, with Book One I was pretty free to make up the "rules" of my world as I saw fit. I had to pay a lot more attention in writing Book Two to what I had created before, to make sure I wasn't breaking anything, which took more mental energy (and research) than I'd expected. I guess I had sort of subconsciously assumed that authors automatically had every word they'd ever written memorized, so when I had to research my own book it was kind of bizarre. Maybe every author actually does have their own work memorized, but I apparently don't have that particular talent.

Jeff Salyards: Hmmm. That is an interesting question. There were plenty of expected difficulties (like overcoming my innate slothiness), but luckily not too many unexpected ones. The one difficulty that sort of surprised me actually dealt with baselines and established (or lack of established) worldbuilding. I played my cards close to my chest in Scourge of the Betrayer (some would say too close), so I couldn’t wait to get started with Veil of the Deserters, since it was going to be an opportunity to open things up and share a lot more detail, both character and of the world they inhabit.

Scourge was intentionally more intimate than epic in scope, and while Veil is hardly Martin- or Erikson-esque, it is a bigger canvas with a lot more detail to try to work in. One thing that bugs me in genre fiction is when a writer info dumps all over the page. There is a trick to integrating that stuff artfully, without the reader’s eyes glazing over or needing to hit them over the head with clunky exposition, and I’m hardly a master at it. So figuring out that balance, and picking and choosing my spots for reveals, was sometimes difficult, especially since it’s first person and the narrator is sometimes in the dark or left to piece things out for himself.

So a lot of the revision was smoothing the world building out and trying to introduce history and backstory and important cultural details as gracefully as possible. One of the old tired "truisms" you hear in a lot of fiction workshops is “show, don’t tell.” Well, that’s kind of bullshit. There is a time and a place for telling, and some of the great classics in literature were full of evocative, insightful, and even delightful telling. I did try to have active scenes that managed to do double duty and reveal something new about the characters, castes, factions, etc. But sometimes you do just have to tell, and there were times I struggled or floundered a bit in figuring out how, especially in the first few drafts.

Django Wexler: Keeping details straight is an obvious difficulty – I try to make notes on everything I can, but inevitably I find myself hunting through past text to figure out if I mentioned the color of somebody’s eyes – but more or less an expected one. For me the oddest problem has been the multiplication of characters. In addition to the protagonists, I necessarily had to invent many secondary characters for each story, and obviously I did my best to make these characters as interesting and fleshed-out as possible. The problem is, the more work I put in and the more I got to know them, the more I wanted to keep track of what they were up to after the book ended, even if that didn’t follow along with the main characters’ story! It’s really tempting to spread yourself thinner and thinner, to see what happens to the fascinating people who’ve wandered out of the story. (Or, alternately, to unrealistically keep EVERYONE who has an interesting character in a big gang following the protagonists around.) For me it’s a tendency I have to fight, though – those stories, while they might be fascinating, would kill the pacing of the main plot. There’s always tie-in short pieces and so on to check back in with!

M.L. Brennan: Keeping the details straight can be maddening. I have a basic info notebook, but you find yourself needing information that you could never imagine needing, or information that you could never have imagined you could forget. I did a lot of flipping through the previous books as well.

I think the most unexpected difficulty for me was sometimes feeling hemmed in by mythology or character elements that I'd established in the first book. A few times I got what seemed like fantastic new ideas, but the problem was that they conflicted with what I'd pretty much set in stone in the first book. Sometimes that could be massaged a little -- for example I had one character who was flatly homicidal toward my main character in the first book, but I realized in the second that I need there to be more levels and nuance in that relationship. So I massaged things a little, coming up with a fairly plausible reason why straight-out homicidal suddenly became murderous-yet-curious. Other times, though, you're kind of stuck. This can lead to greater creativity at the end of the day as you figure out a way to work within previous boundaries, but at the time that it's happening you just feel very irritated with you-from-a-year-ago. This also, funnily enough, leads to yet more re-reading of the previous book as you figure out exactly what was stated, and how to stay true to the wording but start wiggling around the meaning.

Douglas Hulick: Details are hard, yes. I ended up having someone to create a private wiki for me with all the information about my characters, places, etc., and I still had to end up paging through a dog-eared copy of the first book to check little bits here and there. It's easy creating stuff the first time through because, hey, it's all new. Fly free! But the second book? You now have ropes tying you to the first, and sometimes they pull you back to earth (for good as bad both, as ML notes).

Nor were world and character easier for me the second time around. I mean yes, I still had the same first-person narrator as before, but I'd set it up so that his main foil/companion from the first book was out of the picture much of the second book. That tripped me up more than I expected: turns out Drothe needs someone to dash about, not to mention banter and argue, with. So I had to move some secondary characters into new roles. I also took the story to a completely new part of my world, so that meant a new culture, history, politics, and so on. I did this for a reason, mind--like Jeff, I wanted a different feel for the book, more of a quest structure this time around than a thriller/adventure one in my case--but that didn't make things necessarily any easier.

But what really caught me off guard was simply trying to figure out what I needed to reference from the first book and what I could leave out when it came to the second. Since SiS isn't a direct continuation of AT in terms of plot or story, but still builds off the events of the first book, I found myself in a pickle more than once. Figuring out how to explain two characters' interactions/history/conflict while not summarizing the entire first book was trickier than I expected. (Which is why I killed them all off at the end of SIS and started book three with an entirely new cast of characters. To hell with repeating THAT headache, am I right?) (Okay, no, I didn't. But there are days...)

Round Table: Writing the Sequel: Part Two

2014-04-07T16:12:00.001-05:00

It's been great to see what a success this Round Table has been. We're surging ahead and asking about the pressures of success and how writing for a built in audience effects the writing process. The answers are often unexpected and definitely give an interesting glimpse into what goes on behind the curtain for some of my favorite authors. If you missed the kick off to the discussion you can find a link below. I hope you continue to enjoy

Writing the Sequel: Part One

52 Reviews: With each of you having recently completed work on a sequel to the start of very well received series, I'd like to ask you if the level of pressure changes when you know you are actively writing for an waiting audience and if so, does that change the way you approach the writing?

Django Wexler: In my case, the first draft of the sequel was complete before the first book actually came out, so when I was writing it, I didn’t know if the series would really work out with the readers or not. Writing for a waiting audience doesn’t really add pressure for me – if anything, it’s an encouragement to know that there are people eager to read what I’m working on, and I’m just relieved that enough people like my particular brand of story to make it worth doing.

Right now I’m writing the third book in the series, and I do feel a little more pressure, but it’s from another source. For the first time in my writing career, I’m writing a continuation to something that’s actually published and in print; the events of book one (and book two, as of fairly recently) are now absolutely set in stone as far as I’m concerned. It’s a very strange feeling not being able to make revisions to my own work, and I keep worrying I’ll discover something I did in the first book that badly screws up want I want to do in the third, and not be able to go back and change it. So far it hasn’t happened, but it keeps me a little on edge!

Jay Posey: My experience is similar to Django's. I was putting the final touches on the manuscript for Book Two when the first book hit the shelves, so I think the pressure I felt on the second was more self-imposed, wondering if I'd be able to write ANOTHER novel that was up to the quality of the first. In my case, I think most of my Book Two-related nightmares were that I was going to submit the manuscript to the Robot Overlords (at Angry Robot Books) and they were going to write back something like "We've obviously made a terrible, terrible mistake ..."

I'm also working on the third book in the series now, and I'm definitely feeling more audience-centric pressure this time around, much more so than either of the first two. I think on the first book I was in a "Will anyone like anything about this?" phase, and the second was "Do I actually have a second book in me, or was the first one a fluke?", and now I've moved into a new "Can I bring it all together so the audience is thoroughly satisfied?" kind of anxiety.

I hadn't really given much thought to the fact that I can't go back and revise anything in the first two books, so if I failed to set something up properly I can't fix it now ... that's a new thing to fret over. Thanks for pointing that out Django!

Jeff Salyards: This is the problem with being a procrastinator and responding third or fourth—all the good answers are taken, and you start to sound like an echo. So, in that vein, yeah, thanks Django; I hadn’t considered the unrevisability angle before either. Way to harsh my buzz. The publisher is making galleys of the second book right now. . . wait! WAIT! I need to fix something!!

I also have the same response when hearing from readers anxious for me to churn out another book—that feels good. So much better than writing in a vacuum. “Hey, everyone, Veil of the Deserters will be out in three months! Did you hear that! Hey. . . anybody. . . ”

All that said, I can at least diverge on a couple of points. Continuing my procrastination theme, I did not have book two written, or even started, when book one published. So my process did change quite a bit, as there was a deadline, and I couldn’t afford to walk away from the manuscript for long stretches or allow myself to dawdle like I did for the first book.

The other difference: the original publisher, Night Shade Books, went through its death throes mid-stream as I was writing the second book, so there were several months when I didn’t even know if the series was dead in the water as well, as there were several grim possibilities in play. So that caused a lot more stress and anxiety than any pressure to crank the book out. Luckily, it wall worked out, and book two will be out soon. Which is good. Because otherwise I wouldn’t be on this roundtable answering questions. I’d be crying in my beer. And watching Jerry Springer. In pajama pants. While the dogs gave me concerned looks all day.

M.L. Brennan: Clearly I need to start answering emails earlier in the morning to get in on the good answers early!

I wrote the second book while the first was moving through the editing process, so I was still able to have that experience of writing something when the first one had really only been read by a handful of people. In a very real sense, Iron Night was written for the enjoyment of three people -- my two first readers and my editor, Anne. That had increased from book one, which, though I always had every intention of selling it, there was the very real possibility that the only two people to ever read it would be my two first readers, Sarah and Karen. So there were various points in writing Iron Night that I had just done something that I thought was fantastic (or evil, or especially delightfully gross), and I would just be sitting in my office chair giggling evilly (for mine is an evil laugh), picturing the reactions I would get from Sarah, Karen, and Anne.

There was also the horrible terror of writing a sequel and having to prove to myself that I was even capable of doing that -- but others have covered that fairly eloquently. Let's just say that there was definitely some stress-sweating and leave it at that.

Now, at the point where I was writing the third in the series, the first one had been published. And that really did make an incredible difference and impact. I know everyone says not to read the comments, but guess what --- I read the comments. It was amazing -- suddenly people were reacting to these characters that I'd written, and expressing some pretty strong opinions on who was important, or annoying, and what they wanted to see more of. I'm hugely glad that I wrote #2 in the series without #1 being released yet, because writing #3 was a whole new sense of pressure. I knew I could write a sequel now, but the audience.... yeah, that was a big increase in the stakes. I was actually doing edits on the third book when the second was released, and I found myself in a real first-world-author kind of problem:

Me: Oh no, people really love the second book and say that it's better than the first!

Non-Crazy Friend: .....that's a good thing.

Me: No! Ack! The pressure! Now number three has to be good! Ack!

Non-Crazy Friend: Okay, I'm just going to punch you in the face now.

While I've tried to keep it from influencing my writing too much (after all, who hasn't seen the phenomenon where a character becomes beloved by the audience and then is an albatross around the writer's neck? come on, we all watched Heroes), it does bleed through. I had a plan that involved a few characters getting offed -- my agent started having really cold feet about that after the first book began getting reviews. I'll admit to a few worries myself. But then I reminded myself about Heroes, and decided to go ahead with it. (not, however, without a good deal of stress)

Douglas Hulick: Well, it seems I'm going to most likely be bringing up the rear in these discussions, as I don't get to respond until the evening. And while it is *damn* tempting at the end of the day to simply type, "Yeah, what they said!", I couldn't in good conscience take such an easy path. So...

For me, it wasn't the awareness of an audience that caused any kind of pressure, but merely having a deadline. Unlike Django and Jay, I hadn't started on the second book in the series. Hell, I hadn't even figured out what it was about. When the offer landed on my desk to the Tales Of The Kin series, I was 80% done with the first draft a stand-alone urban fantasy thriller. I'd mad e a business & creative decision to not start book two of the series until I knew someone wanted it.

Even when people reacted well to "Among Thieves", I didn't worry too much. Maybe it was over-confidence or naivete, but audience reaction didn't enter into it for me. Rather, it was having to put out a book in a set amount of time that caused me the most grief. I had taken ten years to write my first book, and while I knew how to plot and pace the next book and understood daily word counts (and generally made them), I'd forgotten what a hot mess my process had been the first time around. And since I'd conveniently forgotten that, I ended up trying the final draft on the first pass, since that was what I remembered handing over first to my agent, and then my editor. And the hole only got deeper from there.

So for me, the pressure was there, but it didn't from the reception of the novel--it came from having to compress my process far more than I'd anticipated (and then blowing past my deadline by more than two years. Bit of pressure there, too.).. If anything, I am feeling more anxious now with book two being ready to be released. It wasn't until I could no longer tinker with the work that I really became aware of potential reader reaction.

Round Table: Writing the Sequel Part One

2014-04-02T15:46:00.003-05:00

I've been itching to do another round table. Both the Gender Bias and Violence in SF/F series were well received and I really do enjoy moderating these discussions and the chance to get multiple author's takes on various parts of the genre and the writing process. So when I noticed that I was reading or waiting to read so many sequels in the next few months, I thought I'd ask some of the authors with sequels releasing this year a little about the process of writing that second story. I consider myself very fortunate to have such great talent to work with.

M.L. Brennan's second novel in the American Vampire series, Iron Night was released early this year and has garnered lots of rave reviews. I certainly make no bones about my love for the series. Brennan's unique approach to character development and world building has yet to disappoint and I can't wait to see what Brennan has in store for readers in November.

Django Wexler's The Thousand Names was perhaps the most unexpected treat in my reading last year. His blend of military drama, political intrigue, personal secrets, and powerful and mysterious magic was one of my favorite debuts of the year. With the sequel, The Shadow Throne coming soon I'm sure Wexler will gain even more praise from readers.

Jeff Salyard's atmospheric and gritty debut Scourge of the Betrayers has been on shelves for a while, but it continues to gather excellent reviews and with The Veil of the Deserters just around the corner and great advanced praise it's no surprise I asked Jeff to contribute.

Jay Posey's debut Three was another pleasant surprise for me. Posey's post-apocalyptic tour de force managed to tell compelling personal tale while employing some of the most beautifully minimalist world building I've ever seen. The next installment, Morningside Fall releasing next month, is one of those novels I can't wait to get my hands on.

Lastly, we have the author who's been on my radar for the longest. Douglas Hulick's debut Amoung Thieves was one of the first novels I ever reviewed on this site, and I've been exciting about catching up with Drothe and Deegan ever since. Sworn in Steel is slated for release later this year and I'm sure Doug has spun yet another edge of your seat tale of cunning, corruption, and the price of power in store for his readers.

It's an awesome panel, if I do say so myself. And with all that out of the way, let's get down to the main attraction.

52 Reviews: The series is a staple in speculative fiction, with very few one and done titles on the stands in comparison. What prompted your decision to write a series instead of a stand-alone novel? Was it the weight of the genre's tradition, market forces, publisher pressure, or some other factor?

Jay Posey: Some combination of all of the above?

I genuinely did write THREE as a stand-alone novel. When I set out to write it, my primary goal was just to finish something, and I didn't give a lot of thought to what would come afterwards. But as I got closer to the end of that manuscript, I realized I was already thinking ahead to what The Trilogy would be. That was partly due to the fact that there was More to the Story than I'd told, but also because I was very aware of the tradition of trilogies within the genre.

That said, I'd already had working titles for Books Two and Three before I heard anything back from Angry Robot Books (my publisher), but I hadn't really decided whether or not I'd ever write them. I was pretty content with the story I had told in THREE. But then the Robot Overlords offered to publish THREE and a second book in the same world, and so that pretty much settled it for me ... I knew if I was going to write a second book, I'd also write the third.

I think a lot of what we've already talked about probably highlights why writing a series is such an appealing idea; creating a new world is labor intensive, so once you've got that foundation in place, it's nice to be able to continue to build on it. It's the same from the business side of things. Once you've invested the money to promote a New Thing, it's easier to continue promoting further installments of that Thing than it is to start over with another Newer Thing.

M.L. Brennan: I wrote GENERATION V to function as a standalone, with enough larger elements that I could build a sequel if the situation presented itself, but nothing written or even planned beyond the first book. Then my agent got The Call (okay, The Email) from Roc, and they were all, "We really like it, and we want to know if you have plans for a series. Because we'd really like a three-book series."
You know that moment in Ghostbusters where Gozor is all, "Are you gods?" and Ray is all, "No." -- well, in selling a book, you should always keep in mind what gets yelled next (after the lightning):

"When someone asks if you are a god, you say YES!"

Someone asked if I had a series planned. I did not. However, I immediately lied my ass off. Oh, YES, I had a series planned! I had big plans! Impressive plans! Hugely thematic plans!

The publisher said that that was great, and could I get them proposals for the second and third books? Preferably by Monday?

I agreed --- and then had one of the most stressful, yet one of the most creatively productive, weekends of my life. But I had the proposals on time, and that was how I got published. And I actually did stay moderately true to those proposals when it came to writing the books (a few big events actually got moved later because of pacing reasons).

Two months after my sequel was published, I actually have a much better understanding of why publishers like sequels. When IRON NIGHT was published, the GENERATION V sales had a huge uptick. From what my editor tells me, there are actually a lot of fantasy readers who wait until a series has about three books in it before they ever check out the first, so what the numbers people are really paying attention to is what happens to the sales on the first book when the third comes out in November.

Jeff Salyards: There are some fantasy writers who bang out some great stand-alones—KJ Parker and Guy Gavriel Kay immediately spring to mind, and some of Joe Abercrombie’s recent offerings as well (though those are in the same world, so still have the benefit of the built up foundation, history, cultures, etc.)—but there is no denying that series are a staple of the genre.

While there are dangers in writing a series (e.g., I’m sure we all read bloated behemoths that proceeded at a glacial pace because the author had invested ten thousand hours developing the world and didn’t want you to miss a single leaf or button or dialect), there is also an undeniable draw in creating storylines that bridge several books, crafting something rich and deep with plenty of room to introduce (or kill off) tons of characters, pursue world-shattering plots, and explore some fun nooks and crannies along the way. Of course, not all fantasy series are epic, but the two often seem to marry up.

I always envisioned BLOODSOUNDER’S ARC as a series, so there weren’t market forces or publisher coercion in play. Part of the draw for me was gambling a little and trying to see if I could begin with an intimate story with a small cast and low-magic in book one, and gradually open the scope and ratchet up the stakes through the next books, both in terms of drama and in the reader’s exposure to wild and wacky things.

Of course, another potential drawback with a series is figuring out a way to make each book self-contained enough that it’s satisfying on its own, but leaving the reader wanting more and looking forward to the next one. I sort of stunk up the joint on SCOURGE on that count, as the ending was kind of abrupt (well, a big fat cliffhanger really) but I feel like I did a much better job on book 2. Still, that “middle book syndrome” is something that crops up a lot.

I wouldn’t mind doing standalones at some point, but the draw of a series is always there, despite the pitfalls.

Django Wexler: I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write a series, so the decision was a no-brainer for me. Publisher pressure and market forces weren’t much of a factor – I just wanted to build something grand. I think there are good reasons for the series being the bread-and-butter of SFF, particularly fantasy; there’s often a lot more to world design than you can show in a single book without getting overly didactic. The investment in terms of time and effort is longer, but the payoff is wonderful if you get it right.

Personally, I also wanted to show an evolution of relationships over time. The question of loyalties is the heart of The Shadow Campaigns, as it must be in any story of rebellion and revolution, and I wanted to try to capture how those loyalties change over time, and what happens when circumstances put someone in a position where their past allegiances are no longer tenable. The period of history from which I draw my inspiration was rife with this, and it’s one of the things that really captured my attention in the first place. A series helps lend weight to that kind of decision – if we’ve seen two characters fight by one another’s side for a book or two, their decision to stay loyal to one another or not carries a lot of pathos!

Douglas Hulick: I was very similar in my approach to ML, in that I wrote AMONG THIEVES so it could both function as a stand-alone, as well as be spun off into a series if necessary. The thing is, I didn't expect it to sell, so I didn't put a lot of thought into what would come after. I thought AT would be my "foot in the door" book: the book that would get an editor to say, "Hmm, we like this, but not enough to buy it. What else have you got?" So when the three book offer landed from Roc--yeah, I jumped, but I also 'jumped.'

But even when I was planting all those "seeds" in AT, it was with the idea of it being an open-ended series. I wanted each book to be able to be read more-or-less on its own, sort of like Steven Brust's Taltos series, but the with added possibility of changing narrators and/or setting down the line. There's a reason it's called "Tales of the Kin" and not "Tales of Drothe."

In that sense, I think I may have made things harder on myself, since I don't have an on-going story to anchor things; but I do love the world and the characters and the criminal (and other) cultures I have built there, so I suppose wanting to continue to play with them required a series. That, more than any other consideration (market forces, genre tradition, etc.) was what did it for me. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to stumble into a publishing house that wanted me to write a series, despite my scatter-brained approach to this whole thing. :)

The Grim Company by Luke Scull

2014-02-25T20:10:00.000-06:00

The more I read and, by extension review, in speculative fiction the less I enjoy the stereo-typical fantasy novels that populated my reading prior to the start of this blog. Maybe it's the weight of my growing awareness of the tropes and archetypes of the genre or the expansion of my reading habits into different arenas of the genre. It takes more and more to impress me, and I keep looking for fresher perspectives, characters, and voices. Which brings me to Luke Scull's debut, The Grim Company. To put it bluntly, there's not a lot new in this first volume in a proposed trilogy. I've seen versions of these characters, this setting, and this plot before and I've seen them many, many times. A well versed reader could easily pick analogues of any of the principles characters without a shred of effort. Readers expecting to have their minds blown by something completely unexpected and ground breaking should probably look elsewhere. But readers looking for an expertly paced tale with well crafted characters that packs a mountain of world building into a mole hill of a novel should definitely not miss this novel. Scull may not blow you away with his originality, but he shows a deft hand at character, pace, dialogue, and world building that one rarely finds in a debut novel. Fans of the grimdark movement and complex characters who run the gamut of morality are in for a treat. If this is Scull's freshman effort, the following volumes should be even better.

Set five hundred years after the destruction of the gods by the combined might of world's wizards, humanity is in the thrall of the nearly immortal god-killers who rule with an iron fist and war constantly with one another as the ramifications of their deicide unleash horrors upon the less civilized parts of the world. Our protagonist are part of small group of freedom fighters who have banded together to topple one of the most sadistic of the mage kings. From disparate backgrounds these characters come from a wide sampling of fantasy tropes. We have a pair of world weary, aging barbarians who are on the run from the ruler of their homeland, a callow youth who has delusions of being a hero for the ages, a disfigured wizard or middling power with a biting sense of humor, and more. While none of Scull's characters are particularly ground breaking, they are well realized and of surprising depth. There's plenty of gallows' humor and a definite sense that the author knows exactly what tropes he's playing with and why.

I found the characters that weren't connected to the titular company of freedom fighters, were more interesting because their analogues weren't as obvious. The head of the mage king's armies was particularly well drawn and while I had hopes that he might end up on the side of the angels, Scull was wise enough not to give it to me. The consort of the barbarian king, who wants power and prestige but has too much heart to take the steps necessary to claim it was another surprise favorite. These characters, while at first seeming tangential to the plot end up serving the overall story arc very well and I was impressed with how well Scull wove the disparate and far flung points of view into such a lean and precise narrative. You won't find yourself tangled in subplots that go nowhere in The Grim Company, every scene serves the story or feeds directly into the second novel and that's a welcome change from most debuts in the normally bloated ranks of epic fantasy.

The world building is seamlessly integrated with the narrative and I was pleasantly shocked at the amount of information packed into the relatively small page count. There's plenty more to explore and I'm sure the following volume will fill out the world even more. The almost complete lack of exposition in the novel is astounding considering the amount of information that Scull delivers. The character back stories are also revealed piece meal with critical information withheld until just the right dramatic moment. Aspiring writers should take note of Scull's habit of leaving the readers with questions, only to provide another question paired with the subsequent answer.

In conclusion, The Grim Company manages to impress despite its abundance of easily recognized tropes, largely due to the tight and efficient prose and well drawn characters. Scull may not be breaking new ground, but he entertain with deft pacing, excellently realized characters and dense prose that never feels like exposition. This is a debut novel that gets nearly everything right, and a great start to what promises to be an action packed series.

Honor's Knight by Rachel Bach

2014-02-20T20:55:00.001-06:00

February has been an insane month for me personally. My wife and I have sold one house, bought another and are in the midst of preparing for the move at the end of next week. But I'm still reading. Not as often, or for as long, and it's gotten harder and harder to find the time to write reviews but with Rachel Bach's second Paradox novel, Honor's Knight releasing today I thought I should add my voice to the signal and hopefully get this spectacular sequel some extra sales.

I was a big fan of Fortune's Pawn finding its heroine, Devi Morris, one of the most compelling protagonists of 2012. With a strong sense of urban fantasy tropes, this space opera has a lot to recommend it. Bach's blend of compelling characters, intricate world building, hard hitting action, and a mystery in every corner gets turned up a notch in the second outing, and my niggling complaints with the romantic subplots are addressed so well I almost forgot that I'd had them. Honor's Knight is a superior sequel that fires on all cylinders and readers are in for a white knuckle romp as Devi finds herself the most wanted weapon in the universe by the story's midpoint.

Honor's Knight picks up immediately after the events of Fortune's Pawn, with Devi's memories of her discoveries about Caldswell 's true mission, and her relationship with Rupert erased. Devi knows there is something strange going on as she continues to see glowing creatures that no one else can see, and the strange black substance that seems to appear on her hands at random, but with her memory full of holes and fears of being labelled insane and forfeiting her dreams of being a Devastator she decides to soldier on and keep her mouth shut. But as things get progressively weirder Devi finds herself the target of several kidnapping attempts and she begins to have terrifying dreams that tug at those missing memories. Things are about to get worse, much worse. Not to worry, Bach protagonist is no blushing violet. She handles crisis like she handles everything else, with grim determination, cutting edge armor, and guns blazing.

It's a credit to Bach's skills that despite symbionts that can take down whole teams of mercenaries in power armor, mysterious invisible aliens that can shatter entire worlds, and secret organizations with more power than planetary governments, the real selling point is her overwhelmed and outmaneuvered heroine. Devi Morris is exactly the kind of protagonist that the genre thrives on. Her personality drips from every interaction and she never simpers, or succumbs to the angst all too common in romance heavy fiction. Hurt Devi and you can rest assured that she'll do her dead level Paradoxian best to lay you out. She's tough, unapologetic, driven, principled and yet has just enough vulnerability to sell the romantic subplot that is at the heart of the novel. As protagonist goes, Devi is one for the ages.

And Bach definitely knows her way around a combat scene. While not as frequent as those in Fortune's Pawn I actually found the action scenes to be more fluid and realistic this time around. Also, I was pleased to see that Devi actually needed rescue far less as well. And the romance element also improved dramatically, with Devi actually responding to reality of Rupert's lies and manipulations and not just succumbing to the very real connection between them and sweeping things under the rug. I found it a definite improvement.

All of the supporting characters get some small amount of the spotlight and are fleshed out rather nicely as well as the universe at large, with stops on several new planets along the way. But perhaps the best part of the novel are the moral and ethical quandaries that Devi faces as she is forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. Devi never makes the easy choice and that only makes her a more compelling protagonist.

All in all, Heaven's Knight is a great leap forward not just in the series, but in Bach's maturation as a writer. Fan's of space opera and urban fantasy a like should not let this series pass them by. Even if you were on the fence after, I strongly recommend staying on board for the rest of the series. The conclusion is bound to be epic. Fortune's Pawn I strongly reccomend staying on board for the rest of the series. The conclusion is bound to be epic.

Midnight Blue-Light Special by Seanan McGuire

2014-02-13T19:43:00.000-06:00

Midnight Blue-Light Special is the fourth book of Seanan McGuire's I've read. The second installment of the InCryptid series, shares many of the elements that made Discount Armageddon so enjoyable, but suffers from some problematic issues with narrative voice and plot tension that hampered my enjoyment. McGuire is a prolific writer, putting out an impressive number of titles in a relatively short length of time, so it's no surprise that not every offering will be as strong as the last. Feed released under the pseudonym Mira Grant remains one of my favorite discoveries of the last few years, and I will certainly tune in for the rest of the Newsflesh trilogy, but I'm not so sure I'll be showing up for the further adventures of Verity Price.

Picking up the story shortly after the events of Discount Armageddon, not much has changed for Verity. She's still working at the strip club, though it's under new management and has been renamed The Freakshow, she's still figuring out her relationship with Dominic De Luca, who's membership in the Covenent of St. George still complicates things, and she's still unable to find a way to get her ballroom dancing career off the ground due to her moonlighting as a crypto-zoologist consuming all of her time. With her year in New York coming to an end, Verity has a choice to make, does she leave the family business in pursuit of her dreams or does she accept her role in cryptid society? But that choice is quickly placed on hold, when Dominic reveals that his superiors in the Covenant are sending a team to check on his progress in Manhattan and determine whether or not to move forward with a purge of the city. With the entire population of cryptids in danger and Dominic's allegiance in question, Verity must gather what allies she can and prepare to defend her city against a threat so dire that it threatens not just the cryptids but Verity herself.

Fans of the series will find much to enjoy in this installment, McGuire keen characterization and rich world building continue. This installment adds more definition to Verity's extended family, introducing her adoptive uncle, Mike to the cast. Sarah also gets more page time and even some time as a point of view character(more on that in a bit) , and we are treated to more explanation of her abilities and biology as a result. Istas, the gothic Lolita who can transform into a hybrid bear-wolf-hybrid also makes a more significant contribution to the story, though largely as a source of comedy. And of course, the Aeslin mice continue to tickle funny bones with their peculiar religious observances and rituals.

I applaud McGuire's approach to world building, even with dragons, gorgons, ghosts, boogeymen down every alley and shopping the local bodegas, there's nary a werewolf or vampire in sight. She's managed to populate her urban fantasy with a diverse and rich cast. She mines from myth and legend and is not afraid to throw plenty of beasties of her own creation into the mix. The glut of paint-by-numbers urban fantasy on the shelves would do well to take a few pages from McGuire's approach. There is a definite sense of wonder in Verity's world and McGuire shows no sign of taking her foot from the gas in this volume.

Which brings me to my issues with the novel. After reading several of McGuire's novels over the last six months, I've begun to notice a similarity in her protagonists. With all of the novels I've read being told in strict first person narrative it's hard to miss. With all female protagonists, a similar sense of snarky humor, family dysfunction, and more these women while definitely enjoyable all begin to sound the same to me. It's well done, but it's a definite sense of "second verse, same as the first" for this reader. It became impossible for me to dismiss in this novel, because of the four or five chapters where the point of view shifted to Verity's 'cousin' Sarah. Because these chapters are also written in first person, it was easy to see the similarity in the narrative voice. If it weren't for the chapter headings and the references to Sarah's otherworldly biology I would have thought there hadn't been a shift in narration. The voice is compelling, to be sure, but it is nearly indistinguishable from Verity's. It becomes a bit of a one trick pony, and one that McGuire seems quite content to beat to death.

There are other things about the writing that back up the repetition for it's own sake. McGuire is quite fond of inside jokes and certain turns of phrase. Istas' constant references to "carnage" and Dominic's continuously referring to Verity as a "infuriating woman" are the most prevalent to me, but I'm sure other readers will be able to pick out the ones that grate for them. I understand the want to create a lexicon, similar to the Buffy speak Whedon made so popular, but for some reason it pulled me out of the story on this go around.

My only other major complaint centers around the antagonists. The Covenant has been built up as nigh unstoppable and terrifying to the entire cryptid community and even Verity seems frightened half to death of their arrival. But when they finally arrive they are little more than straw men, falling over far too easily. The eventual showdown was so anticlimactic that I felt the last half of the novel to be wasted.

With that said, most of the novel was fun. McGuire obviously enjoys these characters and letting her imagination run wild as she populates New York with some of the most memorable and human monsters in the genre. Readers can do far worse than spend time with Verity and her clan of extended relatives and renegade monster hunters. I'm probably going to stick with the Newsflesh series, but who knows I may just revisit the InCryptid universe eventually.

Interview with M.L. Brennan: Iron Night and Beyond

2014-02-05T09:15:00.000-06:00

M.L. Brennan is fast becoming one my favorite interview subjects. Her approach to world building and character is always fascinating and she has a way of explaining concepts that boils things down so well, I always find myself amazed that I didn't see it for myself. On top of all of that she's a class act. a laugh riot, and a real pleasure to work with. With an author some compulsively likable, it's no wonder that her American Vampire series has become one of my favorite new series. In our interview we touch on vampire family dynamics, the mating habits of elves, Vampire Batman and meerkats. I hope you enjoy the conversation half as much as I did.

52 Reviews: In Iron Night, we see Fortitude in a slightly different place than in Generation V but on some levels things have stayed the same. I was gratified that you resisted the urge to make him just another paint-by-numbers urban fantasy hero. With his expanding role in the family business what kept you from moving past the dead end job, chronically broken down car, and non-existent love life? Were you intentionally trying to keep him an every man, by down playing his other-worldliness and grounding him in problems and situations familiar to the audience?

M.L. Brennan: The decision to keep those elements present was a very deliberate one. If I had to point to one area that people were really conflicted about on the first book (some readers loved it, some readers really hated it), it's those everyman elements (some would call them doormat elements) of Fortitude. One thing that bothers me a lot in some book series is when something is presented in the first book as a major character element (a career, a trait, etc.), and then after the events of the first book it's completely swept away and never a real factor again. Right from the beginning of my work on Iron Night I knew that it was important for me to hang onto these pieces.

One thing I really wanted to create in Fort was a real character arc -- and to me that means trying to move things along organically. If suddenly Fort had been an ass-kicking macho guy in the second book, I feel like it would've been a betrayal of the character of the first book. The events of the first book definitely changed him, and he does things in the second book that probably would've appalled or frightened him in GenV, but he's still that same guy. The dead-end job and the crappy car are a big part of his rejection of the values of his vampire family, and as much as things changed, his fear of becoming less human is still there, so it made a lot of sense to me that he would continue to embrace them.

Something that I've tried to be really cautious about with these books is the affluence of Fort's family. I feel like Fort's almost perennial money woes are part of what make him relatable. If he has to bribe someone to get information, I wanted that money to mean something, for it to hurt for him to hand it over. Not just "oh, hey, I'm bribing this guy" but "oh, crap, that was the money that was going to pay the electric bill -- how the hell can I pay that now?"

His desert of a love-life is similar to that. I also won't deny that part of it was a bit of me having some fun with urban fantasy tropes. Something about having Fort be so unwillingly sexually frustrated just makes me laugh -- it also feels more realistic to me. After all, how many of us in our twenties were having as much sex as we wished we were?

52 Reviews: Well, I sure as hell wasn't!

I think the every man angle is what makes Fort such a fantastically atypical protagonist, especially considering how hard he tries to maintain that status. Kudos for not going the Vampire Batman route after the end of Generation V. Though as much as Fort tries to hang on to his humanity, Iron Night certainly shows a slide towards his vampiric heritage. How hard was it to keep that aspect of Fort minimized and resist the urge to have him cut loose and kick a little ass?

M.L. Brennan: Well, if I'd heard the phrase "Vampire Batman" before I wrote the book, it probably would've been a much bigger temptation!

I tend to be pretty conservative about my approach on Fort, so there were actually a few points in the original draft that my editor nudged me to make Fort a bit more proactive -- I think my first instinct was to just move him a few baby steps forward from where he'd been in Generation V, when what the character needed more like a regular step. There were a few exceptions -- obviously I started putting a lot of pressures on him around the middle to back end of the book, and nothing in terms of his reactions had to be ramped up.

But I definitely see what you mean -- I think it would've been so much harder to be restrained about Fort if I didn't have Suzume in so much of Iron Night, since her default mode is ass-kicking. So that part of my writerly id that enjoys the "let's punch our way through this problem" approach is always kept satisfied thanks to Suze.

52 Reviews: Speaking of Suzume, I sensed a softening of the character even as Fort seemed to gain more strength. Don't get me wrong, Suze is still a stab first, ask questions later sort of woman, but I noticed that while she still has her edge, she seems more subdued, more tentative when it comes to Fort. I took this change as a very subtle way of indicating the shift that is occurring in her feelings for Fort. I applaud your restraint in not rushing the romantic angle but was this softening of Suze also done to make room for Fort's growth as a hero?

M.L. Brennan: There's definitely a balancing act going on, because Fort's growth meant that scenes that before might've been, "Okay, they're trying to get information out of him -- well, that's definitely going to be Suze taking the lead" became more up in the air. I think it ended up working out, though, because Suze herself was growing at the same time. Fort's growth is the more obvious of the two (and, hey, he's the main character, so that's probably never going to change too much), but Suze is, for the first time in her life, caring about someone outside of her biological family. And for a character like Suze, that's going to be a bit scary and uncomfortable. So there are scenes, like the one in the tattoo parlor, where you can see her prompting Fort to take the lead, and kind of hovering over him. Or when Fort and Suze spar, the fact that she can beat him so easily makes her angry because it reinforces his vulnerability to her, whereas the Suze of Generation V would just be smug about it, like "Yeah, do you see that confirmation of my badassness? You know you do."

There's definitely something more subdued and tentative in her interactions, and I love that you put it into those words, because that's exactly what I was going for. When I was researching foxes on the Internet, I saw this video of a fox that this person had been feeding in their yard. After a while, the person put the food bowl in their living room, and left the door open. The fox had been extremely confident about taking the food in the yard, but now they were having to go somewhere new and strange to get the food -- and doing so was also having to show trust that these people weren't going to harm it. And it was clearly upsetting for the fox to do this. I thought about that a lot when I was writing Iron Night, and even more when I worked on the next book, Tainted Blood. For Suze to be friends with Fort -- a real, there-until-the-wheels-fall-off friendship -- put her in a position where she had to make herself vulnerable. And Suze isn't a character who has ever allowed anyone beyond her family to make her vulnerable before.

52 Reviews: Speaking of making room for Fort's growth, I have to admit that I had hoped to see more of Chivalry in Iron Night. Though he gets very little actual page time in relation to the main plot line, I felt there was a definite warming of familial bonds between the two brothers. How do you approach the concept of sibling dynamics when there is an almost two hundred year age difference and the gulf in relative humanity between the two?

M.L. Brennan: Chivalry and Fort have a relationship that's really interesting to me -- Chivalry's love for his younger brother is really the purest emotion in the series, and in a lot of ways Chivalry is one of the more straight-forward members of Fort's family.

I had a lot of fun with all of the sibling dynamics in the book -- Fort and Chivalry, Fort and Prudence, and also Suzume and Keiko. In all of those relationships there is a big disconnect -- whether it's the age and humanity differences that Fort and his siblings clash on, or the worldview conflict that Suze has with her twin. Everyone's love for their sibling was strong and real -- and they disagreed so fundamentally that they could barely be in the same room. Something about that just makes me interested as a writer.

Back to your excellent question -- the age and humanity gap between Fort and his siblings is absolutely enormous. So I needed them to be tied together by incredible weights.

Imagine living on a desert island with no one but one parent, two siblings, and a large colony of friendly meerkats. You might get very frustrated with your family at times, and go out and play with the meerkats, but even if you became very close with a meerkat, it wouldn't live more than seven or eight years. Your parent will likely pre-decease you by twenty to thirty years -- the companionship you have will be your siblings.

The vampires siblings are the only members of their species that exist in a huge chunk of America, and they don't do much socialization outside of family groups. The humans around them are transient -- dead practically in an eyeblink. Chivalry, for example, will still be alive in another two-hundred years -- and no one else he knows will be, except for his sister and little brother. Fort isn't even out of his twenties yet, so he doesn't fully grasp this, but his brother and sister do -- for all their frustrations with their littlest brother, they understand that they truly *need* Fort. That need is what underpins all of the interactions that the siblings have together, and what forms a large part of the impetus to bridge the gaps.

52 Reviews: What a fascinating and excellent way of explaining the underpinnings of vampire family values. Plus meerkats!

So given the comparative lifespans of vampires and humans, what led you to the choice to bind Chivalry so tightly to his wives? Given, the differences between the mechanisms surrounding the creation of vampires in the series there seems to be less psychological reasons than the classic human turned vampire to explain Chivalry's choices. Was this done to make him more sympathetic and more humane or for a completely different reasons?

M.L. Brennan: Meerkats make any example better. There's science on that.

First and foremost, I really wanted to have the existing presence of a human/vampire romance. Humans falling in love with vampires, and the resulting tortured romance have a certain amount of almost inevitability and ubiquitousness in urban fantasy. But those relationships are almost always faded out on before the inevitable conclusion. I wanted to actually bring this relationship to its end. So Chivalry and Bhumika are a pair who the reader first meets after all the sturm und drang of courtship is over. The vampire reveal has happened, as had the woman's decision to embrace a relationship that will cut her own life short. And they *have* loved each other deeply and truly, but now they're reaching the end of the line, which was inevitable since the moment they got together.

Chivalry's love for Bhumika *did* serve to make him more sympathetic and humane in the first book, which was a big benefit for me. But I'm elbow-deep in the third book at this point, and I have to say -- one thing that I absolutely love is that there's a point where Chivalry's love for Bhumika starts making him look LESS humane. It's fantastic.

52 Reviews: Which brings me to Prudence, who shows a surprising and dare I say chilling change in her view of Fort. With the obvious beginning of their mother's decline, should readers expect to see a tug of war for Fort's continued alliegance?

M.L. Brennan: Prudence is definitely trying to "correct" her little brother, and with the weaker Madeline gets, the more overtly Prudence will try to act with Fort. What's always great with Prudence is that her actions are coming from a place of love. A creepy and sociopathic love, which is much more on display in Iron Night than in Generation V. That scene between Prudence and Fort in the basement cell area was one of my favorite to write, but there's a scene in the upcoming Tainted Blood between all three siblings that I think is even better, and really shows all the bizarre levels in their relationships.

52 Reviews: Moving away from Fort's family dysfunction, tell us a little about the most shocking family dynamics in Iron Night. Of course, I'm talking about the elves. Tell us a little about your thought process during the creation process as you expanded the elves from their appearance in Generation V.

M.L. Brennan: I'd put in a lot of the broad elements of elves in Generation V -- the population crisis, the attempts to breed back up using unsuspecting humans, and also a bit of the internal stresses between the elves and their partly human offspring. When I started expanding on them in Iron Night, though, I really wanted to make them absolutely inhuman and freaky. To do that I spent a lot of time thinking about how they viewed the world -- what I really came up with was a race of sociopaths. As much as I tend to label Prudence's behavior sociopathic, it really doesn't fit the correct definition, since plenty of her actions are motivated by love (albeit a twisted love) of her family -- she honestly feels that she is trying to protect her younger brothers, or her mother.

The elves, by contrast, are truly sociopaths. Everyone around them exists only in terms of what they can do to be useful to the elves -- either as breeding stock or as something to kill. One of the most important things I established during my creation was how they felt about their offspring -- and in elf society, the whole purpose of having a child, raising it, and educating it, was so that you would someday have a worthy opponent to kill. Once I had that locked into place, a lot of other things really just flowed out of that.

In terms of physicality, both of the elves and their offspring, I wanted them to be recognizable in how we usually see elves in fantasy (so there are the pointed ears, extreme eye and hair colors), but also different. I felt like intellectually there was something almost reptilian about the elves, so I mirrored that in their appearances -- I had a lot of pictures of kimodo dragons which I used as reference points.

Where things get interesting with the elves are their scions, the half-elves. (and every other variation -- a few times I was breaking out a pen and paper to work out the fractions, and somewhere my elementary math teachers were laughing) The elves are fairly rigid in their goals (there are only five of them left), but their offspring are much more all over the place. I tried to construct it almost like a Puritan village church congregation -- you'd have your fanatics, your line-steppers, your grumpily obedient, and then a few doubters on the outskirts who are tied to the church by family.

52 Reviews: We can't talk about the Elves without delving into Fort's first serious potential romantic interest, Lilah. The way I saw the character was a mirror to the Fort we saw in Generation V. A person who is passive, tied to a family more out obligation than any real sense of family, and at heart a kind and decent person who is thrust into a world that is completely at odds with the core of her personality. I loved the character, and the chance Fort has to mentor her in a completely different way from Chivalry or Suzume's approach to mentoring him. While I can't say I was surprised that the chemistry between Fort and Lilah ended in friendship, I'll admit it saddened me a bit. Tell us a little about the process of creating this character, what challenges and surprises did it present and what might we expect for Lilah as the series continues?

M.L. Brennan: Since that's pretty much a perfect list of what I was going for with the character, that's very exciting!

I did want Lilah to be an echo of who Fort was at the beginning of Generation V. I did this for a few reasons -- for one, I wanted Fort to realize how far he had traveled from who he used to be, and also accept that the option of remaining hidden away from the truths of his world and family had never really been a viable option. For another, I wanted Fort to have a legitimate relationship decision between the person who challenged and pushed him and the person who complimented and comforted him, with both being viable options.

In terms of actually building Lilah, I ended up doing a large rewrite on her character in the second draft of the book. I'd made her *too* sweet and mild. There were a lot of scenes of Lilah blushing and stuttering in the first draft, and my editor found the character kind of annoying. I went back and really dug into Lilah's character, finding a lot more strength and building up her need to protect those who were weaker and vulnerable -- like her sister, or a few of the changelings that are seen in the book. I think Lilah is a great example of what a good editor can do with a book -- my editor pushed me to make what had been a fairly servicable character into a character that actually functioned on her own rather than in response to others.

You can definitely expect to see Lilah again. The problems that the elf community, and in particular the rising power of their offspring, are not going away, and Lilah is going to end up at the forefront of that movement. Like Fort, she's growing up and making hard choices.

52 Reviews: I'd be remiss if I didn't ask for teasers for Tainted Blood. What can you tell us about the continuing adventures of Fort and Company? And are there any additional projects your fans should be on the look out for?

M.L. Brennan: All the area of Fort's life are going to continue to get more complicated. The political situation in the territory is getting even more complicated. Fort is also inching closer to his transition, and there are going to be some very unexpected physical changes. Familiar faces will be back, along with some new players. Kitsune family dynamics start making waves. And I will finally payoff a teaser from Generation V, page 248.

Beyond Tainted Blood (out in November) I have a few irons in the fire, but nothing solid enough to talk about quite yet. But I'm very excited about a few things!

52 Reviews: Since this is our final question, I'm going to follow my usual protocol and let you have the floor. Feel free to promote an upcoming project or another author's work or talk about whatever strikes your fancy.

Thanks again for being my first second interview. I can't wait to do this again for Tainted Blood!

M.L. Brennan: Thank *you* for making me your first second interview, and I'm really looking forward to being your first *third* interview in November!

Right now I'm working on the edits for the third Fort Scott book, Tainted Blood, which will be published in November 2014. This has been a really interesting book for me to write -- I was trying to balance a lot of different elements as well as move some bigger plot arcs forward. There were big questions that I asked myself regarding a consistency of tone, so I did end up making some big decisions that I hope will bear out well for the series.

Once Tainted Blood is off my desk, I'll be doing some serious worldbuilding on another project which is top secret right now, but that I'll get to tell you about later on. This year I have a lot to look forward to even beyond my own big date in November -- I'm really excited to see Django Wexler's next installment the his Shadow Campaigns series, and Leigh Bardugo's conclusion to herGrisha series can't come fast enough for me.

To finish out, I'd just like to take an opportunity to give a heartfelt thanks to everyone who bought a copy of Generation V and Iron Night, and especially everyone who talked someone *else* into checking out the series. I have a lot of ideas for more books in the series, and it's you guys who can make that happen!

The Emperor's Blades by Brian Staveley

2014-01-22T19:58:00.001-06:00

With the giants of epic fantasy taking longer and longer between installments, genre aficionados are constantly looking for the next big thing and if the hype is to be believed Brian Staveley's debut The Emperor's Blade may just be it. With a familiar plot structure, characters that are comfortably similar to old fictional friends, and a subtle magical system that begs to be explored in more depth there is certainly plenty to recommend in this first volume. Whether or not the strength of Staveley's story telling can overcome the essential sameness of it all and the few problematic choices in his handling of female characters is the real question.

Like so many epic fantasies, The Emperor's Blades focuses on the ramifications of the death of a long-standing and well loved king and the immediate dangers faced by his surviving children. I was immediately reminded of Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and David Anthony Durham's underrated Acacia which is obviously not bad company for Staveley to keep. Tropes are popular for a reason, and Staveley's characters are certainly compelling enough to support the familiar nature of his story. The three grown children of the dead Emperor are thrust into dealing with the death of the father and the conspiracy that led to his demise. The male heirs, Kaden and Valyn have been sent away from the capital to learn the skills that their father believed would best serve them in defense of the kingdom. Kaden has spent the past eight years studying with an order of contemplative monks, whose mental discipline seems to serve no obvious purpose but fans of the genre know Kaden's placement is no foolish mistake. Valyn is on the cusp of becoming a member of the special forces of the realm, a peerless assassin who does the work that conventional soldiers cannot. Their sister, Adare, has never left the capital, but her gender keeps her from wielding true power, though she is appointed Minister of Finance at her father's command. Scattered without allies they can trust, the siblings must deal with their grief of their father's death and find a way to stop the forces arrayed against the royal family and the return of an enemy long relegated to fairy tales.

Sounds pretty familiar, right? Long time fantasy readers have seen most of these tropes before, but that doesn't stop this debut from entertaining. The world building is well done, hinting at a more complex world beyond the borders of the sequestered life of the siblings. Valyn's training with the Kettral is particularly entertaining and I was pleased to see a non-stereotypical type of soldier in this sort of European setting. There's no armor, jousting, or any of the other knightly business in evidence and it was a welcome change from my expectation. There's a definite coming of age vibe to the siblings journey, though most of the steps along the way were nothing I couldn't have predicted I enjoyed the process due to Stavely's deft storytelling. Kaden's austere training in the monastery

The magic system was a definite standout. Magicians, called leeches, draw on a source of magical power for a variety of effects. These sources, called wells can be almost anything from a rare physical substance, an environmental feature, or something more unusual such as a specific emotion. Since a leech cannot perform magic without his or her well, these sources of power are closely kept secrets with leeches going to great lengths to obscure them. The system is so flexible and encourages reader speculation when any magical effect is seen. With leeches being a persecuted and maligned group within most parts of the empire, there is a definite sense of secrecy and risk associated with the supernatural which hopefully will keep the series more grounded reserving magic for more occasional use.

Staveley's characters are compellingly familiar and well written, though I have some reservations about his use of the female characters. Adare, despite being stationed at the center of the fallout after the Emperor's assassination has almost no screen time. While her eventual revenge on her father's killer is one of the most rewarding moments in the book, I feel Adare deserved much more screen time than her brother's training sequences far from where the most important action was happening. Adare seems to have much more potential for new storytelling options, and hopefully she'll see more page time as the series continues. As it stands, she seems not much more than a missed opportunity. The other female characters, seem to occupy the stereotypical female roles in genre fiction, namely as a sexual object or a catalyst for the male character's actions. Which is a real shame, because many of the female Kettral could have been seen so much better use. There is a passage in which Valyn's love interest rages against his overprotective nature and blaming himself for her misfortunes that seems to point to Staveley's awareness of these stereotypes and I can only hope that he steers away or subverts them the future.

But even with the familiar cast, plot, and problematic treatment of his female cast, The Emperor's Blade is an engaging debut with plenty of unmined potential. I enjoyed my time in its pages and will check out the second volume. Will it be the next big thing in epic fantasy? I couldn't hazard a guess, but the combination of industry buzz and Staveley's easy storytelling style will all but ensure it will find a sizeable audience.

Interview with Myke Cole

2014-01-22T19:48:00.000-06:00

I've been meaning to interview Myke Cole for a long time. I've been fortunate enough to have him write a guest post during my Spec. Fic 101 series and he took part in an excellent round table that just never managed to find its way to completion, so I was pleased that he agreed to be interviewed about his newest release Breach Zone. We ran the gamut from questions about his process, the genesis of his excellent series, talent versus doing the work, and influences as wide as comics, history and film, This interview turned out to be one my favorites and Myke brings his usual brand of plain talk and straight answers to the table. If you haven't read his work, I can't recommend it highly enough. If you have, then I hope that this interview will shed some light on the story behind the story and the man behind the Britton, Bookbinder, Harlequin, and Scylla.

52 Reviews: Alright to get the ball rolling, I'll start with a soft ball question and see what shakes out. While it's plain to see that your experience as a member of the Armed Forces has played a pivotal role in the setting of the Shadow Opsseries, what else can you tell us about the genesis of the series? And how has it changed from the initial concept both from the first novel and then onward as the second and third novels were being written?

Myke Cole: I appreciate the spin on a very tired interview question :)

CONTROL POINT was originally called Latent, and the protagonist was an Arkansas Corporal named James Jolly. Oscar Britton, who later became the protagonist, was his best friend. They were rivals for Therese Del Aqua, with Britton actually winning out in the end. Scylla used to be Swift, and when I finally split those characters apart, the Scylla that resulted was more petulant and angry than Magnetoesque as she later came to be. The main antagonist was a guy named Erec who looked like Ian Astbury from the old days of The Cult. There was Mentamancy. Hydromancy was (ridiculously) called Aquamancy. There were two super-powerful "prime magics," Light and Dark. There was a device called the Tair, that was like the sorting hat from Harry Potter, and could tell what school you were. There were Seers, whose primary job was to discover Latent people.

I wrote Latent *four* times from start to finish from 1998 to 2008, when I finally produced the version that my agent agreed to represent. This story has been with me for most of my adult life.

***SPOILER ALERT***

In the version of CONTROL POINT that finally went out to publishers, Jolly was gone, and Britton took center stage. There was no SASS. There was no Fitzy. Nelson (who was named Marty) took Britton in instead of shooting him, and led him to the Green Mountain Tribe, a band of Selfers hiding out in the forests of Vermont. Britton had around 20-30,000 words of adventures there until he was finally captured.

**** END SPOILERS***

The publisher said the whole section didn't work. I had to throw it out and rewrite around 40% of the book to get it across the finish line.

I like to think I'm getting better at writing character. FORTRESS FRONTIER improved on CONTROL POINT in that aspect, and BREACH ZONE is, at its heart, a love story, which I think is a direct result of my studying romance in an effort to figure out how those writers tick. Romances are, at their core, plotless. They're stories that revolve around character interactions, and I think that's super important. In the end, the only thing people really care about is other people. GEMINI CELL is a love story root and branch. It's still action packed, but the relationship between the protagonist and his wife is center stage.

I hope my readers like the direction I'm heading in. My writing mantra, increasing in volume as I chant it over the course of my career, is people, people, people, people.

52 Reviews: Wow, I have to say I am shocked at just how vast the gulf is between the origin and the final product actually is. And sticking with the project through four complete drafts takes a level of commitment and drive that is astounding. What led you to stick with this particular story for so long and avoid jumping to the countless other ideas that I'm sure you had over that ten year span?

Myke Cole: Nothing. I absolutely fell down other rabbit holes. In fact, I wrote two other novels: Cloud Sower and Tea Road, while I was reworking Latent over and over again.

Cloud Sower was a . . . magic/technology blend at the black-powder technology level. I guess it was more along the lines of what Brian McClellan or Naomi Novik are doing. It was set in a 2nd world based largely off late 17th Century Poland. Tea Road was a retelling of the classic Alfred Noyes poem set in a desert realm where a fantasy variant on the Mongols and Mamluks held sway. Both had some brilliant moments. Both, in the end, couldn't be saved.

52 Reviews: Which brings me to my next question, how do you know when a story has legs and when it's time to let go and find another project to work on? I promise I'll get back to Breach Zone promptly.

Myke Cole: Ha! Take your time, brother.

That is the million dollar question isn't it? The answer is: you don't. There might be writers out there who can judge their work on their own, but I'm not one of them. The truth is that I have no idea when my work is good enough. So, I take the route you might expect: I revise until my beta readers tell me it's the greatest thing they've ever read. Then, I send it to my agent. I'm very fortunate in that my agent is very hands-on in editing. Most agents don't do that. My agents has 20 years experience picking winning horses. Once my book impresses him enough to pass it on to the publisher, I feel reasonably confident that it's a good book.

But for those writers who don't have an agent? Find a writer whose career is where you want yours to be (and this is why you go to cons), then convince them to beta for you. When they tell you that your book has legs, it might be time to start shopping it.

But don't do ANYTHING until you have a.) written a book all the way through to completion and b.) revised it until you really don't know if it's good or not anymore.

52 Reviews: I have to be honest, that question was for me. I have started and stopped on at least three manuscripts over the last few years, one of which was almost 80,000 words long. Judging whether or not it's any good, or if it is the right project has always been harder than the actual writing. You've certainly given me a lot to think about. Now on to Breach Zone.

I've been really impressed by the growth I've seen in your writing from novel to novel, with Breach Zone being an exponentially better read than even Fortress Frontier, which I loved. Going back to what you said about character being key, with each novel focusing on a different protagonist, I've noticed that the level of character growth has intensified with each change of principle protagonist. Was this something you set out to do from the outset, or was it an side effect of your maturing as a writer?

Myke Cole: I think it's both. The more I write, the more I learn what's important in good writing. I'm also one of those people who is cursed with never being able to be satisfied/enjoy his victories. As soon as I hit a mark, I start looking over the horizon.

First, the goal was to write a novel that was so good it would get published almost as a byproduct of its quality. I . . . sort of achieved that. I don't want to say I pulled it off totally, because CONTROL POINT is a flawed book, but I came close enough that I consider the mark met. So, now the next goal is to create fiction that STICKS. You know, the way that Brooks and Gaiman and Feist and Anthony and Moorcock and Martin endure. The key to that is character.

All my favorite writers use ensemble casts and explore different protagonists over multiple books. My intention was never to do what Chuck Wendig does with Miriam Black, or what Jim Butcher does with Harry Dresden (and both do it damn well). The upside of this is that it allows me to explore different characters with different life stories. Thanks to this angle, I've gotten to write from the prospective of an African-American young man, a middle-aged married dad, a female corporate mover and a paragon of military virtue. It's a wild ride, and I can feel my horizons broadening as I go.

It's terrifying, because the more you step out on the ledge, the greater the chance you'll fuck up and fall, but if my career fails it damn well isn't going to be because I didn't push the envelope.

I've got one shot at this, and I am playing to win.

52 Reviews: It's interesting to me how the characterization of Scylla progresses through the series, She definitely gains a very Magnetoesque feel in Breach Zone, damaged by her own attempts to do good and while an absolutely sociopath as a result, she still manages to be sympathetic and tragic at the same time. Adding the cover blurb by Peter V. Brett that calls the series a cross between Blackhawk Down meets the X-men, and the parallels between way mutants are viewed in the Marvel Universe and how latents are seen in the series, it's pretty obvious that comics are a definite influence on your writing. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that medium has served as an inspiration and influence for you?

Myke Cole: Comics are a huge influence, not only on my writing, but on my person. I grew up without a sense of safety, and so I didn't really have the freedom to explore the world and let my identity form organically. Instead, I had to construct it. In the absence of strong male role-models, I turned to media, and superheroes were HUGE factors in my developing a sense of bravery, perseverance, stoicism and self-sacrifice. Any/all comic book influence you see in my writing is intentional and, in my opinion, a very good sign.

Readers of BREACH ZONE will notice that it's at least partially dedicated to Batman. He is, apart from Captain America, the costumed crime-fighter I most identify with.

52 Reviews: With the obvious parallel between Scylla and Magneto were there similar inspirations for the story arcs of the other principle characters in the series? I'm particularly interested in Bookbinder and Harlequin.

Myke Cole: Yes, but not necessarily superheroes. Bookbinder was highly, highly, highly (read: stolen from) influenced by the real life Lieutenant John Chard, an engineer sent to survey a bridge who found himself in command of a tiny force under siege. I was amazed at his story of being thrust into command without any real combat experience, and then finding a way to lead based on sheer ingenuity and force of will. He fought against absolutely overwhelming odds and won.

Harlequin is influenced by the character of Lt. Kendrick from A Few Good Men. I was interested in how hidebound he was, what a stickler for the rules, even when it was obvious that those rules were hurting people. I spent a lot of time thinking about *why* a person would think that was the correct course of action, and Harlequin was the character that resulted from that navel-gazing.

In both cases, I have met many real-life service members who contributed to my portrayals of the characters.

52 Reviews: One of my favorite things about the Shadow Ops series is the internal conflicts of the principal protagonists. Britton struggles with a sense of duty and the need for individual liberty, Bookbinder learns lessons about courage and leadership and Harlequin learns that the labels that divide us are less important than the humanity that links is all. As you said, the key to story is character, what changes have you made in the approach you take towards planning the protagonist's growth as the series has grown?

Myke Cole: With Britton, I really wanted to explore reader expectations of a "military man." Less than 1% of Americans serve in uniform, and the result is a divide where most civilians know almost nothing about the military. Ignorance leads to stereotyping and fetishization. That's not cool.

The truth is that military men are like every other kind of man. Some are brave and confident. Some are cowardly and uncertain. Some make good decisions. Some make bad ones. In Oscar Britton, I wanted to explore a conflicted, anxious, blundering person who was *still* a dyed-in-the-wool military officer. I wanted him to flail his way into heroism and be left uncertain as to whether he made the right call or not. I didn't want there to be clear right and wrong. I didn't want easy answers.

Artistically? I achieved that goal in spades. But the backlash of reader reactions against Britton showed me that I misjudged what my audience wants in a story. I'm fine defying my audience. This is my book in the end, and I have to have artistic integrity. You have to take artistic risks to have success in any form of art. But I am *not* fine with my audience hating the protagonist to the extent that they are thrown out of the story.

With Bookbinder, I think I plugged that hole. The irony here is that I actually craft my characters *less* realistically than I did with Britton. I am still working to examine the full range of humanity, but I am also more cognizant of the fact that the characters must serve the drama of the story. This is what many "literary" fiction books I've read get wrong. They are hyper-realistic, and serve up characters that I don't give a damn about.

Reader reactions are universally better toward Bookbinder (and I hope Harlequin) than they were to Britton. This is another advantage of switching protagonists with each book.

52 Reviews: Switching gears a bit, I'd like to talk a little bit about something I've noticed in your social media interactions. You seem to be a really vocal proponent of work over talent when it comes to the production of art. What can you tell us about that topic?

Myke Cole: I feel the idea of talent is intellectually lazy. There's plenty of scientific evidence that *something* is at work other than focused practice that factors into expertise, but the truth is that we have no idea what it is, or if it's even one thing. It could be millions of things.

People absolutely cannot stand to say "I don't know," so we shout "talent!" and obviate ourselves of the intellectual rigor required for real analysis. That's an academic objection. My practical objection is this: That people use the idea of "talent" as an excuse not to work. "He's got a real talent for that, so it must be easy for him" or "I won't even bother to try, because I just don't have a talent for this."

Bullshit. Bull. Shit.

The only thing you can control is the work. It is useless to contemplate anything else. Work until you pass out, and when you wake up, get the fuck back to work again. You can rest when you're dead.

52 Reviews: I can't argue with the results of your labor, the series has gotten better with each novel and in my humble opinion Breach Zone is better than Fortress Frontier by a magnitude of four or five. With this series at its end what can readers expect next?
Myke Cole: That's very kind of you to say. I need BREACH ZONE to gel a bit more in my mind before I can declare it better than FORTRESS FRONTIER. I will agree that it's better than CONTROL POINT, which is flawed for the characterization issues we discussed before.

Next up is GEMINI CELL, which takes place many years before CONTROL POINT, while the SOC is still in its infancy. It'll show you the world at the dawn of the Great Reawakening. It's a highly romantic, highly character driven story. It centers around a US Navy SEAL who runs afoul of the budding clandestine magical service, and death is just the start of his journey. I've said that I need to let BREACH ZONE gel a bit before I can feel good about it. I don't have that problem with GEMINI CELL at all. It has been done for months, and I'm in the 6th draft of edits. I am completely confident that it's the best thing I've ever written, and I sincerely hope that won't be idle bragging when readers finally weigh in on it.

52 Reviews: Well, I'm sad to say that we've reached the last question in our interview. I'm sure the readers will enjoy your answers as much as I have. I usually let the author take point on the last question, so what comes next is up to you. Feel free to wax philosophical on whatever strikes your fancy, offer a bit of sage writing advice you wish you'd heard ten years ago, recommend a little known fellow author or pitch a reality show featuring you Peter Brett and the Beta Winter Solider. It's been a pleasure, sir.

The floor is yours.

Myke Cole: Thanks so much for the smart questions! I really like this rolling interview style. When you do a lot of interviews, they start to run together after a while, and it's really nice to do something fresh and new.

The thing I'd like to throw out to your readers is that the military had been a powerful force for good in my life. I just finished a piece for Writer's Digest on how it ironically served as the best creative writing course I could ever take. I hope aspiring artists will consider military service as a way to hone the personality attributes necessary to face literary dragons. Reserve commitments allow you to serve without abandoning everything else you've built in your life and career, and each branch of the military has an auxiliary for those whose physical limitations prevent them from joining up in an drilling capacity. We need creatives. We need intellectuals. We need people who will help make this institution I love so much evolve along with society so that it reflects it more fully. We are you and you are us. I can't do this alone. Stand with me.

YA Spotlight: Origin by Jessica Khoury

2014-01-17T19:33:00.000-06:00

One of my reviewing goals for 2014 is to review more Young Adult titles. So I'm going to read a minimum of one YA novel each month. After seeing a blurb for Jessica Khoury's debut novel Origin somewhere on the interwebs a month or two back, I picked up a copy and poured through it in a day. With an premise that hooked me from the first few pages and a protagonist that is easy to cheer for, Origin is just the kind of young adult novel I plan to recommend to my daughter when she's older. With an engaging premise and real emotional heft, Khoury has earned a place on my fiction radar.

Origin, is the story of sixteen year old Pia. The result of genetic experiments in a hidden research facility in the Amazon rain forest, Pia is the apex of selective breeding and cutting edge biological science. She's beautiful with a genius level intellect, heightened senses, reaction times, impervious skin that can withstand any injury. Most importantly, she's immortal. Having spent her whole life in the research facility called Little Cam, Pia has only one dream in life, to become a full member of the Immortis team so she can have a hand in creating the next generation of immortals. Her fear of not having someone to spend eternity with drives Pia to both obedience to her keepers and excellence in her studies. But when a sudden storm leaves a hole in the fence that has kept her contained, Pia ventures into the jungle for the first time. The boy she meets there throws her entire life's plan into chaos and makes her question the motives of the only family she's ever known.

One of the main reasons I've avoided YA in the past, is the tendency for the protagonists to make poor decisions all because of their raging hormones. The proliferation of love triangles and obvious wish fulfillment that seem to be the order of the day, simply don't work for me as an older reader, in spite of the fact that I can understand their appeal for the intended audience. Khoury avoids this trap by avoiding the obvious love triangle, and making the conflict something more important than which suitor Pia chooses in the end. Pia is constantly pulled in two directions at once, but her attraction to the native boy, Eio is put in conflict with her dream of an immortal companion, who she will never have to watch grow old and eventually die is much more compelling than another tempting real life suitor. Pia is also torn between her desire to escape the strict confines of the compound that has been her entire world and the wider vistas that Eio exposes her too. But most importantly, she is fighting against the expectations and perceived value of her 'perfection' that have been a constant in her life. She feels that she can be something more and on her own terms, but the expectations of her 'family' are hard to shake off. It's a common enough struggle that it resonates well even for a forty something reviewer like me.

Khoury's world building and prose were top notch. Her descriptions of the jungle surrounding Little Cam and the village that Eio calls home were lush and vibrant and I had no problem envisioning the environment that Pia and Eio move through. She obviously did her research, referencing a wide variety of flora and fauna native to the Amazon. There's definitely a high level of polish in the prose itself, and I found myself admiring a lot in the decriptive passages.

There are a few things about the novel that didn't thrill me, but the good easily outweighs the less than stellar parts. The big reveals about the evil corporation behind the scenes and the source of Pia's immortality didn't come as a real surprise to me, and there I think there could have been more reversals regarding the motives and character of some of the secondary characters but the strength of Pia's internal conflict was enough to keep me turning pages.

There is a strong romantic theme in Origin, which Khoury handles pretty well largely due to the strength of her prose. The speed at which the characters fall for one another is a bit quick, but is easily waved away by their youth and the fact that Eio is the first boy her age that Pia has ever even seen. It's a decent workaround for what could have easily been a major complaint.

It takes something special for a YA book to capture my attention, but Khoury delivered in spades. Pia is a strong heroine, not because of her genetic gifts but because of her heart and strength of character. And Origin tackles plenty of the universal issues its audience faces with a fresh approach and lush delivery. If you are looking for a novel for the Hunger Games addict in your life, you could do a lot worse than giving them a copy of this promising debut.

Breach Zone by Myke Cole

2014-01-15T12:44:00.000-06:00

Reading Myke Cole's newest novel has become a bit of a New Year's tradition for me. Fortress Frontier was the first book I read in 2013, and Control Point was one of the first of 2012. This year has been no different, Breach Zone was my first novel this year and it certainly set the bar for the rest of the year. It's been awesome to watch Cole's career and work evolve over the last few years and he really knocks it out of the park with the conclusion to the Shadow Ops series. While I was expecting improvement over his last effort, Cole delivers a novel so much better than his last that there is no doubt that he's earned his place as one of the most watched authors in the genre. With pulse hammering action around every corner this novel could have become just a sequence of strung together set pieces with magic and missiles flying, but Cole layers the narrative with hard truths about duty and service, community and redemption. Breach Zone has a giant heart inside its bruised and battered chest and that's the real key to its success.

In the aftermath of the battle at Forward Operating Base Frontier and the presidential impeachment that follows, Lieutenant Colonel Jan "Harlequin" Thorsson finds himself a national hero but scorned his brothers and sisters in the military.

Oscar Britton has fled into the Source, serving as the leader of a movement for Latent equality and an end to the forced servitude of the SOC. But before he can make good on his plans, Scylla emerges from the source with a army of goblins and gahze at her back. She will stop at nothing to bring a new world order into power.

With New York City under attack, it's up to Harlequin to stop a woman he once loved from destroying the system he's spent his life time defending, but to have any hope of bringing Scylla down he'll have to turn to the very people he helped imprison for help.

I have to admit that I was underwhelmed when I heard that Harlequin was the principle point of view character for the final novel in the series. The Aeromancer has been one of the principle antagonists of the series, and while he'd redeemed himself in many ways at the end of Fortress Frontier, I was hoping for more of Bookbinder or a return to a more mature and savvy Oscar Britton. In retrospect, Cole couldn't have made a wiser choice. His history with nearly all of the principle characters thus, and the revelation that he was once in love with Scylla makes Harlequin a compelling character that engenders a wide range of reactions from the cast and I'd imagine readers alike. As a career soldier, Harlequin has always been a true believer. Orders are in place to prevent emotions from causing harm to the people he's sworn to protect. He's learned the hard way, and he's stood behind the rules like a shield ever since. The evacuation of the FOB has changed his world and his iron clad faith in the chain of command is rusting. Scylla's attack only hastens the process and Harlequin must adapt his worldview or millions of people will die.

It's Harlequin's internal conflict and the story of Harlequin's doomed love affair with Scylla that are the emotional center of the novel. Cole turns Scylla from a sociopath with terrible magic to a wronged woman who's attempt to do has turned her into a monster. Comic fans will see an easy parallel to Magneto, arguably the most complexly drawn villain in the medium. Harlequin gets much needed depth here, as he struggles with his duty and his own sense of right and wrong. He suffers for his role as the face of the SOC and his treatment of the Selfers he's brought down in his career. But he learns, he grows, he changes. And it's a pleasure to watch it unfold.

Though, the other characters from the series are all woven into the ongoing conflict, this is Harlequin and Scylla's story. Bookbinder and Britton get their time to shine, as do Downer and Swift and the rest of the cast. Bookbinder's actions in the naval scenes are particularly top notch as is the revelation that Downer has thrown off her infatuation with Harlequin and is finally her own woman at last. With as diverse a cast as Cole's created, it's quite a feat that he manages to tie everything up nicely in this last volume.

As expected, Cole's military experience makes for some very realistic and exciting action scenes and I was shocked that the scope and size of the engagements never seemed to pull the action back so far that it removed the emotional core from the scene. But as much as I liked the action, it was the message of Harlequin's character arc that resonated with me the most. Harlequin's eventually realizes that in spite of all the labels and divisions that we use to define ourselves and those around us that we are all fundamentally the same and that the only way forward is together. Cole never preaches, but the message is clear. And coming from an author who's made his life about service to others, you couldn't ask for a better spokesman.

Breach Zone improved on the series in every way with high octane action, characters that grow and change as you read, and a message that actually means something. Myke Cole has outdone himself and readers who might be on the fence about military fantasy or the series conclusion, should waste no time in exploring this fantastic series.

Terrible Minds Flash Fiction Challenge: The Jackdaw's Wire & Lessons Learned

2014-01-10T19:40:00.000-06:00

Like many avid readers and reviewers I've always wanted to be a writer. I've started many a manuscript that've gone unfinished due to countless unimportant reasons. But my New Year's Resolution this year is a simple one. Write, and finish what you start. So with that in mind when I stumbled across a Flash Fiction Challenge at Chuck Wendig's excellent blog, I decided to get cracking. The resulting story, for good or ill is posted below. Read it if you like, or move on. I'm posting it as a way of making myself accountable and maybe inspiring other wannabe writers in the pursuit of their dreams. After the piece, I'm going to talk a little about the challenges and lessons I found in the exercise.

The Jackdaw’s Wire

The feathers of the initiate’s mask made Nico’s nose twitch and he bit the inside of his cheek hard to murder a sneeze. The pain and blood were a small sacrifice for success, for career, for family. And for a thief like Nico, it was a price he’d pay with a smile.

The Jackdaws had recruited him six months ago and despite his fear he’d accepted. Not because of the security and wealth that came with becoming one of the killers who ruled the shadows of the kingdom, but because of her. Sena, the girl who’d found him, his bride if he accomplished this one task.

“The only way to be one of us is to be family. Birth and marriage are the only doors,” she’d said.

After years of living off of whatever he could beg or steal, Nico had leapt at the chance. He’d been lucky; most orphans of the Burning hadn’t survived. They’d starved or were executed for the larceny life in the gutter required.

Only charity saved Nico from sharing that fate the first year. A priest of the Chained God had offered crusts of bread and later a home in the very temple that Nico now watched. He’d been tempted to accept, but the other urchins had warned him off. Priests buggered young boys like him, evading the vows that forbid them a woman’s bed, they’d said. He’d stopped taking the bread not long after, and learned to avoid the soft spoken man with the birthmark like a bloody hand print across his cheek. Life in the gutters had taught him that nothing was free. Even theft had a price; you just didn’t know when the bill would come due.

Nico settled the rough hood of his gray robe to shadow his face and watched. The evening traffic at the temple entrance was light, the smoke from the braziers at the entrance adding to the tickling in his nose. Novices, their robes indistinguishable from his disguise, trickled inside in knots of three and four. Slipping inside should be simple enough. Not wanting to waste time, Nico stepped out from the alley, skirting the next group of novices.

***

It had been easy to gain entrance, and only slightly more difficult to gain access to the cell that the high priest called home. Years of living so as to attract no notice as he picked pockets and cut purses had served him well. The sole obstacle was the lock on the cell door, the only one he’d seen. His lessons had paid off. Even using the tools he’d crafted with bits of stolen wire, Nico had tickled the door open in less than a minute. Waiting in the dark was the hardest part.

He remembered the instructions Sena had whispered into his ear, copper curls brushing his cheek as she tied the feathered mask into place. Enter the Chained God’s Temple, kill the high priest, and bring back a gift worthy of my hand. He’d accomplished the first, only the difficult part remained. The cell was austere and impoverished as expected, despite all rumors to the contrary. The chained priests sought forgiveness through service, like their god who’d been banished from the heavens for his crimes against creation. A proper gift would be difficult to obtain and, denied a weapon, there were only so many ways Nico could end a life given his slight frame.

From his hiding place, Nico considered the picks, but discarded them immediately. A well placed jab to an eye might do the trick but would be too risky. If he failed, any alarm would see him swing. Nico removed his stolen robe, gathered the belt between his hands and waited, his decision made.

The metallic clunk of the lock pebbled his flesh, turning the warm cell frigid. It was time to earn a home and a family, the first he’d had since the Burning. He closed his eyes and pictured Sena’s face, her twinkling eyes and the constellation of freckles that sprayed across her nose. He could do this; he could buy his future with the life of this priest. It was the only coin he had.

The priest was a big man, muscles gone soft. His head was shaved. A dusting of silver stubble had grown in and his bald spot shone in the light of the candle he carried. Nico lunged, looping the belt over the priest’s wide neck and pulled hard. The candle tumbled, guttering as it fell. The makeshift garrote cut off the screams, but the priest struggled mightily. Nico rode him to the floor, yanking the belt like reins. Something was wrong. The priest must have gotten a hand underneath the belt. He dropped the belt and grabbed the mark of office all chained priests wore. The links of rough iron wire bit into his palms as he twisted it, cinching the chain tight. It wasn’t long before the struggling was over. Iron bit deeper than cloth, blood coated his palms when he stood.

The man’s face was a livid purple in the dim light. His bulging eyes were clouded with bloody spider webs. Nico didn’t know why the priest needed to die. Initiates were not permitted the luxury of questions. He didn’t look powerful or dangerous, let alone evil. Perhaps the Jackdaws knew his sins as well as his god had. Had he been a killer, like Nico or was his crime more sinister? Did it matter? Dead was dead. Then he noticed the birthmark, a spread palm across the dead man’s face.

Weeping, Nico knelt and pried the sinner’s chain from the swollen flesh of the priest’s neck. A bridal gift, he thought. Closing the staring eyes he offered a silent curse to the Chained God.

This man promised me a home and a family when I was a child. I hope you’re denied heaven for eternity for making him keep it.

The main thing this challenge taught me was the difficulty inherent in the word count. I'm far more wordy than I realized and trying to balance character, plot, and world building was incredibly difficult. I also discovered that I may have been better off going with a more modern setting, when an alternate take on the same story came to me in a flash as I was writing the last paragraph. My default tends to be fantasy but I might be better suited to consider other angles. But I definitely got a lot of practice pruning sentences to shove as much story into as little space as possible. All in all, I finished the piece in a few hours and that feels incredibly good. Feel free to leave a comment below. If you loved it, or hated it doesn't matter. But I'd love to hear why.

Iron Night by M.L. Brennan

2014-01-06T18:28:00.001-06:00

Urban Fantasy has a bit of a mixed reputation. Many folks see it as an excuse to write erotic detective novels with a cast made up of undead, werewolves, and as many other supernatural beasties as possible. I've never really gotten the appeal of that style novels preferring my urban fantasy to be a more action flick than soap opera. Which puts me firmly in the camp of avoiding any novel with a protagonist that seems to fit that mold. Which basically means vampires as a major part of the cast are essentially a deal breaker for me. M.L. Brennan's Generation V was an exception to that rule. With a protagonist is who is still refreshingly human despite his vampire status and an intriguing, original take on the vampire mythos Brennan set the stage for a urban fantasy novel that I could not only enjoy, but I could recommend to friends without fear of anyone casting aspersions on my masculinity. The sequel, Iron Night was one of my most anticipated novels of the year, and Brennan didn't let me down delivering a superior sequel that offers the perfect balance of humor, heart and action that left me hating myself for devouring the novel so quickly.

Since beginning his transition to true vampiric status, Fortitude Scott's life seems to have improved, he's finally free of his toxic ex-girlfriend, found a better job at an upscale restaurant, and he's found a roommate that not only pays the rent on time, but is actually becoming a friend. Sure, he's had to begin taking a larger role in maintaining the family business of keeping the supernatural beings in his mother's territory in line and is spending more time getting his ass kicked as he tries to learn how to fight, but life is looking up. When Fortitude's roommate is murdered, the Scott family immediately sweeps it under the rug and is content to leave it at that, but Fort has other ideas. He calls on Suzume, the kitsune the only person outside of his family who he can trust and sets out for answers. But despite his fledgling new abilities and Suzume's aptitude for detective work, it's quickly obvious that Fort may be over his head again.

Iron Night succeeds based on Brennan's deft hand at crafting characters who the reader can easily relate to despite the other-worldliness of the story line and her original take on tropes that long time genre readers have seen hundreds of times. Fortitude Scott, for all of his developing abilities and ties to a vampiric dynasty that stretches back hundreds of years, is a regular guy. A bit dorky, insecure, and struggling with his finances and navigating this new life as a vampire he's tried to avoid for so long. Fort's not much different than any twenty-something guy I hung out with in college. He is a perfect stand in for the average male genre reader. He's relatable and his motives and reactions resonate perfectly.

The supporting cast is among my favorites in urban fantasy. Suzume, Fort's partner in crime and seeming love interest is a standout once more. Fort's growing friendship with the kitsune is a standout part of the novel and the deepening connection between them has not one iota of the hurry to bed approach that is so lamentable in many urban fantasy novels. Fort's interactions with his family take a more prominent role in this volume and his sociopathic sister Prudence, gets some much needed depth. The family tableau of the Scott family makes for some tense reading and sheds some light on the vast differences between the three siblings and lays the groundwork for some serious fireworks in future novels.

Brennan's refreshingly original take on vampires was well explored in Generation V, so this time she expands and fleshes out another supernatural element only hinted at in the first volume. And once again, the completely unexpected approach that the author takes makes their motivation absolutely repellent and completely understandable at the same time. I guarantee you've never seen elves in this light before. As the supernatural elements of the world expand, I can't wait to see Brennan's take on other iconic creatures and how they will interact in this modern setting.

And I would be completely remiss if I didn't mention the humor. Anyone who follows Brennan's Twitter feed already knows that this is an author with funny to spare and she infuses her dialogue with enough witticisms and pop culture references to keep readers in stitches through out the novel. Rarely, has a novel made me laugh out loud so many times.

The only thing that kept this sequel from being a complete home run was how closely the plot structure mirrored that of the first novel. It's a minor quibble and the formula certainly works, but I couldn't help but notice it. I have a feeling that with the growing scope of the cast, world building, and Fort's role in the family business that this is a problem that will take care of itself with time. Iron Night is surprisingly tight novel, at just over three hundred pages, but Brennan manages to keep things from feeling rushed, and yet the novel flew by for me nonetheless.

If you like fresh takes on old tropes, characters you'd gladly drink a beer with, and laughing your ass off at three in the mornings, you should definitely give both Generation V and Iron Night a try. M.L. Brennan is the best thing to come out in the urban fantasy market in years and you can even carry the book in public without shame.

Coming Attractions: My Most Anticipated Novels of 2014

2014-01-04T16:09:00.001-06:00

With the holidays at a close, and a pile of books that need to be read, I thought I'd list just a few of the upcoming releases that have me salivating in anticipation for their release. This is by no means an exhaustive list as I have left off novels that I couldn't find cover art for and releases in series where I am woefully behind. I plan on making a decided effort to catch up on a few authors that I've just discovered or have found my neglecting for newer shinier releases. Take a look and tell me if there is any upcoming novels you think should be added to my list in the comments below.

Breach Zone by Myke Cole:

Some might consider including this final installment of Cole's increasingly popular Shadow Ops series a bit disingenuous, as it's the first book I completed this year, but having read this thrilling and thought-provoking conclusion to Cole's first series, I simply couldn't leave it off the list. If it's true that every author leaves something of themselves in their work, then this story exposes Cole's opinions on service, patriotism, duty and personal honor and the often treacherous waters that must be navigated to reconcile them. I was looking forward to this novel ever since completing last years Fortress Frontier and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I'll be posting a more thorough review closer to the publication date. If you thought that Cole was a rising star in the genre, Breach Zone marks his arrival as a major player.

The Shadow Throne by Django Wexler:

Django Wexler's The Thousand Names surprised the hell out of me. I'm not a fan of military fantasy but Wexler's deft hand at characterization and way of making military tactics and epic battles accessible and compelling left me anxious for more. The Shadow Throne offers a change of scenery and a more in depth look at the politics and hidden agendas in play. Count me in for the continuing adventures of Marcus and Winter as they face new challenges on a completely different stage.

Iron Knight by M.L. Brennan

With it's release just a few short days away, I'm anxiously awaiting my review copy of M.L. Brennan's second Generation V novel. With protagonist Fortitude Scott, finally accepting his nature as a vampire, and taking his place in his family's supernatural empire there are countless opportunities for Brennan to continue on the path of excellent character development and coming of age drama that made Generation V such a standout. Add in the unavoidable hijinks of kitsune, Susume Hollis and Iron Night is all but guaranteed to be a successful sequel.

Skin Game by Jim Butcher

The inclusion of the latest installment of Butcher's fan favorite Dresden Files is no shock at all. But Butcher has managed to keep this series fresh and engaging while still staying true to the heart of the series by allowing Harry and his allies to change and grow in unexpected ways as the series plows ever onward. With the shocking status quo changing events in the last two installments, Butcher seems poised to continue the trend of enthralling readers with the trials and tribulations of everyone's favorite wise ass wizard. I couldn't be more excited.

Morningside Fall by Jay Posey

I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic tales, and Jay Posey's debut novel Three knocked me on my ass. Blending a sparse prose style and a mysterious approach to world building, Posey managed to make me care more about the plight of his characters far more than the how and why of his grim setting. Given the unexpected ending of the first installment, I was afraid that the story would end their. I am anxious to see how Posey handles this sequel, given the shift in protagonist and what appears to be a significant time gap between novels. I'm confident that no matter what Posey will continue to deliver the goods in the compelling style that made Three one of the most readable debuts of 2013.

Prince of Fools by Mark Lawrence

I'm really way behind on reading Mark Lawrence. I read Lawrence's debut Prince of Thorns shortly after it's release at the Science Fiction Book Club. When I went looking for the next installment, much to my surprise the SFBC was no longer carrying Lawrence's work. Due to my compulsive need to have all books in a series the same size, I'd put off buying the next novel. Time passed, and here we are with a new series set in the same fantastic world and with ties to the previous trilogy. I'm in like Flynn in this one and have every intention of catching up with Jorg and his brothers very soon.

The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman

Grossman's The Magicians is perhaps the one book recommendation I make on a regular basis that has a chance to backfire on me. Grossman's hyper realistic take on what real children would become if they were placed in a school for wizards and were capable of astonishing magical feats has been a bit divisive among my circle of friends. Quentin Coldwater despite being so exquisitely drawn is perhaps the most miserable protagonist in fantasy since Thomas Covenant. But I think that's the point of the Grossman's tale in many ways, the story of Quentin's eventual redemption which I'm keenly hoping The Magician's Land provides.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

What can I say? I love the premise of this novel and have been itching to start on something by Jemisin who has always been something of a critical darling. The premise of pending apocalypse in a fantasy setting that is expected and unavoidable, becoming nothing more than a fact of life. The fact that I have nothing more than the basic premise to go on, and I'm still this excited at the prospect makes The Fifth Season a shoe in for a list like this one.

Veil of the Deserters by Jeff Salyards

Jeff Salyards' Scourge of the Betrayer was an odd book for me. With its odd choice of protagonist, deeply flawed characters, and grim matter of fact violence and complex and mysterious world building, I didn't have a clue what to make of it, other than I knew it was good and that Salyards was an author to watch. At long last, the further adventures of Braylar Killcoin and Arki are coming and I for one can't wait as we learn more about the Suldoon and Killcoin's mysterious sister. The continuation of Bloodsounder's Arc is right on time.

Sworn in Steel by Douglas Hulick

Hulick's Among Thieves was one of the first novels I reviewed on this site, and I've had the pleasure of hosting Doug on a round table on Violence in Science Fiction and Fantasy recently. I've been eager for the release of the next Tales of the Kin for so long that I'd almost forgotten it was due out this year. Hulick's approach to the fantasy underworld and the engaging voice of his protagonist Drothe were standouts of my first year of reviewing. With Drothe now in a place of more power in the Underworld, I'm certain that we'll see a ratcheting of the stakes and new foes and challenges for the quick witted Drothe, I'm curious to see how Drothe handles his new circumstances and getting an even deeper look at the society Hulick has developed for the criminal Kin. If Amoung Thieves was any indication, readers are in for a hell of a ride.

2013: A Year in Review, Many Thanks and a Resolution or Two

2013-12-31T15:20:00.000-06:00

2013 has been pretty damn good to me. I got married to an amazing women who is the love of my life and has encouraged me in all of my geeky pursuits despite having no interest in them other than the fact that they bring me so much joy. I was awarded my third degree black belt, a level of accomplishment and skill that I never in a million years thought I would attain. I finally managed to finish my first piece of speculative fiction, which was widely praised by my beta readers. And as you know, I've read. A lot. Seventy titles, which is my most productive reading year to date. I owe most of that to this blog, which keeps me reading when other interests threaten to encroach upon what free time I have.

When I started this blog, I had no idea of the impact it would have on my day to day life. I've always loved to read and to talk about books so a blog in which I talked about books seemed like a perfect fit. I won't lie, there were dreams of boxes of free books landing on my doorstep with a weighty and wonderful thunk too. I've been fortunate to have received review copies from publishers and authors alike and have discovered many new authors and wonderful stories just because, against all sense, some people out there seem to care what I have to say about the books I read.

The community has been kind to me, helping with promoting the site, allowing me to do guest posts for audiences far larger than mine, and in some cases calling me out on my own foolishness and then helping me find a way to better myself in the process. Thanks to Justin Landon of Staffer's Book Review for calling me on my gender bias. As a result, I've learned a great deal about the obstacles faced by female authors in the genre and have made great strides in closing the gap in my own reading and have discovered many new authors in the process. In just three months, I've closed the gap by twenty percentage points from where it was on October first. And many thanks to Stina, Mazarkis, and Zachary who were kind enough to discuss the issue with me in public here.

And the authors themselves have been more approachable and kind than I ever would have expected. Through interviews, round tables, and online interactions I can say that I have been so very impressed with the caliber of people that produce the stories that I love so. I've even made a friend or two. Thank you all for contributing to the success of this site and taking part in some charged discussions through email that produced some of the most viewed posts in the site's history. It wasn't always easy, but I couldn't be more pleased with the results.

There's one story I'd like to tell, for no reason other than to illustrate just how awesome this tribe of writers can be. I couldn't have been more touched and surprised, so I thought I'd share it with my audience.

My wife, who knows my covetous heart so well, set out to get signed copies of some of my favorite novels this year. When some were unavailable through retail channel she contacted authors directly and the generosity and kindness of these authors simply blew her away. This Christmas was one for the record books, in no small part to the kindness of some the best authors out there. Thank you for your kindness.

2014 is on the horizon, and I'm confident that it will be an even better year. So I'm going to make a resolution or two in public to keep me honest. I'm going to continue on my quest for gender parity in my reading and reviewing and I'm going to do my best to pay the kindness that has been shown to me forward into the community. Oh and I'm going to kind a home for that story, because it's not going to publish itself.

Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire

2013-12-31T13:41:00.001-06:00

Seanan McGuire is one of the notable female authors who I decided to make a point of reading this year. It's only appropriate that I end this year's reviewing with the last of her novels I've read this year. After being thrilled with Feed and finding Discount Armageddon a serviceable start to a series, I was looking forward to starting McGuire's October Daye series. Rosemary and Rue doesn't disappoint and given its status as McGuire's first novel, I am certain that the series will reach even greater heights. With lush world building, a engaging and unexpectedly human protagonist and plenty of action, the adventures of October Daye will appeal to fans of the works of Jim Butcher, Patricia Briggs, and Kevin Hearne. In spite of some flaws, this is a fantastic start from the pen of one of the genre's most well respected names.

October Daye is a changeling, whose mixed heritage grants her a small portion of her mother's magic and a place in the world of the fae. Her skills as a private investigator have resulted in a knighthood and a dangerous assignment. While searching for her liege lord's missing wife and daughter, Toby finds herself faced with an enemy whose magic is so powerful she is helpless against it and spends fourteen years trapped in a pond after being turned into a fish. When the spell is broken, Toby's human family has moved on and she turns her back on the fae, whose influence has cost her everything. Depressed and eking out a threadbare existence, Toby seems to have given up on life. All that changes when her friend, Countess Evening Winterrose is murdered, and Toby finds herself compelled by Evening's dying curse to find the person or person's responsible. She must re-enter a world that has cost her everything to find Evening's killer or die from the power of the Countess' curse.

There's a lot to recommend in this debut. Toby Daye is a far cry from the paint by numbers urban fantasy protagonist despite how similar she might seem at first blush. She's a supernatural creature with the expected preternatural abilities, but her status as a changeling leaves that magic weak and ineffectual against the powerful forces arrayed against her. She is a knight of the court, but her ties to the pureblood society are tenuous due to her self-imposed exile. Toby is a woman with plenty of potential but very little of it is realized in expected ways. She manages to come up on top based on dogged determination, the ability to recognize when she's out of her depth, and more than a little luck.

The supporting cast is well developed and I look forward to seeing more of many of the characters that have only tangential importance to the plot. Tybalt, Manuel, Lily, Sylvester, Luna and many more are dying for more screen time. Toby has plenty of potential love interests and they are handled with a light touch, never taking center stage. This is a blessing considering the dire straits of the investigation and I applaud McGuire's choice to stay so far away from the ubiquitous paranormal romance angle given the state of the novel's plot.

The world building is top notch, going far deeper in to the breadth and depth of the fey than most fantasy novels. The wide variety of the fair folk is well represented and I look forward to discovering even more. The rules and social mores of fey society are well described and just inscrutable enough to make it clear that these are a bloody minded folk who are quick to take offense if the proper channels aren't followed. The currency of debt and favors that is so prevalent leaves plenty of dangling plot threads that I hope will be picked up as the series continues. With the internal politics and prejudices surrounding changelings, McGuire places this fairy tale squarely in the realm of human politics and gives the setting a ring of authenticity that helps ground it well.

Despite how likeable Toby is as a protagonist, I have some problems with her as a character. As a former private investigator who is good enough at her job to earn a knighthood, it is disconcerting how little effective detective work that she seems to bring to the story. She seems to bounce from failed lead to failed lead catching iron bullets with her body and narrowly escaping assassins all the while. She never seems to do anything but react, and I find it hard to believe that she could have earned a knighthood if she is always so ineffectual as an investigator. I'm hoping with her apparent return to official private investigator status, that we'll see more of her vaunted investigative skills in future novels. In this volume, the answer to the question about the identity and motives of Evening's killer is resolved not through Toby's cleverness but through information gained far too easily from an uber-powerful tertiary character. Hopefully, this will not be a trend that continues.

My other major issues center around paging and agency. The pacing was uneven throughout. The early chapters amounted to a tour of McGuire's exquisite world building and establishing the cast. Toby's investigations were essentially pointless, only providing more mystery and never much in the way of actionable information. As the second act begins, Toby seems to reel from one failed assassination attempt to the next. She rarely acts seeming only to react swept from one place to the other, bleeding and healing by turn. Based on her description as a effective investigator and knight of the court I would expect her to take a more active role in the events befalling her. Instead she seems to be a mere passenger in her story, rather than its author. If Toby weren't such a likeable character, I'm not sure I would have liked the novel as much as I did given her lack of agency.

In spite of it's flaws, Rosemary and Rue is an excellent start to what promises to be an engaging urban fantasy series. The world building is exquisitely done with a richness of detail and plenty of room for further explanation. October Daye is an extremely engaging protagonist, despite her apparent lack of supernatural fire power or particular capacity as an investigator. The supporting cast all but begs to be delved into more deeply and the plot threads left dangling at the end of the first novel promise many more adventures in Toby's immediate future. I'll definitely by giving this series a few more books to even out its pacing and for Toby to find some agency. After all, I gave Jim Butcher four novels to get Harry Dresden ironed out, and we all know how well that turned out.

She Who Waits by Daniel Polansky

2013-12-27T12:00:00.000-06:00

My review of the final Lowtown novel is likely to be the shortest review I've ever written for a novel I enjoyed so thoroughly. But delving too deep into this story would risk spoilers, so I'm forced into brevity. I loved the preceding two volumes of the Lowtown trilogy and was both excited and saddened to know that my time with the one of the most irredeemable and yet most compelling protagonists I've ever encountered was coming to a close. Polansky has been labelled as a 'writer's writer' by folks with far more education and experience than I, but I would go one step further and say that these novels are perfectly suited to any reasonably well read person who isn't likely to be put off by a novel that takes a long, unflinching flinching look at the darkest parts of society and human nature. These books aren't easy to read, they are violent and profane with hardly a decent person in sight, but they are so compellingly well written and so deft in their observations about the cold facts of human nature that it's a definite shame they haven't found a wider audience.

But to get to the specifics of She Who Waits, this final volume takes place six years after the last installment. Warden and all of the other principles introduced in the series are getting older, and most none too gracefully. Warden is still doing what he does best, running his criminal enterprise from the shadows and sticking his nose in where it doesn't belong. The kingdom is on the verge with powerful forces angling for control of a weak monarchy and Warden quickly finds himself planted firmly on top of a powder keg. Being manipulated by his former employer, the secret police of Black House, while he manipulates them in turn, Warden is drawn into a dangerous game of uncertain allegiances and deadly stakes once more. Complicating matters is the reemergence of only woman he ever loved, the person responsible for his fall from the halls of power. With the lives of his loved ones hanging in the balance, it seems doubtful even the crafty Warden can escape the coming explosion unscathed.

As always, Polansky's prose is the star of the show. Tight and poetic, gritty and somehow beautiful the musings of Warden are certain to stick with you well past the final pages. Warden is no angel, and is simply struggling to do right by the people he loves, at piece with the contradictions of his hedonistic and wicked ways. That dichotomy is the secret to Warden's success as a protagonist. Readers may not like him, but they'd be hard pressed not to understand him. As tired and weary as he is in this final volume, Warden's wit is still razor and readers will find themselves chuckling even in the novel's darkest moments. Fans of the grimdark movement will find much to enjoy in Polansky's protagonist.

Those who have read the preceding volumes, will certainly not be surprised by the twist and turns of the plot and Warden's often inscrutable maneuverings as he fights the long odds again. But as always, all is eventually made clear and then we're off to the races as the novel reaches its unavoidably brutal climax. There are flashbacks to Warden's past, though they seem to take up far less space in this volume. I would have liked more back story, but didn't feel cheated at all. We are given exactly what the story demands and nothing more. As with the end of most series, there is death and betrayal and reversals of fortune. I felt that some of the deaths were robbed of their significance and emotional impact, but having such a tight narrative focus and the framing of the take, there really was no way an observant reader couldn’t have seen it coming.

In many ways, She Who Waits delivers exactly what fans of the series have come to expect and the end while perhaps disappointing to some should come as no surprise. I personally would have felt cheated with anything less than the eventual outcome. Polansky has managed to create a world and character that will live in my mind beyond the confines of the story, and he wisely leaves us wanting more. Polansky remains one of the most undervalued writers in fantasy today, and I wish him greater successes in the next stage of his career. I certainly will be in line for whatever story comes next.

The Best of 2013: Year End Edition

2013-12-26T19:04:00.000-06:00

With the holidays over, I imagine that many of my fellow bookworms have gift cards and Christmas cash burning a hole in their pocket. With that in mind here are the ten best novels, I've read this year minus a few of the bigger names that the vast majority of genre fans have purchased long ago. I made the decision not to include some novels that were all but sure things simply because, there are lesser known novels that are just as good and could definitely use some publicity, no matter how small. But rest assured, though you may not see a King, Gaiman, Butcher or Brett in residence here, these authors are in no way less worthy simply because they don't have the benefit of decades in the business of a successful franchise to their names. 2013 was a year of discovery for me, and I'd like to share the very best of those with you all. Happy Holidays and I hope you find a novel you've not yet read in this list.

10. Fortress Frontier by Myke Cole: Sophomore novels are tricky, especially when the first novel is well received. Myke Cole did the unthinkable and bested his debut, Control Point in every way. Fortress Frontier adds depth to the cast, concept, world building and even the prose itself all while still drawing heavily on all the traits that made it's predecessor such a hit. There's action a plenty, character growth that leaves reader's cheering, and an authenticity born from the author's life experience. Military fantasy rarely gets better and Cole has proven again that he's a major talent. I'm likely to make the final book in this trilogy, Breach Zone one of the first books I read this year.

9. Generation V by M.L. Brennan: I gotta admit, I wasn't expecting to like this novel half as much as I did. I mean, vampire protagonists are overdone, right? But Brennan's Fortitude Scott is a different animal all together. He doesn't want to be a vampire, and given the ingenious fact that Brennan's vampires are born, rather than turned, he doesn't have to be one, not in the ways readers might expect. Fortitude doesn't exude sex, or handle himself well in a fight. He's a push over, vegetarian,with an art degree and a dead end job. But shit gets real. With the help of a kitsune and his own refusal to give up on a losing battle, Fortitude takes his first steps to becoming a vampire, and more importantly a man. Brennan succeeds on the merit of her new take on a tired trope and the strength of her every man protagonist. I, for one, can't wait for the sequel.

8. The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu: Another type of novel I rarely read is the comedy, but Wesley Chu's uproariously funny debut was an welcome exception. This sci-fi thriller/comedy reminded me of all the best parts of television's Chuck with an engaging premise reminicent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Add in the coming of age tale of the slacker extraordinaire Roen Tan and the pitch perfect and often laugh out loud action sequences and it's easy to see how this debut has catapulted Chu to rising star status. The sequel, The Deaths of Tao may have deviated heavily from the formula of it's predecessor but it showed off a completely different set of writing chops that guarantees I'll be reading Chu's work for the foreseeable future.

7. Vicious by Victoria Schwab: My love affair with superheroes is an old one, but rarely do I find a novel that effectively captures what I love about the genre. Vicious' manages that with its obvious nods to its four color parents ranging from the seminal graphic novel Watchmen and the dynamics between two friends whose acquisition of superhuman abilities destroys every bit of good feeling between them. But better yet, the broken time line structure and the moral ambiguity of the two leads makes for an engrossing character study on the nature of good and evil and the blurring of the line between. I hear Vicious has been optioned by none other than Ridley Scott, and I certainly hope we eventually get to see Victor and Company on the big screen sooner than later.

6. The Blue Blazes by Chuck Wendig: If I were going to crown an author of the year it would be Chuck Wendig. I've read three very different novels from him this year and each of those has been a cut above the crowd. The Blue Blazes is simply the best of these. With an unforgettable protagonist in the larger than life and yet tragically broken Mookie Pearl, bombastic action sequences that literally chew up the scenery, and richly bizarre world building Wendig delivers plenty of punch per page. But it's the emotional core of dysfunctional family values that makes it stick in your mind long after the last page is turned.

5. Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh: This compelling novel shouldn't have worked for me. It's science fiction, romantic comedy, and essentially has no real action sequences to its name. But despite not fitting into my wheelhouse at all, Love Minus Eighty kept me enthralled. With pitch perfect characterization, fascinating commentary on the role of technology in our social interactions, and more subtle themes about the trials of forming real connections with the people around us, McIntosh delivers a novel that reminds me of no one more than Phillip K. Dick, where the science is only the vehicle that exposes the beating heart of humanity hiding beneath it. If you don't like sci-fi, romance or books with out explosions, check your baggage and read this book. You'll thank me later.

4. The Thousand Names by Django Wexler: This year was the year of books that took me by surprise. I'm not a fan of military fantasy, but Wexler's debut kept me turning pages late into the evening. Departing from the stereotypical knights and swords tropes of the genre, this flintlock fantasy has all of the grit and mystery of the early volumes of Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and the military realism of Bernard Cornwell, with a cast packed with compelling characters and the best treatment of female characters I've seen in a book of its type. Wexler is all but guaranteed to grow in popularity as the series continues and I can't wait to lay my greedy paws on the next installment of this fantastic new series.

3. The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes: Sadly science fiction and fantasy isn't known for the beauty of its prose. Beukes' time travel thriller is set to change that. With lyrical prose from the first page, this story about a time travelling serial killer and his victims charms and disturbs with equal measure. This novel celebrates the women who fall to the killer's knife with a poignancy and grace that makes them so much more important than the animal that ends their lives. These Shining Girls are the real stars of the novel, and the exact mechanism of the house that allows the murderer to escape justice is left nebulous because it's not the point. As a character study, Beukes' tale is elegant, haunting, and sure to tug at the heart strings so much so that the lack of explanations hardly matter at all. Spend some time with these women and then hand this novel to anyone who turns their nose up at your genre of choice.

2. No Return by Zachary Jernigan: No novel took me more by surprise than No Return. It's chock full of classic sci-fi elements that I couldn't care less about. Robots, truly bizarre aliens, and aloof and terrible gods are all integral to the plot. I freely admit to being less than impressed at the outset, but as I wound my way through the dense narrative I found myself more and more riveted by the fate of Jernigan's characters and the thematic aspects that are wound so deftly into his world building. No Return is a novel that gains depth with examination and I plan to return to its rich and odd depths soon. Jernigan is a talent that bears watching and deserves far more attention than he's gotten due to the implosion of Night Shade Books.

1. NOS4A2 by Joe Hill: I've been a Stephen King fan since I was a teenager, so it goes without saying that I've followed his son's career with interest since his debut. While I certainly enjoyed his work, none of those books struck the same chord as some of my favorites of his fathers. NOS4A2 changed that by the end of the second chapter. Hill turned in a story that is so unsettling and profoundly intimate that I can't think of a single novel I've enjoyed more this year. Vic McQueen is a heroine for the ages and don't even get me started on where Charlie Manx ranks in my best villains of all time list. This is a novel chock full of atmosphere, chilling evil, and characters so real that they practically breathe. Rarely does a novel chill my bones and warm my heart at the same time, and that is why Hill's latest earns top marks this year.

Interview with Django Wexler

2013-12-20T08:14:00.001-06:00

The Thousand Names is easily one of the best books I've read this year, and a strong contender for debut of the year besides. So it's no surprise at all that I asked Django Wexler for an interview. We covered the usual questions about concept, influences,character, plotting and more. I was impressed by his candor and his sense of humor and quite enjoyed myself as I'm sure you will too. There are some links to other content by this talented author included, be sure to check them out. They're well worth your time. I even bookmarked one for reference later.

Well, that's enough from me. Enjoy.

52 Reviews: I'll start with a soft ball question. What can you tell us about the genesis of The Thousand Names? Did the original concept change much through the course of writing?

Django Wexler: So, The Thousand Names basically came from my reading two books – George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones (and sequels) and David Chandler’s The Campaigns of Napoleon. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of Martin, and I really liked what he did with his setting – he took the standard knights-and-castles fantasy and brought it down to earth, so to speak, by introducing a big dose of historical realism and modeling it more closely on a particular time period. I decided I wanted to do something like that, a secondary world with a strong historical basis and magic with a pretty light touch. But since the knights-and-castles era was pretty well covered, I thought it would be more fun to base it on a very different time in history.

When I read Chandler’s book, the Napoleonic era seemed perfect. Big, sweeping battles, lots of interesting political changes, and not something you see much of in fantasy. Influenced by the old S. M. Stirling and David Drake series The General (military SF retelling the campaigns of Belisarius) I originally planned to do a fictionalized version of the actual life of Napoleon, with Janus as the Napoleon character. Once I started developing the world a bit more, and working on the characters and their backgrounds, it became clear that wasn’t going to work, and the current version of the story only has faint similarities to the actual *course* of history.

I think Winter’s story was the last part to fall into place. I knew I wanted the second POV to be female, but for a while it was Janus’ little sister, or Marcus’ girlfriend, or similar. Once I realized she needed her own story, it worked much better, and the result is that her plot ended up taking over the series to the point where she’s probably the key character!

52 Reviews: While I also loved Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, I was really impressed that none of your viewpoint characters were from the ranks of the privileged few. Did you intentionally choose to focus on the common men and women, or was it more a function of the historical period that provided the basis for the novel?

Django Wexler: It’s a function of a couple of things, but mostly the setting. I wanted the viewpoints to be two characters at opposite ends of the military hierarchy – one to give the rankers point of view, and then one at the top to talk strategy and help explain what’s going on at a higher level. The ranker was obviously going to be a commoner, and that ended up being Winter’s role. For the officer, I wanted someone who basically knew what he was doing, and the way the Vordanai army is put together that mostly means commoners as well. (In the Vordanai army, a captain has to rise from the ranks or be trained at the War College to achieve his rank, a colonel just buys his.) Janus is the exception, of course, but I knew I didn’t want him to be a point of view – that kind of “genius” character works best when viewed from the outside, the Holmes and Watson or Thrawn and Paelleon.

In The Shadow Throne, the next book, the third point of view is Raesinia, the heir to the Vordanai crown. Fortunately, she is a very long way from the pampered princess archetype, and using her helps us peek into the inner workings of court politics.

52 Reviews: Janus is definitely a fascinating character and I applaud your choice to keep his motives and tactical decisions largely obscured. One of the other things I've noticed is that while the Colonel appears to have a great deal of genius regarding military matters he seems particularly obtuse to more common concerns. Was it necessary to provide this blind spot to allow Marcus a more important role to play? Or was this to keep Janus from becoming too larger than life and this unrealistic as a character?

Django Wexler: Hmm, it’s a little bit of both. As the POV character, Marcus needs a story of his own, he can’t just be standing around saying “Brilliant, sir!” all the time. But also I think it helps Janus be a more identifiable character. We all probably know somebody who is a master of one particular field of expertise, but who isn’t too good at day-to-day stuff. It feels realistic, somehow. It also fits with Janus’ backstory – mostly unrevealed as of yet, but it’s safe to say that it involved a lot of reading and study at the expense of real-life experience.

52 Reviews: Moving on to Winter, I found myself drawn more to her story than any other in the novel. I love how you placed her so firmly in a man's world and yet she never comes across as mannish. What led you to the decision to have your principle female character live as a man, and what challenges did you face as a result?

Django Wexler: It’s funny, because I originally made the decision for boring, practical reasons – I wanted Winter to be in the army, rather than a camp follower or something, and having a fully gender-integrated army wouldn’t have fit with the society I’d designed. But once I made that choice, and worked through the implications for her character, it really helped turn her into a full-fledged person. I had to figure out why she was the kind of person who would do that, take this big risk, and it made her very interesting.

One thing I *didn’t* want is for the story to be about the mechanics of her hiding her gender. That can be a good story, especially combined with a coming-of-age plot, but it’s not what I was going for. So when the book starts, she’s been doing it for two years or so, and I just sort of assume she knows what she’s doing. Hopefully I didn’t damage anyone’s suspension of disbelief too badly by not going into the details of supportive undergarments and furtive bathroom breaks.

52 Reviews: With the bulk of the novel taken up with the various stages of a military campaign, how much research and planning went into getting the feel if not the specific details just right? What advice would you give to aspiring writers on research and how to avoid using pre-writing to keep them from having to write the actual prose?

Django Wexler: Fortunately for me, a lot of the “research” is just the stuff I read for fun. I wouldn’t have gone for this kind of story if I didn’t enjoy the historical stuff enough to go through it. So it’s hard to say exactly how much was actually involved – once I started working on it as a book, I did make an effort to seek out some lower-level, first-hand accounts of what battles and marches were like, so I could get that right along with the strategy and tactics.

Research can definitely cross the line into procrastination. While it’s important to get things right (I think) you can’t let fear of getting things wrong paralyze you. In particular, relatively minor details are easy to change in a later draft, so it’s not worth giving up your writing momentum in order to figure out some tiny piece of combat drill or military etiquette. Just mark it somehow (I use Word comments) and move on, take a look on the next pass.

Also, I think a lot of writers fall prey to the idea that, “Oh, it’s epic fantasy, I’ve got to have a big battle in it!”, which is completely not true. And even if you DO have a big battle, you don’t have to (and probably shouldn’t) give us the blow-by-blow. I wrote a guest post on this subject for A Dribble of Ink that contains a lot more of my thinking.

52 Reviews: I noticed that much like Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, you use magic fairly sparingly and often with a lot of mystery. The magic that is used seems devastatingly powerful and possibly game changing and yet sees very little actual page time. What led you to those choices, and will we see a continuation of that theme, or will future volumes see a dramatic increase in the open use of magic?

Django Wexler: The lack of magic is definitely a “by design” feature of the world, for a couple of reasons. First, not having ubiquitous magic means it’s easier to use historical precedents for cultures, technologies, and the like. (I’ve never really liked the worlds where the wizards only blow things up, and never help with farming or diseases.) Second, I was interested in the military, tactical stuff, and I wanted that to actually matter, which meant not having real battlefield magic in the style of, say, Steven Erikson. (Not that I don’t love Erikson’s books! But having armies always seemed sort of pointless when it usually comes down to which all-powerful demigod beats the other.) So even the strongest magic we see in The Thousand Names wouldn’t make the user a match for a hundred soldiers in the open.

Magic in the world of The Shadow Campaigns is finicky and poorly understood, so while it can be a

powerful force it’s hard to rely on. The Shadow Throne definitely continues the trend of magic being relatively subtle; there’s probably a bit more, page for page, but it’s not so much flash-and-bang fighting magic. As the series goes along, I think the role of magic will increase a little, though, if only because Winter and the others will find out a little bit more about it.

52 Reviews: One of my favorite aspects of the novel was that everyone seems to have secrets. Not only are they present in the story arcs of the characters, but there also are many hidden agendas and secrets that are kept from the general populace as well. Even the title of the series seems to hint at this theme. What led you to this overarching aspect of the story, and how do you manage to not telegraph the numerous reveals in the novel?

Django Wexler: Hmm. I actually find this a hard question to answer, because I think that’s a basic part of how I write – a story is always more interesting when the characters have secrets, even if only little ones. In this book in particular, for the reasons we talked about regarding the magic system, I knew I wanted the reality of magic itself to be a secret at the beginning of the story – as far as the characters are concerned, it’s a myth. Then Janus has secrets, both because of his goals and because that’s the kind of guy he is, and once Winter’s story fell it became kind of a theme.

The tricky part is giving appropriate hints without giving the game away. It’s very hard to do, but the perfect reveal is one that completely blindsides the reader when they first see it, but then is totally obvious in retrospect. That’s a pretty narrow range to calibrate too, though, and it’s different for each reader, so I just did the best I could. A couple of the biggest secrets, the READER is privy to all along, but not the characters – Winter’s gender is revealed in the first chapter, and the fact that magic is real in the prologue. Then the trick is making maximum use of the dramatic tension provided by the reader knowing something the characters don’t.

The title of the series definitely plays into the “secrets” theme. I sort of imagine it as the kind of thing that won’t make it into the official version of history, so that the Shadow Campaigns are the hidden, true story.

52 Reviews: Switching gears a bit, I'd like to talk a little bit about your experience as a debut author. With your first novel under your belt what was the most challenging aspect of the process, and what advice would give to aspiring writers attempting their first novel?

Django Wexler: I always feel like a little bit of a cheat being called a debut author. My book Memories of Empire was released by Medallion Press in 2005, and another book, Shinigami, in 2006. Medallion is a small press, so I qualify for various debut-author things because the pay wasn’t pro-rate, but it was still honest-to-goodness advance-paying publication.

The main advice I would give to aspiring authors is a) keep writing and *finish projects*, and b) don’t assume that your first completed novel will be your first publication. Very few people end up selling the first thing they’ve written. It’s certainly worth trying, but you send it off and then start something else. I finished at least four novels before writing Memories of Empire (it depends how you count), and The Thousand Names was #8 or #9 total.

The hardest part, for me, was actually finishing the stories. Starting new projects is always more fun than banging the last few nails into old ones, and without a clear goal it’s easy to drift in a sea of half-completed manuscripts. Actually getting a piece into final, submittable form and sending it out is a big milestone, and worth working toward.

52 Reviews: Continuing along this vein, what's been the most rewarding aspect of your experience as a writer considering the critical success of The Thousand Names?

Django Wexler: I’m not sure if we’ve got “critical success”, but I guess the response has been reasonably positive. For me, talking to people who enjoyed the book is always wonderful. It’s a bit of an ego-trip, obviously, but it’s also great to see how you made people happy. For the same reason I like responding to mail, signing copies, and so on; it’s little things that take me a couple of minutes, but it can make someone’s day. That’s a really rewarding feeling.

I’ve also been privileged to meet quite a few other writers, either on Twitter or at cons, and they’ve been pretty uniformly awesome. Getting to be a part of that community is a lot of fun.

52 Reviews: I like to end my interviews by giving the authors a chance to talk about whatever strikes their fancy. Feel free to pimp upcoming projects, recommend other authors, or just share something you think might interest the readers. Or you could talk about your secret pact with Napoleon's ghost made on a crossroads on the island of Elba. The choice and the floor is yours.

Django Wexler: The next big event for me is the release of my middle-grade fantasy, The Forbidden Library, in April of next year. I’m really excited about that one, it’s a new area for me and I hope people like the book. The Shadow Throne, sequel to The Thousand Names, releases in July. I’ll probably also have a novella and some short stories out in there somewhere, either in e-bookstores or on the web.

And completely off-topic, for anyone interested, I’m now writing a regular anime column for SF Signal.

Thanks for having me on!

Reflections on Gender Bias

2013-12-18T19:57:00.001-06:00

After my round table on Gender Bias, I've been striving to improve the gender parity of the books I read and review. With a little less than three months of paying much closer attention to the results of these efforts I've come to the following conclusion.

Reviews on male written work generate more traffic. I've reviewed five male written novels since the first of October. These novels only account for approximately thirty six percent. Even with female written novels accounting for sixty four percent of the novels reviewed in this period, posts that feature male authors generate approximately 20 more hits than their female counterparts. Perhaps readers are more likely to check out a review for novels they've already noticed in book stores or authors with more name recognition.

There are probably lots of reasons for this. Publishers do seem to promote male written novels more heavily, I've seen evidence of that while perusing Netgalley and even in my local book stores. The thing is there's precious little that we as genre lovers can do to directly impact the publishing model directly except by voting with our dollars.

So what's a mid-list blogger to do about it? Gender parity is a step, and one I'm quite glad I've taken. I've discovered a score of new authors that I'd previously overlooked and have been gratified to discover novels that have entertained, touched and challenged me. I'm happy to have had a small hand in recommending them to my audience. But I'm left wondering what else can I, and we as a community do to make this genre we love so much more inclusive? My curiousity about the possible reasons posts on female authors seem to draw less traffic, which lets face it may impact the reading habits of reviewers who are looking to grow their audience, has led me to one possible and relatively simple answer.

We spread the word. Looking over my twitter feed for the last few months has led me to some surprising statistics. The number of retweets I average on female written novels in the past few months is an average of five per post. On the flip side the number of retweets for male posts averages at 10 per post. I'm sure there are other factors at play in which posts get the most promotional juice from social media, but this is something we can control. We can spread the word with nothing more than the click of a mouse. If you see a review promoting a female author's work, especially if it is one you have read and enjoyed, take a second and share it. It doesn't matter whether it is an old novel, a promising debut, or the newest craze, just share it. It takes no time at all, and it is a simple way to keep novels by under promoted authors in the eye of their audience.

For my part, I'll keep on reading for parity and sharing my thoughts with you all, and I'll be sure to put my money where my mouth is by sharing reviews for authors who may not be getting the attention they deserve.