Interview with Cynthia R. Richards

Please welcome fantasy and horror writer Cynthia R. Richards to the blog today.

Tell us a little about yourself.

My literary career began when I interned as a part-time columnist for a small entertainment newspaper in college (a long, long time ago). I wore several hats: food critic, entertainment reviewer and cranky editor. Freelance Journalism wasn’t for me though (I enjoyed eating too much), so I eventually entered the Information Technology field as a computer programmer. Somehow I fell in with the wrong crowd and became the dreaded Project Manager.

A co-author of horror and urban fantasy novels, my first solo fiction project – Phantom Harvest – was published by Whiskey Creek Press in 2013. My book baby is up for an EPIC EBOOK Award for Best  Fantasy of 2014. I’m an active member of EPIC and Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.

Please tell us about your latest book? Phantom HarvestCOVER

Phantom Harvest, Book One in the Mutant Casebook Series, introduces the dangerous and diverse Mutant World.  Created by an atomic test gone horribly wrong, the “Calamity” ripped a hole in reality. Humans torn from their homes were split apart into many versions of themselves. Some theorized that a devious intelligence based the human mutations on the person’s core nature. Many of them became Dark Elves. These beautiful, ruthless beings took control. They established a corrupt governing body and built the city of New Athens. Other types of mutants made up the dregs of their new society. Some stayed within the protection of the city.  Others, criminals and vicious killers, migrated to the savage wilderness known as the Outskirts.

Gideon, a half-breed mutant with a surly temper and rotten luck, struggles to scrape a living as a tracker in the desolate territory near the gateway to the human world. Business seems to be picking up when Gideon is approached by a powerful dark elf with deep pockets and a serious problem. Human miners at the dark elf’s plant are being taken by an elusive predator. Gideon is pressured to find the killer before word of the disappearances reaches the human world, endangering the tense relationship between their two races. But, nothing is simple this close to the conduit between worlds. Archangel, a ruthless mercenary operating in the secret sectors of mutant society, has set his own deadly game in motion.

Surrounded by savage wilderness and cut off from contact with civilization, Gideon must find a way to protect his friends and survive to collect his bounty.

Does this book fit into a series? What is the focus of that series?

Phantom Harvest is the first book in the Mutant Casebook Series. It introduces the dangerous and diverse Mutant World.  The series is based upon the exploits of Gideon and his adopted father, Hiroshi.

How did you prepare to write about the book’s specific area or field of study?

The Mutant Casebook Series is based on a “What If” scenario. What if atomic testing in the 1950s went wrong and there was an accident that ripped a hole in reality? Humans were pulled into another world. Their molecular structure mutated, giving them extraordinary power and changing their bodies to fit their new environment. How would the mutated humans cope? Would they cling to their old lives, building cities and developing governments? Or would they simply succumb to animal behavior?

While this book is a Fantasy, it is strongly based in the sciences. I did research on genetics, quantum physics and astronomy. My day job centers around information technology and medicine. Of course there was the historical research of Area 51 and Japanese Internment Camps. This really was a fascinating and fun project

What are you working on right now?

I’m juggling two literary projects right now. Pariah is the first book in a new dark fantasy series.  Millennia have passed since the corrupt of Seelie society were banished from Otherworld. Abandoned in the Human Realm, their descendants keep to the shadows, controlling criminal organizations and governments in secret.

The Second project I’m working on is Vendetta, Book Two in the Mutant Casebook Series. This time the boys are in the Mutant city of New Athens. Low on cash, Gideon reluctantly agrees to take on a missing persons case. Someone makes it clear they don’t want the guy found as attempts on Hiroshi’s life begin. 

Author Website –  http://crrichards.com

Author Blog – http://deepthoughtsandjunk.wordpress.com/

FB Author Page – https://www.facebook.com/authorcrrichards

Twitter – @CR_Richards

Amazon Author Page – http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00BA159W2

Purchase Information

Whiskey Creek Press

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Smashwords

Kobo

Sony

 

Interview with Charbel Tadros

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Today we welcome Charbel Tadros, fantasy writer.

1.      Please tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Charbel Tadros, currently 25 years old. I’m married and expecting a baby soon. I work at a school here in Lebanon in developing and executing life skills programs for students with special needs in addition to being a High School Counselor as well as a writer for the Red Carpet Magazine. I have been into spirituality for over 12 years now and have been writing for over 15. The first novel I published was “The Destined Journey” and it was a spiritual novel which was unexpectedly very well received in Lebanon. I also published a collection of spiritual poetry entitled “When the Spirit Speaks”. My most recent publication is a fantasy novel called “Leviathan”, which will be part of the War of the Heavens Trilogy. I currently live in Brummana, Lebanon.

2.    Leviathan Please tell us about your latest book.

“Leviathan”, my latest novel is an epic fantasy which was inspired by the death of one of my close friends in a car crash a few years back. I used my writing skills and helped revive him in this novel. It is the story of his brother and how he dealt with the tragedy before discovering the world of energy and going from one world to another where he and his girlfriend Vicky meet various mythical creatures. These creatures, including gods, angels and demons, used to interact more with humans before because humans believed in them more. Now, because of that lack of belief, they weren’t acquiring enough energy and couldn’t interact with people anymore.

3.      Does this book fit into a series? What is the focus of that series?

“Leviathan” is part of a trilogy called “War of the Heavens”. Its focus is how energy is used in real Magick. The techniques of magick are spread around the books and will help readers understand how energy can be used to perform magickal deeds. Of course, the books will also help readers understand the real meaning of magick and how it is as scientific as physics, though not as well understood.

4.      How did you prepare to write about the book’s specific area or field of study?

I don’t usually prepare for writing a book. My brain just tells me that the book is ready and I should start writing. When it does that, I just sit at my laptop and start writing. Most of the time, I have no idea what I’m writing or how events in the story will unfold. Sometimes, I even have to reread what I wrote and discover that I had no idea I knew anything about what I had been writing. I believe that I am just a vessel and things are being written through me.

5.      How does this book fit into your real-life interests?

I have always been interested in quantum physics and the law of attraction. When I put them together, I understood how magick works and I got really interested in it. Eventually, I just wrote about it.

6.      What are you working on right now?

Currently, I just started working on the second part of the War of the Heavens trilogy. I am also expected to start working on my Master’s thesis about special education in a few months.

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Facebook page: www.facebook.com/waroftheheavens
Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Leviathan-War-Heavens-Charbel-Tadros-ebook/dp/B00HFDJ2T0

 

Jennifer Allis Provost on Copper Girl

Welcome Jennifer Allis Provost who has a new urban fantasy out called Copper Girl. Be sure to enter the raffle to win a free copy (link at the end of the interview.)

Please tell us a little about yourself.

You could say that I wear many hats.  By day, I hang out in a cubicle. By night, I’m a writer of fantasy and horror. All the time, I’m a mother to three year old twins. You guessed it – my biggest obstacle is balancing all of my obligations.

Please tell us about your latest book.

Copper Girl, which releases June 25, 2013 from Spence City, is about a world that’s full of magic – until the government outlaws it. This is a problem for our heroine, Sara Corbeau, since she just happens to be an Elemental, born with the ability to make metal do her bidding. What’s worse, her family is on a government watch list, and both her father and brother have gone missing.

Sara adopts a ‘hide in plain sight’ policy, living in a dingy apartment and working at a boring, go-nowhere job.  Her plan of moving through life unnoticed works pretty well, until she takes a nap during her lunch break and has a vivid dream about a man named Micah. It turns out that he’s no figment of her imagination, but an elf from the Otherworld. And, he just might be the key to finding Sara’s missing father and brother.

CopperGirlsFRONTcoverFINALhirezDoes this book fit into a series? What is the focus of that series?

Copper Girl is the first book of the Copper Legacy, a four book series that follows Sara as she struggles to piece her family back together, and bring magic back to her world.

How did you prepare to write about the book’s specific area or field of study?

Since Copper Girl is an urban fantasy, I made sure to read extensively in the genre; some of my favorites are Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels series, Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series, War for the Oaks by Emma Bull, and Charles de Lint’s Newford series (especially Onion Girl).

How does this book fit into your real-life interests?

Sara makes a significant piece of jewelry for Micah, and I have been known to string a bead or two. She also has an unhealthy addiction to caffeine. (Being a caffeine addict is totally an interest. I am very interested in obtaining my next shot of espresso!)

What are you working on right now?

I’m finishing up the Copper Legacy (and possibly a spinoff duology), and working on another urban fantasy set in Scotland. I’m also gearing up to re-release my fantasy series in 2014. Lots of work ahead for me, and I’m loving every minute of it.

Thanks for having me, Theresa!

Click here to enter the free giveaway of Copper Girl!

Jennifer Allis Provost is a native New Englander who lives in a sprawling colonial along with her beautiful and precocious twins, a dog, a parrot (maroon bellied conure, to be exact), two cats, and a wonderful husband who never forgets to buy ice cream. As a child, she read anything and everything she could get her hands on, including a set of encyclopedias, but fantasy was always her favorite. She spends her days drinking vast amounts of coffee, arguing with her computer, and avoiding any and all domestic behavior.

Friend me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jennallis

Follow me on Twitter: @parthalan

http://jenniferallisprovost.com/

http://jenniferallisprovost.blogspot.com/

 

#3–The Great Traveling Fantasy Round Table

Sylvia Kelso—In Gratitude for Fantasists

 

 “Barren crags and ancient forests, winds scented with honey, wolf, wildflowers, swift water so pure it tasted like the wind, deep snow lying tranquilly beneath moonlight, summer light cascading down stone under sky so bright it held no color. These he put into his making… Shapes he had taken in his long  life mingled together as swiftly as his body remembered them: the white owl in winter, the golden hawk, ferret and weasel and mink, stone, wind, the tree smelling of sun-soaked pitch, water thundering over stone, endlessly falling, the stag that drank the water … He remembered faces he had loved, of friend and lover, teacher and ruler, their eyes speaking his name, Atrix Wolfe, beginning to smile.”  (The Book of Atrix Wolfe,Ch. 23. p. 238)

The great shape-shifting mage Atrix Wolfe created a death-dealing spell whose ravages occupy most of the book. Here he finally creates a counter-spell, ranging through all the aspects of his life. It’s also a passage that typifies why Patricia McKillip, for me, is a gratitude among fantasists.

I like many fantasy writers, but few achieve permanent lighthouse status. A handful of small but telling oeuvres, Sheri S. Tepper’s Gameworld books. Ellen Kushner, E. R. Edison. Samuel Delany. Joanna Russ. Tolkien, of course. Unlike Tolkien, McKillip’s work never radically altered my outlook or my writing style, but even now, I wish it could. 

McKillip, however, has been around a while. Her fantasy novels run almost uninterrupted from The  Forgotten Beasts of Eld in 1974, up to The Bards of Bone Plain in 2010. Eld  won the World Fantasy Award, but nothing since has missed a nomination or finalist position in some award, if not a win. From the passage above you can begin to see why.

First and foremost, McKillip is the only fantasy writer I know who operates usually at the rare level of language Tolkien himself only achieved every so often, as when, describing Cerin Amroth, he used the commonest words – “ gold, white, blue, green, tree, grass, flower” and yet drew with them “shapes that seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived” [that moment] “and ancient as if they had endured forever” (The Fellowship of the  Ring, Book II Ch VI.) But in Atrix Wolfe here alone we have: “wind scented with honey, wolf, wildflowers,” “summer light cascading down stone”, “the tree smelling of sun-soaked pitch.” This passage is a major aria, so to speak, a cornucopia of life-images, but such examples appear everywhere. Simple words, often repeated, particularly words like “bone, wind, light.” Used mostly unadorned, but magnificently resonant.

The language may be “simple.” The narratives are not. They deal with magic, and many shift between worlds, or between faerie and “earth” of some sort,  or between then and now. Joanna Russ once wrote, “Harlequins say it over and over. I only say it once.” McKillip often doesn’t even say it once. The reader has to sit up and work, as we used to say about cutting-out horses, to figure how we got from There to Here and where Here might be, and if Here is a dream or not. The novels following Atrix Wolfe are particularly good at these “twitches.” In Winter Rose, the shifts from wood to farm, from past to present, and between the enchanted hero Corbet Lynn’s doubled –sometimes tripled – realities are as fast and can be as bewildering for the reader as they are for the characters. Was that a dream? Or an event? Or symbolism? After 12 years and more than 12 readings for the similarly “shifty” The Tower at Stony Wood,  I am just now firmly figuring out what happened where and when and to whom.

This quality of enacting rather than just talking about interaction with other realities doubtless explains why McKillip doesn’t often appear on the popular awards lists like the Hugo.  For McKillip, you are better to be one of those who, to borrow Huck Finn’s review of Pilgrims’ Progress, like their statements interesting but tough.

There are other felicities peculiar to McKillip. Her characters are memorable and ever-differentiated, and they have charisma, yes, but Can Do Characters is only just up the writing pyramid from Can Spell and Can Tell a Story. As might be expected, McKillip can also do beautiful settings and thunderous events, but she is one of the rare fantasists who draws music deeply into her work. Often music is integrated with magic, as in the Riddlemaster trilogy that ended with Harpist in the Wind. There, though, music leans rather towards hand-waving: Morgon strikes smashing notes from the harp, or he “plays the winds” or other such nebulous events. Later, music becomes more immediate. Here are musicians talking in the kitchen in Atrix Wolfe.

“’Fanfares,’ they said, ‘first and second, and third, the one Lefeber wrote, and then, … with the second wine, the Silvan fanfare, which you always take too fast, and there is a rest between the second cadence –‘” (Ch. 7, p 84.) Magic has happened here, these musicians will sound for a king’s feast. But this is also the nitty gritty of playlists and squabbles over timing you find among real musicians anywhere.

Music provides the vehicle of magic in Song for the Basilisk and Bards of Bone Plain too, but these books include some of McKillip’s more wicked invented instruments. The small, red-mouthed bone pipe Caladrius finds in the wild and with which he eventually destroys the Basilisk, is both eerie and imposing. But the music magister Giulia  plays with a tavern group, using the “farmer’s instrument” the picochet. “’It has a square hollow body, a very long neck, and a single string. You play it like a viol, between your knees, with a bow’.” (Basilisk, 43.) When her bass-pipe player hands Giulia hers, he says “’Don’t break the windows with it’”(31.)

A similarly anarchic bagpipe appears briefly in Bards, and full length in the short story “A Matter of Music,” with the “lovely reedy cothone that looked like a cow’s bag with eight teats” and which its owner plays “only when she was asked.” The cothone and the picochet tie together McKillip’s knowledge and love of music and the will-o-the-wisp humor that flits through her work. Like Tolkien, she has a comic element as rarely seen as it is to be prized. It can even be black, as during the duel amid the treasure in the dragon’s tower in The  Tower at Stony Wood: “He caught a boot in the throat, that knocked him into a clatter of plate and some astonishing gold armor, filched, apparently while occupied, from a coronation ceremony”(Stony, Ch. 18.)

And then, a consummation not always to be found in notable fantasy writers, there are McKillip’s gender politics. Writing when second-wave feminism had already shown women writers how to change the masculinist narrative configurations of older fantasy, McKillip has no trouble making her women wizards, power-centers, decision-makers for the narrative, as well as heroines, victims and all the usual female roles. Even in Eld, wizardry is the woman’s power. Nyx in The Sorceress and the Cygnet is only one in the succession of such wizards, elemental powers, and even goddesses.

The Tower at Stony Wood is perhaps my favourite McKillip novel, having the most perfect version of all these characteristics: the language, simple yet achingly numinous. The magic, erratic, unexpected, fierce but also whimsical. The “women’s work” – weaving, sewing, embroidery – that composes the novel’s motifs, and the stunning reprise on “The Lady of Shalott,” no longer a passive victim in her mirror-cell. Most of all the fine balance between kings and knights and women of power,  from the triple goddesses who oversee the action to the woman whose magic compels peace between kingdoms: Sel, who as she says in the Gloinmere palace gate, is also “’the baker from Stony Wood’”  (Stony,Ch. 26, 269.)

Which raises my final cause for gratitude. Most high fantasy focuses on the nobility. But in her best novels, McKillip doesn’t just turn a farmer-prince into a world-ruler; she can take a baker,  and in Atrix Wolfe, an apparently mute scullery drudge, and transform them too into figures of magic and power. Best of all, she does it for women as well as men.

 Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “At Sunset” appears in Luna Station Quarterly for September 2012.

Deborah J. Ross—Marjorie Torrey & Marjorie Fischer

In this season of appreciation, I’m aware of how many writers – some household names, others obscure – have gone before me and influenced not only my work but my life. The list of the legendary will surely illicit, “Oh yes, I loved that person’s work.” I love hearing stories of how the right book at the right time had lasting transformative effects.

I want especially to acknowledge two writers whose names I almost never see mentioned, yet who inspired me. Interestingly, they were both named Marjorie. They wrote two of my very most favorite children’s stories. Long before I could read for myself, my mother read them to me, night after night. For those of us fortunate enough to have memories of being read to as small children, those books retain a luminously magical aura. Sometimes, alas, they don’t stand up well to being re-read as adults. I have no doubt that some of those I treasured would disappoint me greatly. I find these two books as delightful today as they was 60 years ago.

 

Artie and the Princess, by Marjorie Torrey, Howell Soskin,1945. Marjorie Torrey was a writer and illustrator in the ’40s and ’50s, with 2 Caldecott awards and several successful mysteries under the pen name Torrey Chanslor. She was born in 1899 and seems to have dropped out of the literary scene some time in the ’50s.

I don’t believe my parents actually bought this book. It had a Christmas gift sticker on the flyleaf, now so peeled off as to be illegible, and an inscription from some folks we didn’t know. The binding’s all but disintegrated and many of the illustrations have been adorned with my own crayon scribbles. but the paper, thick and soft, has worn well.

Artie is a little dragon who lives with his parents in a forest. There’s something missing from his life, “little playmates his own age,” as his Mamma puts it. In search of friends, he wanders far off and comes to a beautiful mountain top.

   “Hello,” said a soft voice. And from the tall grass, quite near him, rose a little creature with blue eyes and pink cheeks and yellow pig-tails. She had on a red dress and a gold crown. She was exactly as tall as Artie himself (though not the same shape) and the prettiest thing he had ever seen in his life. So of course he knew hat she was.

   “Hello, Princess!” he said.

   The Princess rubbed her eyes. Artie guessed that she had been asleep. He was sure of it when she said:

   “You’re really true, aren’t you? You’re not a dream — you can speak!”

   “Why of course I can speak. Of course I’m real!” said Artie.

   Then he remembered all the strange things that had happened to him, and he thought, Perhaps I am dreaming!

   He grabbed the tip of his tail and pinched it, hard.

   “Ouch!” he said.

   “See?” he said to the Princess. “Now you pinch me, and you’ll be sure.” He held out his paw.

   The Princess took it, but she didn’t pinch it. She just nodded and smiled.

   “Yes, you’re real,” she said. “And I like you. My name is Princess Ann. but I’m called Pandy. What is your name, little Dragon?”

   Artie said, “My name is Artemus Peter Edward Adelbert Jehosophat Dragon. But I’m called Artie.”

   “Well,” said Princess Pandy, “let’s play, shall we?”

Looking back, thinking about the tense, lonely child I was, Artie and Pandy were exactly the friends I longed for. I drank in every moment of their play. Of course, all does not run smoothly for our friends. The problems (a rude, vengeful cousin Prince Otto and his equally arrogant father) are countered with gentle strength as Artie (and later his parents), who remember how to fly and to breathe fire in defense of those they love. As an adult, I can throw around terms like empowerment, but for a child, a friend who was not only playful but protective struck all the right emotional notes. Artie may have had the physical might, but it was Pandy’s unerring sense of fairness and generosity that taught him how to use his strength wisely.

Red Feather by Marjorie Fischer, with illustrations by Davine; Modern Age Books, 1937. My favorite childhood books all came from someone else. This one had my brother’s name on the inside cover. He was 11 years older than I, my half-brother, and lived with his mother rather than with my family, so I suspect there is an interesting story in how I happened to come by the book, but not one I ever knew. I must have been older than I was when I got Artie and the Princess, for I made no attempt to colorize the illustrations. The book would be considered a “chapter book,” 151 pages long, with lots of pictures but lots of text, too, with lovely spoken rhythms for reading aloud.

Red Feather is a changeling story. The usual scenario is that the fairies exchange one of their own babies for a human child, only in this case, the swap is interrupted. The resemblance is so close that when they return, they can’t tell which is which. It makes a difference because the fairy child is nobly-born and the human child is destined to be the scullery maid for the Fairy Queen. In this world, only mortals are any good at housework. We follow the one the fairies take back, and like most children, she feels that she doesn’t belong, she can’t do anything right, she longs to be somewhere else. It’s a variation of the “prince-in-hiding” Harry Potter “special-child” theme.

   “When my mother finds out that the scullery maid she has planned so long to get may be a fairy instead of a mortal, she will punish all of us,” said the little lad.

   “That is so,” said Michael. “she has spent days over ancient books of magic, and she has found that no fairy ever dusted as well as a mortal.”

   “I was with her when she planned the changeling,” said another fairy. “‘How difficult it is to get good servants,’ she said to me, and then she made this plan.”

   “She must never know,” said Michael. “we must all vow never to breathe to a fairy soul that we could not tell one baby from the other.”

   “And now take one of them and let us be gone.”

   “Aye, take one of them.”

   Amanda had stepped back near the fireplace, and now the honest warmth of the wood fire seemed to spread deep inside her.

   “I will not have my child a scullery maid,” she said, and a real tear ran down her beautiful face.

Re-reading the story, I think of a time when categories of books were not so rigid. The story begins like a fairy tale, “Once upon a time,” and in slow stages becomes a love story, a coming-of-age story, a story about longing and isolation, a journey of self discovery and personal power, all with a gentle understanding of each character. I went through a period of not being able to read it without wincing at the way “fairy” has changed — certainly, a beautiful young man with long, flowing hair dressed in tights who admits he is a fairy means something quite different today than it did in 1937, and I myself had to grow up enough to be easy with sexual connotations so I could read the book entirely in its own terms.

An interesting historical perspective comes from the Publisher’s Note: “The two major barriers that have stood between writer and reader have been the high cost of new books and their narrow channels of distribution. MODERN AGE BOOKS have overcome these obstacles. By the use of modern, high-speed presses manufacturing costs have been drastically reduced… and by using magazine distribution channels, new books, for the first time, have been made easily available to everyone.”

Wherever you are, Marjorie Torrey and Marjorie Fischer, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Deborah Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with JAYDIUM and NORTHLIGHT, and short stories in ASIMOV’S, F & SF, REALMS OF FANTASY and STAR WARS: TALES FROM JABBA’S PALACE. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the” Darkover” series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy THE SEVEN-PETALED SHIELD. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She has lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.
http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/

#2–The Great Traveling Round Table Fantasy Guest Blog – November

In part two, Chris Howard celebrates the work of Terry Pratchett and Valjeanne Jeffers talks about three Cherokee writers, William Sanders, Thomas King (a personal favorite) and Daniel Heath Justice. Enjoy.

Chris HowardTerry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett is one of the biggest names in fantasy literature.  He’s a bestselling author in the UK and US. His books have been made into movies and translated into dozens of languages.  He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire, he was knighted, he’s won the Carnegie Award, and he has early-onset Alzheimers.

            Instead of looking broadly at Pratchett’s extraordinary accomplishments and uncertain future, I want to narrow the focus to one accomplishment, Pratchett’s gift of an entire world—a fascinating, complex, and fundamentally comic place called Discworld.  He has given it us to explore in dozens of books, so I’m also going to try to convince those who have not walked the streets of Ankh-Morpork or the forests under Überwald to take their first step.

Like a lot book series in fantasy, science fiction, and literature in general, we may have to find our own way in.

For me it started with the Guards—Guards! Guards!

I didn’t begin reading Pratchett with the wizards and the Colour of Magic, the first in the chronologically written order of the books.  I began with Sam Vimes and the Night Watch of Ankh-Morpork, and somewhere around forty books later I can look back on all the reading and re-reading of Terry Pratchett’s work and realize I never left Discworld.  I just have to hear the name Weatherwax, Vetinari, the snapping shutters of the clacks, or anything off the list of Abominations Unto Nuggan, and I’m there.  It’s like I went on a two-week Hawaiian vacation in the early ’90s, and years later discovered that I had apparently settled down just outside Honolulu.

Talking to Pratchett fans, it’s clear everyone has a favorite story series in the Discworld books, the Witches—especially Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg (but don’t forget Tiffany Aching and the Wee Free Men), Rincewind and the Wizards, Vimes and the City Watch books—with Lord Vetinari, mostly looming in the background, occasionally stepping in to shift lives and cities and wars toward what usually turns out to be a promising outcome.

And it all began in front of a mysterious door on a dark street, in the pouring rain, in the great city of Ankh-Morpork:

            The figure rapped a complex code on the dark woodwork. A tiny barred hatch opened and one suspicious eye peered out.

            “The significant owl hoots in the night,” said the visitor, trying to wring the rainwater out of its robe.

            “Yet many grey lords go sadly to the masterless men,” intoned a voice on the other side of the grille.

            “Hooray, hooray for the spinster’s sister’s daughter,” countered the dripping figure.

            “To the axeman, all supplicants are the same height.”

            “Yet verily, the rose is within the thorn.”

            “The good mother makes bean soup for the errant boy,” said the voice behind the door.

            There was a pause, broken only by the sound of the rain. Then the visitor said, “What?”

            “The good mother makes bean soup for the errant boy.”

            There was another, longer pause. Then the damp figure said, “Are you sure the ill-built tower doesn’t tremble mightily at a butterfly’s passage?”

            “Nope. Bean soup it is. I’m sorry.”

            The rain hissed down relentlessly in the embarrassed silence.

            “What about the caged whale?” said the soaking visitor, trying to squeeze into what little shelter the dread portal offered.

            “What about it?”

            “It should know nothing of the mighty deeps, if you must know.”

            “Oh, the caged whale. You want the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night. Three doors down.”

This passage shows the comic side, but it doesn’t take long to realize the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night are going to overthrow the government, and they’re going to use lies, terror, and chaos to do it.  Sure, it’s going to involve a dragon summoned with the use of a stolen magic book, a puppet king, and there’s also some potential human sacrificing, and an orangutan who happens to be a librarian seeking the lost book.  But it’s also about reviving or staying true to your sense of justice.  It’s about a directionless, drunkard city watch captain, Vimes, who discovers that it doesn’t matter how low a man has fallen he can’t lose the ability to distinguish right from wrong, and he can always climb back up and make things right.

That is the brilliance of Terry Pratchett.  He has taken the “map is not the territory” concept to unique and beautifully detailed levels, applying his own map of Discworld to our territory, our world, our changing cultures, environment, and advances in technology.  Through the eyes, hearts, and minds of Vimes, Rincewind, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and all the other Discworlders we see and feel and contend with their hopes and fears, the rise and decline of civilizations, gender and race inequality, with shared controversies and acts of courage, with everyday hostility and kindness.

And Guards! Guards! is just one book out of about forty, eighth in the sequence, and to many Pratchett readers—I include myself—the stories only get better as you go along. If I had to pick three for desert island reading I would go with Going Postal, Night Watch, and Monstrous Regiment.  With so many amazing books it’s not easy to choose, but I think I would stand by those three.

If you’re not already a Pratchett reader, have I convinced you to pick up one of the books?

Don’t blame yourself.

I fail miserably every time I attempt to explain Terry Pratchett’s books to someone who has never heard of Discworld, Granny Weatherwax, the Ramtops, or the notion of belligerent cheese—like the Lancre Blue, which has “to be nailed to the table to stop it attacking other cheeses.”  I have tried to explain the clacks—the long distance semaphore-based communications system that in some ways mimics modern technologies like email and the Internet, including a thriving hacker subculture, the business of operating the systems, and the struggles around who controls it.  I quote funny lines, or try to explain the footnotes, the disc and the elephants all on the back of Great A’Tuin, or that Jingo is about prejudice and war, and Wyrd Sisters is about propaganda and the good or evil influence that words can have on history and even reality.

As Terry Pratchett’s books have grown in worldwide popularity, the problem of having to explain these things has diminished, even if the difficulty remains.

It is Pratchett’s ability to weave serious and sublime themes into blended fabrics of rough cloth, Klatchian silk, and silly string.  In every Discworld story you will find an astounding complexity, cleverness, imagination, and poignancy bound together with humor—and I mean serious laugh out loud while you’re reading by yourself comedy.  That’s also what binds Pratchett fans together.  All of us live in Discworld to some extent, and the only thing I can say to those who don’t is pick up Guards! Guards! Or Wyrd Sisters, Going Postal, or The Wee Free Men.  Start somewhere.  Just take a walk through Pratchett’s world.  I dare you to come away with the same view of this world, because every Discworld book has some alchemical mixture of those enduring Pratchett elements: painfully serious, brilliantly silly, but most important, simply and universally human. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld

Chris Howard is a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books)
and half a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is “Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology” in Fantasy Magazine. In 2007, his story “Hammers and Snails” was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic, Saltwater Witch. His ink work and digital illos have appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages of other books, blogs, and places. Last year he painted a 9 x 12 foot Steampunk Map of New York for a cafe in Brooklyn. Find out everything at http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com

Valjeanne Jeffers—A harvest of Native America Fantasy

The month of November is reminiscent of orange-ringed harvest moons, piles of flying leaves and succulent dishes… For some it calls to mind the Norman Rockwell moment frozen in time when Pilgrims and “Indians” sat down to dinner in a picture-perfect afternoon of brotherly love, peace and thanksgiving.

I instead envision Native American writers moving through the stacks of speculative fiction. So I thought it would be particularly apt in November to showcase the harvest of Native American SF/fantasy that I recently became acquainted with: The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, written by Cherokee author William Sanders, Green Grass, Running Water by Cherokee author Albert King, and The Way of Thorn and Thunder by Cherokee author Daniel Heath Justice.

The Ballad of Billy Badass is a literary protest of the crimes against Native American peoples woven into a tale of a battle against preternatural evil. In Green Grass, Running Water fantasy and myth are humorously used to explore the middle ground between the modern and the traditional. And The Way of Thorn and Thunder is a high fantasy journey that address the destruction of Indigenous magic and culture by conquest– a journey which has been described as just as epic as J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings.

Thus, Sanders, King and Justice use science fiction and fantasy quite brilliantly to create a dialogue between past and present… sociopolitical dialogue which is perhaps even more effective because it is spoken through the mouths of their characters.

Writing is transformative. We transform the past and present through the power of written words whether through our characters’ raucous laughter, cries of rage, lonely voices in the wilderness, or sobs of melancholy. In doing so we inform the future. This is just as true of science fiction/fantasy authors as of any other genre. As writers, we give birth to ourselves and our experiences–often making statements about the world around us whether we intend to or not. This, I believe, is our greatest harvest. Our gift, our offering to the world.

Unquestionably it is something to be thankful for.

Valjeanne Jeffers is a SF/fantasy writer and a graduate of Spelman College. She is the author of the Immortal series and The Switch II: Clockwork (this volume includes The Switch I and The Switch II). Valjeanne has been published in numerous anthologies including: Genesis: An Anthology of Black Science Fiction, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology and Steamfunk! (in press). She is also co-owner of Q &V Affordable Editing. http://www.vjeffersandqveal.com

The Great Traveling Round Table Fantasy Guest Blog

Welcome to the Great Travelling Round Table Fantasy Blog. This month, we in the northern hemisphere have been celebrating harvests and thanksgiving feasts while our friends down south have been watching their crops grow strong and green under a strengthening sun. Both of these give us thoughts of gratitude and plenty, so we thought we talk about the greats of science fiction this month. In the first installment, Carole McDonnell pays homage to Lord Dunsany, Andrea Hosth to Andre Norton, and Warren Rochelle to Ursula K. LeGuin.

Carole McDonnell—Lord Dunsany

November is harvest and gratitude month, so the travelling tour is about the bounty of our favorite fantasy writer, or the best ones, or the best known ones. The one’s we’re grateful for—that make us read fantasy.

I suppose if gratitude is about fairness, I should begin (in all fairness) with the homegrown storytellers. My grandmother, my grandfather Uncle Bertie, my uncle Winston, my aunt, and my mother. When I was growing up in Jamaica –in the city but especially in the country– there was no electronic entertainment. My There was maybe a TV but it was turned off pretty early. And there was also radio. But for the most part, those dark nights were spent with books, my mother’s favorite English authors, or someone telling a riddle or a story. I especially loved riddles because they showed a logic –a game– that the mind had to struggle to understand.

Books, themselves, were few and far between and my mother, coming from an oral culture, could repeat the beginning of her favorite novels — her favorite authors being Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott.

On my own I discovered Shakespeare. Hamlet is fantasy, right? I also discovered Edgar Allen Poe. And without trying to, I ended up memorizing the opening of the Tell Tale Heart. I especially liked Poe’s gothic worlds where the psychological and the fantastical met together in a surreal world of unreliable narrators.

But the story that took my heart away and that opened worlds for me was Lord Dunsany’s Ghost. Readings of this story can be found here among other stories in the librivox collection 004 and here read individually at Miette’s Bedtime podcast http://www.miettecast.com/2006/03/21/the-ghosts/.

Sure, I loved The Sword of Welleran, and the world Welleran inhabited, a rich world like all of Dunsany’s worlds. But the craft, the suddenness, the weird paradox of believer in ghost/non-believer in ghost…the sheer science of the epic fantasy battle. It was as if the narrator of Ghosts was fighting against what he sensed was the unreliability of the world and he was not going to allow himself to fall into it.

Of all Dunsany’s works, Ghosts — for me– has stood the test of time. OR the test of rationality. OR the test of faith. When I first read Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

I loved it but found some of it too much. The language was too ornate, almost overdone. Now, I can make it through the language of Elfland…and there are moments where Dunsany’s tendency to indulge beautiful language bores me or annoys me because it is excessive. I also have found myself balking at his easy disdain of Christianity, something I  tolerated or ignored in the past but which now irks me because I sense an overbearing meanspiritedness in it. The story is beautiful but it’s hard to love a story that subtly –or not so subtly– sneers at one’s religion.

But Ghosts will always be a favorite.  Listen to the story here at  Miette’s Bedtime podcast http://www.miettecast.com/2006/03/21/the-ghosts/  and see if you don’t fall in love with it.

Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildeside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower. http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/

Andrea Hosth—The Greats of Fantasy, Andre Norton

I expect everyone has a different definition of who a “great” of fantasy is, and part of the basis for that definition will be the circumstances in which the writer was encountered.

For instance, I read all the Harry Potter books and enjoyed them thoroughly (except, perhaps, Harry Potter and the Extended Camping Trip), but J K Rowling doesn’t fall into my own personal set of “greats”.  I’m well aware that my reaction of “Hey, those were some fun books, a bit like The Books of Magic, and a bit like Witch Week – Hermione was cool, and Snape is nicely grey, but boy did Draco’s character arc turn into a damp squib,” falls far short of the sheer veneration awarded by a generation where a Potter book was a major event, a shared coming together which no other book or writer will ever offer.

All of which is a long-winded caveat to note that “great” is a highly subjective term, and that when I approached this subject and tried to find some objective standard of “greatness”, the most I could come up with is “really loved this, will go back for more and more and more”.  So what fantasy writers are great to me?  And why?

Almost always it comes down to “girls doing stuff”, but I’ll talk about a writer whose books were often an exception to that rule.

Andre Norton, although she was acknowledged as a Grand Master of both Science Fiction and of Fantasy, rarely shows up these days on lists of “Greats”.  Her books, ranging from the Witch World series, her magic books for children, and her many space novels, aren’t held up as examples of brilliant and lyrical writing, or complex and searching psychological portraits, or extrapolations of advancements in technology on what it means to be human.

They’re kick-ass adventures though.

Sheer adventure – the grip of the story, the need to know what happens next – a writer who can serve that up over and over will catch me every time.

Along with adventure, Norton gives us an eerie, almost alien voice, and outsider protagonists whose predicaments and dogged endurance make you want them to find some place to call their own.  Norton’s story are full of people trying to find their place – refugees, outcasts, and the different.

Norton’s influence is all through my work.  I repeatedly write time-displaced people, alone, needing a place to call theirs.  Her effortless blend of science fiction and fantasy may well be why a spaceship showed up in my very first high fantasy attempt.  The idea of Forerunners permeates my world-building.

And I love trying to put together a plot which keeps drawing the reader to find out what happens next.

Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue. See: www.andreakhost.com

Warren Rochelle—Thank you, Ursula K. Le Guin

One of my former students recently told me that while she appreciated Ursula K. Le Guin and understood her place and significance in the pantheon of American science fiction and fantasy, she just didn’t care for her work.

Sigh.

Clearly I have failed her.

Or—seriously—the student didn’t connect to Le Guin’s fiction as I did, and as I still continue to do. Her loss (and I thought she was such a nice person …). For me, Le Guin, is one of a small number of writers who changed my life and profoundly influenced my own fiction and my teaching. As I have written about this influence in more detail in another essay, “A Wave in My Mind” (Paradoxa 21 (2008): 293-309), I want to focus on just one particular node or point of influence in this thank-you essay, the power and strength of storytelling, especially as it is concerned with the Other, the “not-us,” and why I think this matters, and thus, why I am grateful to Ursula K. Le Guin.

Le Guin argues, in her oft-quoted essay, “Prophets and Mirrors: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing,” that . . . “the story—from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have no societies that did not tell stories” (The Living Light 7 (Fall 1970): 112). She uses this tool in Earthsea Revisioned (Cambridge, MA: Children’s Literature New England, 1993) to examine a particular story, that of the Hero and the Quest, or the Monomyth, the Hero’s Journey, and suggests it can provide even greater understanding of the human condition if the myth is reinterpreted and reimagined.

In the traditional Monomyth, “The hero is a man” and “the hero-tale has concerned the establishment or validation of manhood. It has been the story of a quest, or a conquest, or a test, or contest. It has involved conflict and sacrifice” (7).  And it is about men—and in the Western European tradition a white man. In the first three books of the Earthsea cycle, while using the traditional elements of the myth—the public quest, conflict and sacrifice, the public grail, and so on—Le Guin, through Ged, asks what if the hero is a man of color and all the villains, white? What if the hero is the Other, one of society’s Outsiders? In Tehanu, the fourth Earthsea novel, she goes a step further: the hero of the novel is a woman and one without overt power, who performs her tasks in private, on a far smaller scale than that of the first three novels. What, then, if the hero is Othered by gender? What assumptions and beliefs are challenged, and questioned, what is learned about human experience and the human condition through these challenges and questions?

In The Dispossessed, Shevek and Bedap are friends and they love each other as adolescents. Separated by time and circumstance, they reunite in Abbenay, the main city on their world. This friendship is reaffirmed; trust is re-established, in this reunion, through sex. Bedap is primarily homosexual; Shevek, heterosexual. But on Anarres, the taboos and boundaries we accept as givens don’t exist. That Bedap and Shevek can express their feelings physically is unremarkable. The Other that both men would be in our society doesn’t exist.

That Le Guin has included these challenges in her fiction, that she demands her readers see the Other as human, as themselves, is one key reason that I am grateful for and to this writer.  She deconstructs the Other and Otherness and what remains is our common humanity. As a gay man, I am, to many, Other—alien, not human, not us.  While Le Guin is not the only writer of fantasy or of science fiction to challenge the Others we have constructed, she is the one whose stories resonated—and still resonate—for me. I saw myself; I was present and accounted for.

So what? In the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin explains why this matters: “But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.” Fiction is a lie that tells the truth. I tell my students in intro creative writing that, above all, they must tell the truth, even as they make up their stories. Through the metaphor of fantasy, Le Guin is telling the truth: there is no Other, except for those we construct ourselves out of misconceptions and ignorance and fear.

For doing this, for telling this truth in fantasy, I will always be grateful to Le Guin.

Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010). He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. He is currently at work on a novel about a gay werewolf and a collection of short stories. One of the collection’s stories, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published Queer Fish, Volume 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, http://pinknarc.com) in October 2012.

Website: http://warrenrochelle.com

 

New Egyptian Novel! Interview with Merrie P. Wycoff

Every once in a while someone writes a book that I know my readers will be especially interested in. Merrie P. Wycoff’s Shadow of the Sun is one of them. Merrie tells the story of the Pharaoh Akhenaten from the perspective of his daughter, Merit-Aten. Here’s what she has to say about the book.

Would you please tell us a little about yourself?  I was born in San Jose, CA and when I was 10 years old we took a class trip to the Rosicrucian Museum where I discovered a colossal statue of Pharaoh Akhenaten and was mesmerized. I vowed to discover the truth about this unusual looking man who history had deemed ‘a heretic.’  After college I moved to Los Angeles and worked as a lead Segment Producer for Entertainment Tonight for six years.  Then moved to Colorado where I reside today.

Would you please tell us about your latest book?  Shadow of the Sun is a paranormal historical novel set in Ancient Egypt. The story is told through the eyes of Pharaoh Akhenaten’s and Queen Nefertiti’s first daughter who is born to save her family and bring peace to her country after her parents introduce a revolutionary form of peaceful worship during a dark reign of terror. The problem is that her parents’ have dramatically different views on how she should do it.

Pharaoh Akhenaten desires that Merit-Aten remain chaste and take the perilous path of an Egyptian Mystery School initiate while Queen Nefertiti demands that Merit-Aten choose a consort and produce more heirs to ensure the family’s survival.  Merit is forced to choose her own destiny, but can she do it without destroying everyone she loves?

What made you interested in writing this particular story?  I have always been fascinated with Egyptian history. I am currently earning my Egyptology degree at the University of Manchester. But, on my second trip to Egypt in 2007 with Stephen Mehler, we traveled with an ancient Egyptian wisdom keeper, Abd’El Hakim Awyan who dramatically changed my perspective and introduced me to an entirely different point of view. I yearned to show my readers something new about an ancient civilization.

What does a typical writing day look like?  I love to write. I write whenever I have a chance. Lunchtime, before dinner or late at night. I just need quiet so that my scenes can come alive…like watching a movie. I have to hear it, taste it, smell it and see it. The characters tell me their story. I just listen.

Can you describe your writing process?  Research. Research. Research. Readers want to know what kind of tea they were drinking. It took me seven years to write this.  Probably could have done it sooner if I had an outline.  My next book will take less time.

How did you come up with your title?  Akh means child or shadow of the mother in the Khemitian (Egyptian) language because children follow their mothers everywhere.  The sun refers to the Aten which is the form of monotheistic worship that Pharaoh Akhenaten introduced back after he wiped out the pantheon of gilded gods.  The ruling deity at that time was Amun, the Hidden One who lived in the shadows when the priests ruled Egypt with greed, superstition and fear.

What advice do you have for writers who have not yet been published? Summon up your will forces to sit down every day and write. Then find a great editor to polish your work. Make it excellent. The publishing world is being turned upside down by those of us who are self-publishing.  My story is unique but it isn’t a vampire or zombie novel so although agents loved it they didn’t want to take a chance.

Name three people who either inspired you or influenced your creativity. My sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Conant who believed in me.  Drunvalo Melchizidek who urged me to write this story. And my mother who kept a bust of Nefertiti on the mantle while I was growing up. Life plants clues we just have to be aware of them.

If your book were chocolate, what kind would it be and why?  Dark chocolate with a hint of chile because it is exotic, flavorful and a bit spicy.

Tell us about your main character’s psyche or personality. What led her (or him) to be the person s/he is today?  Prior to her birth, Princess Merit-Aten remembers that she made a contract with the heaven lords to save her family. She negotiated for superior knowledge. Unfortunately that gets her into a lot of trouble and doesn’t make her popular with her older classmates.  She discovers jealously, lies, betrayal, murder and magic within the warring court.  Merit-Aten’s ability to talk to animals, see colorful auras around everyone and her obsession with the forbidden use of magic in order to further her cause stirs up a lot of drama.

If you could host a magical dinner party, who are the six people (living or otherwise) you’d include?  Stevie Nicks, Marie Antoinette, Queen Guinevere, Mary Magdalene, Count St. Germain, and Thoth.

What are you working on right now?My second book in The Shadow Saga is called Stealing the Shadow of Death.

Find out more about Merrie and her novels at http://merriepwycoff.com/