Tracy Falbe's Blog, page 50

Strong Females define The First Sword by Anna Kashina

Review of The First Sword by Anna Kashina
In this beautifully detailed fantasy, Anna Kashina creates a world where royal heirs are tested by a sword through the heart. Survival indicates worthiness of inheriting the throne. The ancient First Sword must be used in the testing, but it has been missing for years. Additionally the powerful Church led by Reverend Haghos works to stamp out magical power by testing all newborns and killing those with magical abilities. The tyranny of the Church is checked somewhat by the Keepers, an ancient order of scholars that develops magical powers.

Far from the dangerous halls of the ruling elite, live Alder, Kyth, and Ellah in the Forestlands. Alder and Kyth grew up believing they were brothers and their friend Ellah harbors the secret of never being tested by the Church.

As can be expected the plot is driven by the quest to control the First Sword and find the royal heir who was whisked away from Church execution at birth.

Kyth emerges as a strong character, and his inner conflicts and fears are communicated well. Alder and Ellah fade a bit through the novel and don't get developed too much, which makes them feel mostly like placeholders, but all three of the teenagers come through with very genuine behaviors. They are impulsive and poor at judging anything, but their friendship and devotion to each other are heartwarming.

The real strengths of the novel come through in the detailed settings and the characters and cultures that the three young people experience upon their quest. One example is the mysterious and potentially dangerous Forest Woman. She seems to be some kind of deity formed of the female energy of the forest. "Her skin was fair and her thick long hair was the color of ripe ivy buds, light brown with a soft golden tint." wrote Kashina in her description of the Forest Woman.

Another compelling character emerges when the young people travel with a nomadic people called the Cha'ori. They travel with a hort led by the foreteller Dagmara, who informs Kyth that her people are not tested by the Church and that she and other Cha'ori have magical powers. The existence of people living outside Church authority is very eye-opening for him. Dagmara embodies a new worldview for Kyth. She is in touch with her magic, very old, and well respected by her people.

Kashina creates another intriguing female character in the assassin Kara. This time the power is based on mental discipline and physical skill. She contrasts with the mystical female characters in the story and provides another view of how female abilities can be developed.

Although The First Sword will feel familiar to fantasy readers because of its formulaic structure, it provides an engaging and suspenseful read. The action builds slowly but becomes riveting near the end. The narrative appeals to all the senses. The author's skill had me tasting the food and feeling the clothes. I also greatly appreciated Kashina's inspirations from the natural world. Little details like naming species of plants during the characters' travels vividly developed the environment.

The First Sword was a very carefully plotted story. All the loose ends get tied up at the end, which is always satisfying. Kashina deploys some fun diversions in the story that made me wonder who was working for who and who was the object of the Church's hunt.

I really have nothing bad to say about the novel. It was an intriguing fantasy, vividly told, and full of genuine feelings. The First Sword has young adult appeal and also plenty of nuances to keep adult readers hooked.

My fantasy ebooks available to Kindle readers in India

I received an email from Amazon Direct Publishing recently that announced that the Kindle store was now available in India. People in India can visit www.amazon.com and buy Kindle content with their national currency.

As far as I know this is the first platform for my novels that enables people in India to make purchases. I've taken payments from readers at my websites for years using Paypal but it does not process Indian rupees. Over the years I've had people in India write me to say how much they enjoyed Union of Renegades because they could access the free ebook, but I never had a way to sell them the rest of the novels.

So, hopefully Amazon's expansion as a seller of digital content into India marks the beginning of more access to this market. I'd love it if more retailers and especially my payment processor could take payments from India.

For those Indians interested in epic fantasy you can look for my novels of the Rys Rising and The Rys Chronicles series at Amazon.com. Visit the free fantasy ebooks page here to read more about my novels and download one or both of them to get started.

Here's the links for downloading directly from Amazon:

Union of Renegades: The Rys Chronicles Book I
Rys Rising: Book I

Although Paypal does not accept rupees at this time, keep in mind that it DOES process many currencies. Readers outside the United States who wish to buy ebooks from me and directly support my writing can checkout with Paypal in any of these currencies:

Canadian Dollar
Euro
British Pound
U.S. Dollar
Japanese Yen
Australian Dollar
New Zealand Dollar
Swiss Franc
Hong Kong Dollar
Singapore Dollar
Swedish Krona
Danish Krone
Polish Zloty
Norwegian Krone
Hungarian Forint
Czech Koruna
Israeli New Shekel
Mexican Peso
Brazilian Real (only for Brazilian members)
Malaysian Ringgit (only for Malaysian members)
Philippine Peso
New Taiwan Dollar
Thai Baht

Excited about Nook expanding to the UK market

According to the August 20th press release from Barnes & Noble, the bookseller is expanding its Nook ebook catalog and line of ebook reading devices into the United Kingdom in October.

I've connected with thousands of readers through the U.S. Nook store who've bought my fantasy novels, so I'm naturally excited about this opportunity to be discovered by new readers in the UK.

Although lots of people like to say Barnes & Noble is late to the game and will not prevail against Amazon in the ebook market, I don't really have an opinion. There's certainly nothing wrong with Nook devices and its catalog of digital content. I'm a content provider, so the more retail outlets that offer my novels in more places, the better for me.

Of course readers in the UK don't have to wait for Nook to reach their green isle. You can download samples of my fiction right now, and if you like my work, my payment processor takes your British Pounds just fine.

Visit the free fantasy ebooks page to download Union of Renegades and/or Rys Rising: Book I if you like epic fantasy told from many angles. 

Free for Amazon Kindle US epic fantasy Rys Rising

Rys Rising: Book I by Tracy Falbe - Passionate epic fantasy told from many angles.
It takes Amazon a couple months but it catches up with competitors' prices eventually, at least in the United States. I noticed this morning that Rys Rising was finally set to free in the Kindle store. It's always been free at my website, but I initially released it as a 99 cent novel at retail outlets until I had more of the series published.

Since publishing the subsequent Rys Rising novels Savage Storm and New Religion, I switched Rys Rising to free at Smashwords and its retail partners in July. So it's been free at Barnes & Noble and Apple for a while. We'll see when Sony and Kobo catch up. They'll get there someday.

Unfortunately the Amazon Kindle publishing system does not give me the ability to make an ebook free. I have to wait for Amazon to notice that I'm giving it away elsewhere and then it price matches.

So, this is good news for readers who get a chance to sample my fantasy fiction for free. Some of them will like it and then purchase my other novels, which means I get to have an income. We all need those right?

Anyway, if you like hard-hitting multiple character epic fantasy, Rys Rising just might become your new favorite novel.

Readers on any platform can download it for free in prc, epub, or pdf format.

Kindle users can visit Amazon to download directly to your Kindle devices.

My environmental interpretations of The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings fantasy trilogy is truly a titan of 20th century literature. I first read Tolkien's masterpiece when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. On top of completely falling in love with the story and the genre, I connected deeply right from the beginning with the theme of greedy industry versus Nature. 

Even as an adolescent I imagined Tolkien being inspired or more likely appalled by the coal dust encrusted portions of England and the factories that besmirched what had once been a green land. This was an image I could relate to immediately and I felt keenly the abuses heaped on Nature depicted in his novels. When the trees of Isengard were killed to fuel the furnaces of Saruman's war machine, I thought of how my native state of Michigan was thoroughly deforested in the late 19th and early 20th century. I recalled the places where I had seen the big stumps with new young forest growing up around them. I was always shocked to learn that the whole state had been deforested and the white pines sent to the mills with a total disregard for the land and the ecosystems. How could people cut down a whole forest? I could understand cutting down some trees, but all of them? I understood well Treebeard's dismay when he looked upon his massacred forest.

Moving on from Isengard, the trilogy also presented the land of Mordor, a volcanic hell of rocky rubble, tainted waters, and despair where the slaves of Sauron hunkered in a bleak wasteland. Mordor is the metaphor for all wanton acts of pillaging against Nature. Think of all the fair places around the world that were once wild and have been reduced to toxic tangles of fuming equipment or blasted rock. The mountaintop removal strip mining for coal in Appalachia takes green forested mountains and reduces them to barren rubble pockmarked with ponds of toxic slurry. Another horrendous example of Mordor on Earth is the Alberta tar sands in Canada. Forests are destroyed and the ground mined for tar sands that yield a thick type of oil after excessive processing that uses large amounts of energy and pollutes vast quantities of water. Find some pictures of tar sands extraction and you will truly see monstrous destruction of our biosphere on an epic scale.


Although Alberta is far away from my home, its toxic reach goes far. In 2010 a pipeline that goes through my county burst because it was moving tar sands oil that is very difficult to move through a pipeline. It has to be mixed with benzene, a known carcinogen, so it can be pumped. A massive spill of this benzene laden tar entered the Kalamazoo River and irrevocably polluted my watershed. The forces of Mordor are on the march!

Like Sauron in the Lord of the Rings, the shadowy captains of the oil industry are determined to destroy all that is fair and good and replace it with squalor, decay, and poison.

This is an assault on Nature that has been going on for a long time. Tolkien witnessed one of the most horrific results of the Industrial Revolution when he served in the First World War. In that conflict, war machines turned millions into human hamburger and blackened Europe. No wonder Tolkien imagined a shining white city that would resist such evil madness. Gondor was not perfect and it was corrupted by despair as illustrated by its insane Steward, but it remained worth fighting for.

Healing our tender biosphere will not be as simple as casting the Ring into the volcano. Its power cannot be resisted but it will ultimately consume itself. As Tolkien said much that is fair will be lost in the battle to push back the darkness, but the magic remains for a new and fertile world to grow again. I loved the symbolism of the little box of soil that Galadriel gave Samwise to put into his garden when he got home. We all must try to take a little bit of Galadriel's seemingly simple gift and till it into our lives.

In the Fellowship of the Ring Galadriel said to Samwise:

"In this box there is earth from my orchard, and such blessing as Galadriel has still to bestow is upon it. It will not keep you on your road, nor defend you against any peril; but if you keep it and see your home again at last, then perhaps it may reward you. Though you should find all barren and laid waste, there will be few gardens in Middle-earth that will bloom like your garden, if you sprinkle this earth there. Then you  may remember Galadriel, and catch a glimpse far off of Lorien, that you have seen only in our winter. For our spring and our summer are gone by, and they will never be seen on earth again save in memory."

On sale at Audible for $5.95 Union of Renegades fantasy audiobook

This week through Sunday September 2nd, Audible U.S. is having a big site-wide sale. Most audiobook titles will be $5.95 for a la carte buyers. Audible members will get their typical extra 30 percent discount off these sale prices, so it's truly a great time for audiobook lovers to pick up some extra titles, especially titles by an indie author like me that you otherwise might not have considered.

About Union of Renegades:

The epic begins as Dreibrand Veta and the conquering Horde of the Atrophane Empire reach a mythic Wilderness that beckons with a magical call to glory. But Onja, Queen of the rys, a race far more powerful than the greatest human state, guards this land. She has the power to imprison souls and her genocidal rage is legendary. Everything is at risk for her desperate enemies, the union of renegades.

Please visit Audible to enjoy the great sale price this week. And leave a rating and review if you like it! That small action will help other listeners discover my fantasy fiction.

If you also want to download the ebook version of Union of Renegades, it's always free at Brave Luck Books.

Grass depicts the 1924 migration of the nomadic Bakhtiari

There was a time before modernity corralled all people onto the global grid. A myriad cultures developed in niches throughout the world, and long ages went by as people lived off the land that shaped them with both bounty and deprivation. In the 19th and 20th centuries explorers sought adventure in remote places so they could observe these vanishing cultures distinct from the ever-expanding civilization that was absorbing and colonizing the world into a homogenized mass. Film technology developed while some peoples were still living within organic cultures, and I recently came across an extraordinary documentary called Grass (A Nation's Battle for Life) that depicted the ingenuity, courage, and hardiness of the Bakhtiari nomads of Persia.

The film was made in 1924 by the explorers and filmmakers Merian Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. They recorded the harrowing annual migration of the Bakhtiari as they traveled to fresh pastures for their herds. The tribe was described as the "Forgotten People" because they lived beyond the fringe of civilization in remote highland plains and mountains. Numbering 50,000 the tribes amassed a half million animals (horses, goats, sheep, donkeys, cattle, chickens, and dogs). When their grasslands on one side of the mountains were depleted they had to travel to fresh pasture, which meant crossing the half mile wide Karun River and scaling a 12,000-foot mountain. Men, women, and children along with their herds made this incredible trek. They crossed the raging river on rafts of sticks tied to balloons made from goat skins. Many of the men and boys leaped into the torrent on mere floats made from two goat skins, and then they shepherded their animals through the water. It took a week for the entire nation to get across the river. The film of the people crossing the river is jaw-dropping. The current is so swift and wide. The multitudes of people and animals in the aggressive current look small upon the water as the long lines of their heads reveal the sinuous current.

Then the Bakhtiari face the mountains. The film shows them ascending a 2,000 foot sheer cliff on narrow zigzagging trails. The inclines are relentless and they trudge up them driving their animals. Women carry babies on their backs, and the filmmakers point out a young girl who is scaling the pitiless trail with a calf across her shoulders. She is amazing to behold. No girl today could possibly be as strong as she was.

When they reach the snowy heights, the people take off their shoes and go barefoot. Their canvas shoes are said to be worse than nothing. With shovels, crews of men cut trails into the snow and the Bakhtiari move onward barefoot in the snow. At last they are over the mountain and reach fresh grasslands where they can spread out and make their camps and return to a life of relative ease.

Witnessing the migration of this people was a gripping experience for me. I can't recall ever seeing so many people work together on such a scale to reach a common goal. The men were organized into crews and went forth to labor because it was how they lived. If they did not get to good pastures then they all would perish. These people were so vividly connected to their Earth. They lived among the animals and lived off the animals. They moved across the steep slopes like ants and no barrier could stop them. I also considered why these people occupied this treacherous niche in the ecosystem. I wondered if they had endured in this harsh back country because it gave them freedom from overlords and wars and confining laws of urban civilizations.

To anyone interested in indigenous peoples and living closely with the land, this documentary will let you glimpse the lost world of earlier times when all people had to have a direct relationship with the sustaining Earth. The documentary is also thoughtfully constructed with a compelling narrative and talented cinematography. Merian Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack are only shown during the opening because during the rest of the journey they are behind the cameras. Their associate Marguerite Harrison traveled with them and she provides an attractive focal point for many scenes as she interacts with the people. You can really see what an adventure she had with those filmmakers. Merian is instantly recognizable as the real-life template for Indiana Jones. 

I'll conclude extolling the virtues of this archival documentary by stating two things: 1) I watched it twice because I could not get the images out of my mind, and 2) It has many cute puppies in it!

Savage Storm: Rys Rising Book II paperback at Amazon US and Europe

I'm gradually expanding my options for buyers of print books. Savage Storm: Rys Rising Book II is now available at Amazon in the U.S. and its European outlets. It's priced at $15 USD and converted to equivalent amounts at the international sites.

This distribution into the UK and Europe helps make my novels more affordable to overseas buyers. Shipping the books to international locations is expensive but the print on demand distribution allows buyers to purchase the novel closer to where they live.

If you want Savage Storm as a paperback please visit the site for your country:

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Amazon Germany

Amazon France

Amazon Spain

Amazon Italy

The hardcover version of Savage Storm is produced at Lulu.

I'll work over the next month to get New Religion: Rys Rising Book III into the international Amazon channels as a paperback. 


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A Treasury of Fantasy Costumes on Etsy

Etsy has got to be the most delightful, interesting, and surprising marketplace on the internet. I never know what I am going to find there, and every time I browse the site, I always see things I've never even thought of.

Because I'm a fantasy author, I sometimes make treasuries on Etsy that showcase creations that appeal to fantasy fans. There are some amazing fantasy, Medieval, and warrior costumes, accessories, and weapons for sale on the site from artisans all over the world.

I titled my most recent treasury Best Dressed Quest. I recommend looking it over if you are about to embark on an epic adventure and have some gold to spend.

See the treasury http://www.etsy.com/treasury/MTE2ODQ4ODN8MjcyMzE1OTcwNA/best-dressed-quest?index=0

Sexual content is not just for the romance genre

I recently had a reader complain about the sexual content in one of my novels. The person declared that he did not want to read romance or erotica. I can understand that, but I don’t write in those genres. If I were to market my novels as romance I would likely get many complaints about not focusing on love enough.

The offense I caused this reader got me to thinking about how self publishing can differ from traditional publishing. Publishers define genres, acquire content that fits criteria or shape it to their criteria, and then place round peg products into round peg holes. Readers learn to expect certain things. Epic fantasy, the genre I write in, was for a long time not a place for bumping uglies. Although I love this genre, I had always imagined that it would be even more fun and meaningful if its characters had a more realistic edge and were allowed to openly indulge in romantic urges.

When I started writing in the late 1990s I had conceived of myself as being published by a publisher, so I kept the content within some of the boundaries I was familiar with from commercially produced fantasy fiction. I worried that if I went too far, a potential publisher would tell me to change things. And trust me the thought of anyone telling me to change something in my novels is anathema to me. Even so, my first four novels were decidedly PG-13. I included sexual situations and love scenes but wrote them politely.

Then in 2004 I discovered the fantasy of George R.R. Martin and was exceedingly impressed, apparently along with millions of other readers. I loved the huge cast of characters, the battles, the intrigue, the magic, but I was also delighted to discover an epic fantasy not hobbled by ridiculous Victorian notions about keeping everyone’s pants up. Epic fantasy had matured, moved out of the house, and was going to live with her boyfriend if she wanted to. Feeling quite liberated, I decided to write my next novels exactly how I wanted to without playing chaperone to my sexual content.

When I do love or sex scenes, my phrasing has become more graphic and my sexual situations are a bit more frequent. I very much enjoy writing my stories this way. I write epics in which years pass in the lives of characters and it would seem quite strange if none of them had love interests or the occasional hook up between battles. Would it even be reasonable to portray a young man who is good looking, rich, and frequently facing death as NOT interested in the advances of women?

Then there are literary reasons for giving characters sex lives. It adds intensity to their lives and hopefully helps readers relate to them and understand their motivations better. For example, of course a hero wants to save people because it’s the right thing to do, but he especially wants to save his lover and mother of his child. Or how about this scenario? Of course that young princess hates the thought of an arranged marriage, and now that exciting outlaw who just kidnapped her would be a great way to get back at daddy. Now that’s much more interesting, at least to me.

But now I return to my marketing quandary. How do I present my fantasy novels to readers? I don’t think I’m romantic or sexy enough to claim the label romance and certainly not erotica. But when I use the label epic fantasy, apparently some people seem to think nookie is off limits, or at best off stage. I understand that some readers never want sex in their books, but how am I supposed to convey in my marketing that my writing is inspired by the full range of human emotions and experiences?

I realize I’ll never please everyone. I never became a writer shaped by the requirements of a product line developed by an outside company. I’m an independent writer self publishing her novels. They are exactly the way I want them to be, but I admittedly struggle with how to package and present them to readers. I’m sure I’m not alone among indie writers with this problem. I guess I’ll just have to go along upsetting the occasional reader who doesn’t want chocolate in his peanut butter. As a writer, I can at least be satisfied that I am provoking strong reactions.