Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 334

the thirtieth ebook

My thirtieth published ebook, to be precise:

Cover image copyright Jm73 | Dreamstime.com

Thirty ebooks (five nonfiction and twenty-five fictional) in two years! I’ve been busy.

And if you’re looking for an introduction to Windows 8, check out my book at Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

-JM

Thursdays of Sword & Sorceress 27 – an interview with Elisabeth Waters & Michael Spence

Our final interview is with Elisabeth Waters & Michael Spence.

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1.) Tell us about yourself.

MS: I write. I edit. I snark on Twitter, occasionally, or Facebook. I make bad puns in Bitstrips. I read things out loud, sometimes into a microphone. And at the moment I hail from that part of the country that gave us “Wapsi Square,” Clifford D. Simak, Lois McMaster Bujold, Charles Schulz, Richard Dean Anderson, Patricia C. Wrede, and one of my literary heroes, John M. Ford.

EW: I have “the job that will not die”—I still find myself signing e-mail as “Secretary to Mrs. Bradley.” The current major project is getting her backlist back into print. The real struggle is fitting my own writing around her work. Silly me, I thought it would be easier after she died.

2.) Why do you write?

MS: A tricky question, to which the answer has evolved through the years. Earlier I would have said, “Because it’s fun!” or “There’s this feeling of power…” and both are still true. But with time, experience, and increased exposure to the work of others has come the thought that, dadgummit, I too have something to say; and I need to figure out the right way to say it. As well as learn the best ways to entertain readers, which after all is why people come to Sword & Sorceress, right?

EW: I lived in MZB’s household, and it turns out that writing is contagious—possibly even highly contagious. And people ask me for more stories, so I keep writing them.

MS: I’m one of those people.

3.) Sword & Sorceress is known for sword & sorcery centered around a strong female character. Is there any particular trick to writing strong female characters?

MS: Trick? TRICK?!? How DARE you, sir! We are honest, hard-working craftspersons here! To even SUGGEST that we would stoop to such tawdry, despicable things as TRICKS…

Ohhh … you mean Reliable Techniques. Well, then. In that case—

Although I’m more than willing to be proven wrong on this one—always in the market for useful tools, y’know—I don’t think so. Of course, it helps to know some strong females, which I do (including my esteemed collaborator); so asking myself, “Would ____ or ____ respond this way?” is useful. It’s the old song, “Write what you know.”

(A maxim sadly in need of clarification, incidentally. What you know is finite and doomed to repetition, and if you stick with what you know you’re can’t do anything truly imaginative, which means that your sword & sorcery career will quickly go ker-ploosh. You must use what you know—or can find out—to help you move on to what you DON’T know.)

To be sure, women and men ARE different (et vive la différence), and it’s a poor writer who simply takes a Conan-surrogate and flips his gender. I’ve heard the generalization that men focus on solving the problem at hand whereas women tend to focus on how that problem affects the persons involved, and I don’t find it hard to believe. But to the degree that this is true, it’s a situation that a swordswoman or sorceress will need to address early in her career if she’s going to make it into this anthology. And although our resident Sensitive, Melisande, hasn’t yet been engaged in magical combat—preferring to work behind the scenes—one of these days we’ll need to have her step up and fire off some thaumaturgy.

EW: I’ve spent my lifetime around strong females. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I know any weak females, so I’d probably have more trouble writing weak female characters. I admit that my grandmother’s answer when I asked what she was doing during the fight for women’s suffrage was “I didn’t pay any attention to that nonsense,” but she was born in 1896 and died in 1997, so she lived through two World Wars (plus Viet Nam and Korea), raised two children, and coped with incredible changes in the world around her. She said if she couldn’t take it with her she wasn’t going–and she didn’t. I admire her tremendously; I have enough trouble coping with the change from the 1928 prayer book.

4.) What would you say makes sword & sorcery different from other kinds of fantasy?

MS: Thews. You probably won’t find thews emphasized in other varieties of fantasy. Particularly urban fantasy.

Here’s a hypothesis for testing: I suspect that sword & sorcery is high fantasy’s counterpart to science fiction’s space opera. Big characters (not only physically, of course), big action, big sets. (For science fiction, see the universes of Cordwainer Smith, E.E. “Doc” Smith, or Lois McMaster Bujold.) That may not accurately describe my writing in general, but it does fit that of Deborah J. Ross, say, or Mercedes Lackey, or Fritz Leiber.

Or Marion Zimmer Bradley herself, who neatly wove the two together with her Darkover stories.

5.) How do you think ebooks and the Internet will change the way we read & write?

MS: I gather it already has changed the way we read and write. Twitter, on the plus side, has made us think about what we’re saying so that we can say it briefly. (The soul of wit, no?) On the minus side, it has also led many of us to scrunch our noble tongue into TextSpeak—wh U no cn B scraggly, alBit Ficient, b/c it focSS N space NstedF gramR. And as grammar deteriorates, so does the structure of language. Moreover, our emphasis on the keyboard as primary input device has caused penmanship, already dealt serious blows by medical school and similar institutions, to decline. I propose, along with intensive early teaching in the Old Math, equally intensive training in simple, aesthetically pleasing Longhand.

Speaking whereof, I’ve heard from various authors, from Umberto Eco to Patrick McLean (check out http://lifehacker.com/5684918/a-defense-of-writing-longhand) about the benefits of longhand for writers. It may also be relevant that Mark Twain, although he experimented with switching from writing by hand to dictating to a typist, gave up the typewriter because “after a year or two I found that it was degrading my character” (http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/mtwain/bl-mtwain-1stwr.htm). Make of that what you will.

Concerning e-books, I’m of mixed minds. On the one hand, they’re useful almost beyond credulity. “Two hours’ wait? No prob; I’ve got Robert Jordan’s entire Wheel of Time cycle on my smartphone.” To say nothing of the storage burdens they alleviate for small households. On the other hand, I’m concerned that their lack of literal mass and volume may lead, at least in the short run, to a correspondingly lightweight regard of them as books. Whether or not they make an impact on our bodies when dropped, I hope they continue to make one on our souls.

EW: E-books have certainly changed the way I read. I started with two e-book reader programs on my Palm Pilot. Now I have the Kindle app on my iPod, which is where I do most of my reading (white letters on black screen, large type–I can read in bed without having to smuggle a flashlight under the covers with me). At my age, I really appreciate the ability to change the type size; there are printed books I simply can’t read. I love the e-book format. Self-publishing has changed the quality of some new books, but it has also allowed authors to re-publish their old ones, so readers are getting a lot of their old favorites back.

6.) Tell us about your Sword & Sorceress story.

MS: “They That Watch” is a “Treasures” story, of which several have appeared in recent volumes to introduce the Treasures (and anti-Treasures)—loci of magical powers and influences—and their Guardians. The Treasures support an orderly (though not mechanistic) universe; the anti-Treasures promote chaos.

The introduction to a previous tale noted that, at the time, my wife and I lived in Indiana with our canine Guardian, who was determined to provide all the chaos we could ever need. That last bit stuck in Lisa’s mind (take note, any of you seeking story ideas), and she refused to let go of it. Canine Guardian, canine Guardian—what could we do with a canine Guardian?

Lisa and I each thought about the concept and arrived at similar conclusions. Dogs take a quite different view of physical artifacts from ours, as my dog readily demonstrates by walking on a bed oblivious to the carefully-ordered papers he tramples underfoot. Their priorities are different. Where that line of thought takes us, you’ll see in the story.

This story also expands the world of the Treasures a bit more. You’ve seen references to the land of Grestig (“Crosswort Puzzle”), China (“Daughter of Heaven”) and the Colonies west of the Atlantic (“Inquisition for Blood” and “Truth in the Inward Parts”). There’s more in the New World than the Colonies, however, and what the faculty and staff of the University of Albion’s College of Wizardry don’t know about that piece of geography could hurt them in the not-too-distant future.

7.) Can you share an excerpt from your Sword & Sorceress story?

MS:

Melisande decided to sit in on the seminar after all, but when the group arrived, she felt as if her hair stood on end. As a Sensitive, she knew this feeling well, but why now? It could be just that Edward’s here. Edward was the Guardian of an anti-Treasure, the Sceptre of the Ungodly, and anti-Treasures could be uncomfortable things to be around. Maybe I’m feeling things more than usual because of my pregnancy. That was certainly possible as well.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As the talk continued—tonight’s session concerned Treasures and their Guardians (apparently they didn’t have either in the Colonies)—Melisande realized that the girl was flirting with Edward. She looked up into his face and actually batted her eyelashes as she said, “There is a saying where I come from: “‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?’—and I think it would apply here. You have all of these powerful Treasures,” she smiled at Edward, “and they have Guardians to watch them, but who watches the Guardians? How do you know they won’t misuse the Treasures in their care?”

8.) Recommend one other book or short story you have written that we should read.

MS: If it’s reading you want, grab our collected, 2-volume Treasures of Albion e-book from Amazon’s Kindle store. Otherwise I’d suggest you head over to Audible.com and give Marion Zimmer Bradley’s early Darkover novel The Sword of Aldones a listen. I didn’t write it, but that’s me reading it.

EW: I’ve been taking advantage of e-publishing to sell stories when the market I wrote them for went away. I have a story called “Line Dancing” available for Kindle and Nook. I also have a couple of stories based on operas: “Shadowlands” and “Our Fathers’ Gold.”

The Sword of Aldones is still listed as “headed to retail” at ACX.com. It should be available in a few weeks from Amazon, Audible, and iTunes, and it’s definitely worth listening to. I’ve heard the whole thing, because I was the person in charge of making sure that all the strange vocabulary was pronounced the way MZB pronounced it.

9.) Recommend one non-fiction book that you haven’t written.

MS: Make Every Word Count, by Gary Provost. I picked it up at a used-book store on a whim and it gave me a wake-up head slap worthy of NCIS’s Jethro Gibbs. “Omit needless words,” decreed William Strunk; Provost confirms it. Sword and Sorceress’s word-count limits give me special incentive for developing that skill.

EW: The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. That’s the book I recommend most often to writers—the proper use of the comma is rapidly becoming a lost art. The companion volume, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, is another one I highly recommend.

###

Thanks, Elisabeth and Michael, for the interview. And I’d once again like to thank all the Sword & Sorceress 27 writers who agreed to be interviewed.

Check out our interviews with past S&S contributors – , , , Sword & Sorceress 25, and Sword & Sorceress 26.

And the novel featuring my Sword & Sorceress character, spy and assassin Caina Amalas, is now available for free in all ebook formats: Child of the Ghosts.

-JM

SOUL OF SKULLS – the rough draft begins

On November 7th, 2012, I started writing the rough draft for SOUL OF SKULLS, the sixth book in the DEMONSOULED series about knight and adventurer Mazael Cravenlock. If all goes well, I hope to have the rough draft done sometime in January.

So, let’s have some previews of what’s coming in SOUL OF SKULLS:

-The San-keth will return, having been absent in SOUL OF SORCERY.

-A good portion of the book will take place at Knightcastle, Lord Malden Roland’s stronghold.

-Gerald Roland will be a point-of-view character for the first time. His wife (and Mazael’s sister) Rachel will return as a POV character.

-Malaric of Barellion will also be a POV character.

-We’ll encounter the Aegonar – a nation of seafaring humans that worship the serpent god Sepharivaim.  Essentially, an entire nation of San-keth proselytes. Except while the usual San-keth proselytes abase themselves before the serpent people, the Aegonar are nothing like that. They consider themselves the chosen people of the serpent god, and regard the San-keth themselves the way some countries regard their constitutional monarchs – sort of as honored mascots, but with no actual power. Needless to say, the San-keth themselves regard the Aegonar as dangerous heterodox fanatics, but they can’t really do anything about them.

-Except, of course, for one particular San-keth cleric who is a bit more dangerous than the usual run of San-keth priest.

-We’ll also see the consequences of the Great Rising, since the spell raised thousands of runedead in every nation in the world. Some places managed to defend themselves, some are in various stages of civilizational collapse…and some were completely overrun by the runedead.

-Sir Hugh Chalsain, the youngest son of Prince Everard Chalsain of Barellion, will also be a new POV character.

Watch this space for future updates!

-JM

GHOST IN THE STONE – the first 19 days

Cover image Copyright Nicholas Wave | iStockPhoto.com

October is over and November is here, so how did GHOST IN THE STONE do in its first 19 days of existence, from October the 12th to October the 31st?

420 copies!

To put that in perspective, that is as many as GHOST IN THE STORM did in its first six weeks.

So thank you, all! On a personal note, I have to say that of all the books I’ve written, GHOST IN THE STONE has gotten the most positive feedback from readers. People have emailed out of the blue to say how much they have enjoyed the book, which is always a pleasant surprise for a writer.

-JM

THE BURNING CHILD is now available

Cover image copyright Fernando Cortés | Dreamstime.com

Way back in 2011, I promised that I would write another story in THE THIRD SOUL series before the end of 2012, and I am pleased to announce that I have fulfilled that promise with 57 days to spare.

THE BURNING CHILD is now available at Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords. (As usual, availability on the iBookstore should come in a week or two.)

Click here to read the first chapter of THE BURNING CHILD.

And if you’ve never heard of THE THIRD SOUL series, you can get the first novella in the series, THE TESTING, for free right here:

Image Copyright © Igor Kovalchuk | Dreamstime.com

Read at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and Smashwords.

-JM

Reader Question Day #44 – all about Ghost in the Stone & Ghost in the Forge

This week for Reader Question Day we have a number of questions about GHOST IN THE STONE, and the forthcoming sixth book in THE GHOSTS series, GHOST IN THE FORGE. Note that this post will have all kinds of spoilers for GHOST IN THE STONE, so read on at your own risk.

Stefanie asks:

Hi I just finished Ghost in the Stone and I’m kind of a romance fanatic when it comes to Caina. Kylon seemed somewhat interested in Caina in Ghost in the Storm, will it lead to something else? 

Kylon and Caina were definitely attracted to each other on some level. Some of it was simply because they were both young, in excellent physical condition, and lonely. Part of it was because Caina admired Kylon’s dogged loyalty, and Kylon admired Caina’s cleverness.

That said, Caina hates sorcery, and Kylon uses sorcery to enhance his battle skills.  Additionally, Kylon is a little afraid of Caina – one woman without sorcerous power should not be able to outwit a powerful stormdancer and the strongest stormsinger in New Kyre, but Caina did. Caina is also a Ghost of the Emperor, and Kylon regards it as his solemn duty to defeat the Empire and bring victory to New Kyre.

So when they meet again in GHOST IN THE FORGE, it will be interesting.  :)

(Kylon wasn’t in GHOST IN THE STONE because he was busy destroying the Empire’s western fleet at the time – more on that below.)

Also how did you come up with the idea for Corvalis and Caina’s relationship?

For the first four books in the series, the most common reader question was “when will Caina get a romantic break?”

So when I started plotting out GHOST IN THE STONE, I decided it was time to add a romantic interest for Caina. It was easy to justify in terms of the plot. By the time of GHOST IN THE STONE, Caina had become very unhappy with her life. She had been running on vengeance and rage for almost ten years, had seen all kinds of horrible things, and it was starting to catch up with her. So after her talk with Theodosia a third of the way through the book, she was ready to take a risk and make a change.

The idea for Corvalis’s character came directly from the idea for Nicasia and the Defender. The fact that Corvalis had labored so hard to save his sister is exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to Caina. I thought about making him a former magus of the Magisterium, but Caina could not tolerate that (she had a hard time being civil with Claudia Aberon and Nadirah), so I made him into a former Kindred assassin instead. Since the Kindred were major villains in GHOST IN THE STONE, that worked out.

One last question (sorry I am a Ghosts series maniac) how did you come up with the idea for this series and all its characters?

It’s an amusing story – I wrote up a summary of it here for a previous Reader Question Day.

Toni asks:

When will Ghost in the Forge be coming out?

April/May of 2013, I think. I’m almost done with my two current projects – THE BURNING CHILD and a short book about Windows 8. (I like writing fiction, but a quarter of all the books I’ve ever sold have been computer books.) By the middle of this month, I want to be going full blast on SOUL OF SKULLS, and have that done by January/February of 2013.

So if all goes well, April or May of 2013. Unless the Mayans were right, of course.

Can you tell us anything about it?

Here’s the premise for GHOST IN THE FORGE:

The Empire has forced Istarinmul to withdraw from the war, but the war between the Empire and New Kyre has ground to a stalemate. The Kyracians cannot defeat the Empire on land…but the Empire cannot defeat the Kyracians on sea, and New Kyre is on an island. So they’re stuck, and no one of importance on either side wants the war to continue, especially since Andromache essentially engineered the war for her personal benefit.

So both sides want to find a face-saving way out of the war…but then the announcement comes.

The neutral city of Catecharon is home to the Masked Ones, a college of sorcerers considered to be the best artificers of enspelled objects in the world. Additionally, the Masked Ones are known to be sorcerers of tremendous potency, and could probably destroy the Empire, New Kyre, Anshan, and Istarinmul if they felt like it…but they are uninterested in political power, and prefer to spend their time honing their arcane sciences and exploring the netherworld.

But now the Masked Ones have an announcement – they’ve constructed a weapon of fearsome sorcerous power, a weapon that will allow its wielder to conquer the world.

And the weapon is for sale to the highest bidder. So the various nations all send embassies to Catecharon to find out what is going on – and Caina comes with the Imperial embassy, and Kylon heads up the Kyracian one.

The point-of-view in GHOST IN THE FORGE will rotate between Caina, Corvalis, and Kylon.

-JM

The Burning Child – cover image and Table of Contents

Cover image copyright Fernando Cortés | Dreamstime.com

Work is proceeding well on THE BURNING CHILD, the fifth novella in THE THIRD SOUL series. I should have a sample chapter up in a few days.

Meanwhile, here’s the Table of Contents:

Chapter 1 – Wolves in Flesh

Chapter 2 – The Hammer of Dark River

Chapter 3 – The Blood Shaman’s Mistress

Chapter 4 – Wolves in Shadow

Chapter 5 – Duel

Chapter 6 – For The Greater Good

Chapter 7 – A Sister of the Temple

Chapter 8 – The Secret College

Chapter 9 – Guises

Chapter 10 – A Magister’s Wrath

Chapter 11 – An Initiate of the Conclave.

-JM

Thursdays of Sword & Soerceress 27 – the Jonathan Shipley interview

This week’s interview is with Jonathan Shipley.

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1.) Tell us about yourself.

I’m a speculative fiction writer in Fort Worth, Texas, who writes

novels and short stories set in a vast story arc that includes

fantasy, horror, and space opera. Although my stories have been

published in two dozen anthologies, it’s been slow marketing the

novels.

2.) Why do you write?

I have so many stories and novels in my head that they keep pushing

their way out into the world. Then their place is taken by the next

story forming in my head. Once I tried to track my dreams and

resolved to keep a journal where I would record the night’s dreams

every morning. In reality, I never had time in the morning, so I

would carry the dream around all day until I had a chance to write

them down. Then I would miss a day or two and have multiple dreams

that I was trying to keep track of as they faded and jumbled together.

Writing fiction is a more controlled process, but similar in that I

have many threads to track until the ideas are transferred to the

page. Because I’m constantly jettisoning old ideas to make space for

new ones, reading my older writing is almost like discovering

completely new work.

3.) Sword & Sorceress is known for sword & sorcery centered around a strong female character. Is there any particular trick to writing

strong female characters?

I think the challenge of a strong female protagonist for a male writer

is not to write a man in a skirt. I’ve used opposite gender stories

as a springboard for classroom discussions of gender stereotyping in

writing, and the girls cite two things the boys fail to incorporate in

a female viewpoint: strong internal emotional responses to situations

and an emphasis on eyes as a physical attribute. I try to avoid those

two pitfalls as I write my female characters.

4.) What would you say makes sword & sorcery different than other

kinds of fantasy?

Sword and Sorcery tends to be more overt with conflicts coming to

physical blows (the sword part) whereas others types of fantasy may

have conflicts of endurance or belief or discovery that don’t involve

so much physicality.

5.) How do you think ebooks and the Internet will change the way we read & write?

I think ebooks will speed up the process from conception to reader and

allow readers to access what they want to read on a smaller-than-book

scale. The ability to download a single short story instead of an

entire collection makes reading more like music, where there’s always

been a strong tradition of buying single songs instead of albums.

6.) Tell us about your Sword & Sorceress story.

“Grave Gold” is a tale of a barmaid who works in an inn at the bottom

of hill that also hosts a notorious barrow. The barrow is known for

two things — hidden treasure and unquiet dead. So treasure hunters go

up the hill and never come down. The situation intensifies when very

much against her better judgment, the protagonist Jenna is forced to

deal with the barrow firsthand.

7.) Can you share an excerpt from your Sword & Sorceress story?

He arrived in full armor when the moon was as its peak. The few

people in the common room noticed, but not the right things. They saw

a helmeted soldier, an unwanted authority figure. They didn’t see

that the armor was outdated, that the crest on his breastplate was

that of a long-dead clan. They didn’t notice that the common room

grew chill when he entered.

Jenna gathered her courage and went to meet him just inside the door.

“This way, sir,” she said, beckoning to a corner table where they

could talk without being overheard. There were more secluded places,

of course — the rooms upstairs, the stableyard, the cellar — but she

didn’t want to be that private with a revenant spirit. It seemed

prudent to have help within easy screaming distance.

“Can you take ale?” she asked as he lowered himself into the chair.

An odd question for a dead man, perhaps, but bread and salt seemed to

have some appeal.

“Not really” — his voice was fuller, not longer a whisper, but

surprisingly light — “but a mug before me would bring back pleasant

memories.”

She hurried to the counter to draw a mug and set it before him. Then,

hesitantly, she took the seat opposite him. He reached up a gloved

hand to loosen the strap of his helmet, and she tensed. She really

didn’t want to face whatever skeleton animated the armor, but there

seemed no choice in the matter.

The helmet lifted, and she held her breath, expecting the moldering

worst. Then she exhaled in surprise. Several surprises, actually.

Not only was the face perfectly intact with piercing blue eyes and

aristocratic nose, but it was also the face of a woman.

8.) Recommend one other book or short story you have written that we should read.

“Credo” was first published decades ago in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s

Fantasy Magazine, but it just came out again last Christmas in the

ebook Past Future Present. The protagonist, a church organist, must

banish a foul-mouthed imp from the organ before Sunday services. It’s

a more humorous take on the same theme of exorcism that “Grave Gold”

explores.

9.) Recommend one non-fiction book that you haven’t written.

Death in the Dining Room by Kenneth L. Ames (1992) sounds like a

murder mystery but is really a social history of Victorian times when

dining was the center of family life and carved representations of

slaughtered game animals often embellished the sideboard as a reminder

of the balance of life and death. This book gets points for an

intriguing title and also for bringing back to life vanished concepts,

such as back staircases, hallstands, and card receivers — all part of

the “ceremonies of daily life” that the Victorians firmly believed in.

###

Thanks, Jonathan, for the interview.

Check out our interviews with past S&S contributors – , , , Sword & Sorceress 25, and Sword & Sorceress 26.

And the novel featuring my Sword & Sorceress character, spy and assassin Caina Amalas, is now available for free in all ebook formats: Child of the Ghosts.

-JM

It’s National Novel Writing Month, starting today

Fire up your typewriters! Or advanced computational engines, as the case might be.

Writers occasionally gripe about NaNoWriMo, but I am not one of them. Learning to write is a bit of a struggle. For someone like me, sitting down to write 1,000+ words is a day that ends in “y” (and if I only do 1,000, I’m slacking), but it can seem like a terrifying and daunting challenge to someone who’s never done it before.  So if it helps someone get their 50,000 words down, why not do it?

Therefore, I bid all you NaNoWriMo-ers good luck!

Weirdly, for all these years I’ve been writing, I’ve never actually done NaNoWriMo. I always seem to find myself editing in November. The one exception was last year, when I started SOUL OF DRAGONS in October, and hoped to hit 50,000 words of the rough draft in November, which I did.

This year, I’m editing THE BURNING CHILD right now. However, as soon as that’s done, I hope to get cracking on SOUL OF SKULLS, the next book in the DEMONSOULED series. I might be able to do the first 50,000 words of the rough draft in November, but I should probably attempt to get some sleep at some point. Both these goals might be optimistic.

-JM

an excerpt from THE BURNING CHILD

Here’s a little excerpt from THE BURNING CHILD, which should be out next month:

“That was what happened at Dark River,” said Rachaelis, “wasn’t it? All the kings and lords were dead, so you told the men what to do.” 

Corthain remembered that terrible day on the banks of the Dark River, the day the Jurgur horde had almost destroyed the combined armies of the kingdoms of the west. But Corthain had taken command of the shattered hosts and turned the tables of the Jurgur horde, smashing them utterly.

Thousands upon thousands of men had died…and the singers called him the Hammer of Dark River for it. 

But after seeing what Maerwulf had done in Araspan, he did not regret it so much. Had the Jurgurs triumphed at Dark River, Maerwulf would have done the same on a vast scale throughout all the western kingdoms. 

“I was,” said Corthain, “in the right place at the right time.”

“Perhaps,” said Rachaelis, “but that only works if the right man is in the right place at the right time.” 

-JM