Niall Teasdale's Blog, page 39

Stories from the Dubh Linn

Last night I finished off the last of the stories for the next Thaumatology anthology, Tales from the Dubh Linn. So I thought I would share them with you. I’m not sure how I’ll order them yet, but this is what you’ll be getting:

A Night on the Town: Four friends on a night out in London end up visiting the Dubh Linn, a notorious pub in London frequented by the darker side of supernatural society.

After Twilight: A teenager with a taste for vampire romance story finds herself falling in love with a teenage vampire who has just started at her school. Will the course of vampire romance run true?

Changeling: A farmer in Wales becomes convinced that his wife has been replaced by a fae changeling.

Hunt: A young couple spend Halloween night in a tent in Windsor Great Park while overhead they can hear a sound like geese calling. They are in for a very wild night.

Succubus: When Wendy discovers that her husband has been cheating on her, she summons a succubus for revenge and gets more than she bargained for.

The Body Trade: When a reporter begins investigating human trafficking into London she enters a far more dangerous world than she could ever have been imagined.

For those who have previously read the series, these are largely standalone stories, but you will be seeing some characters who have turned up before. John Radcliffe and Kate Middleshaw turn up more than once, and we’ll even be seeing Hughes and Croft, the Welsh detectives from Disturbia. You’ll also become better acquainted with Belvedere, the decadent Sidhe from the same book, and there is one more, secret, guest star from the main series.

As a side note, when Hammer of Witches comes out, it will have a bonus short story along with it. Housemates tells the story of how Ceri and Lily first met.

Whose Voice Do You Hear?

A friend of mine at work has recently been brainwashed aquired an iPad of some description. So off he went to Apple's iBook Store and picked up a copy of Tales from High Towers' Study since he's been saying he's going to try reading one of my books for ages. He's having terrible trouble with reading it, however, and not because my writing's terrible or the like. No, he can't read my books without imagining me reading them to him. (He reads in bed. I'm just not going there!) I can understand the issue; I wouldn't want to listen to me reading this stuff either.

But it got me thinking. Who do you hear when you read a book? You know, the little voice that reads along with the text?

I mean, sometimes it has to be easy. Urban fantasy in particular gets a lot of first person narrative. You presumably listen to the voice of the main protagonist. But then you hit the problem of: What does Rachel Morgan sound like? I've never been to Cincinnati, I have no idea what a local girl would sound like, so I guess I'm making her voice up. To me, Rachel likely sounds like "generic English girl." I probably make her sound like someone from Hampshire.

And then, my stuff is written third person. You're listening to an anonymous narrator, even if he or she is pretty much always looking over Ceri's shoulder. It does seem sort of logical to think of the author as the narrator, but most of you are going to be lucky enough to have no idea what I sound like. So, what do you hear when you read a third person novel? Is it like a play and the characters have their own voices while someone who sounds like a BBC announcer reads the rest? Does it all come out read by Maureen Lipman? Does the sex of the main protagonist affect the voice you hear, or the sex of the author, or do you always your own voice reading along?

PS. If you don't know who Maureen Lipman is, look her up on Wikipedia. She's a comedic goddess, and also played a really awesome villain in Doctor Who.

Lily – Easter Bunny of the Year

Another seasonal holiday and, well, I just felt Lily should get dressed up as a rabbit. It's traditional, right? Unfortunately, she had to hold that pose for hours and she was, a little miffed with me by the end of the session. I promissed her an Easter egg and I think I might have got away with it.

The larger version of this render is available here: http://tharcion.deviantart.com/art/Easter-Bunny-294405990

Bad Girls

Over the last week or so I've been creating new models of Ceri and Lily using the latest technology from DAZ 3D, Genesis. Genesis uses various new tricks of the trade, including weight-mapping, which should give smoother, more natural, joint bends. I also picked up some really good shaders for various forms of metal and other surfaces, including some really very good latex surface shaders; Ceri's dress and Lily's bra have benefitted from those.

Looking closely (I recommend the full-size version on Deviant Art: http://tharcion.deviantart.com/art/Bad-Girls-293730231), you can see Ceri's dragon tattoo here. You may also be thinking, "Her hair is longer!" Well, yes; that's a sneak peek at book 7, where she grows it. Bad Girls is the name of the first part of book 6, Hammer of Witches. Make of that what you will.

And now I'm off to render this as a desktop backdrop. I rather like how it came out.

Progress Update

In the last 25 hours I have:

Finished the first draft of Book 7.
Done a second read through of Book 6, Hammer of Witches.
Written a new short story, Hunt.

I'm feeling vaguely accomplished. Book 7 now has a working title, Eagle's Shadow, which it didn't have yesterday. My wonderful proofreader/sanity evaluator, Ellen, came up with that one after her read through. I was having no luck coming up with anything and it's a damn good title!

Book 6 looks like it will be out toward the end of April. It should be ready for then assuming I don't decide on any rewrites.

I'm going to try to take a short break from writing the novels. I plan to do some short stories for the next anthology and catch up on my list of books-to-read. I'll never catch up with the Hollows series if I don't get on with reading them! Of course, the last time I said I'd take a break from writing, I did actually read a book, but I also wrote 40,000 words in two weeks…

New Feature: Search Term I Giggled at This Week

That might be too long for a feature name. Anyway, while the most common search this week was people looking for succubus pin-up pictures, the search term which made me giggle most was "illegal porn pics". I know how they got here; I suspect they were disappointed.

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Inspiration – From Where?

Where do you get your inspiration from? For art or writing, or role-playing, or any other creative outlet really, there has to be something to inspire you to create. So what is it?

For me it's many sources. I'll focus on the Thaumatology books here, but I've written fiction in other genres which came from other places. I like mixing genres, especially with something like superhero fiction which is heavily influenced by both sci-fi and fantasy.

I've been fascinated by magic, the systems and mechanisms of magic, since I was a kid. I created rule systems for fantasy role-playing games, I read books on various different forms of magic. I don't believe any of it, but it's a fascinating subject. The first book I ever wrote was a fantasy (and no one will ever read it, it's terrible, but I was a teenager). Urban fantasy did not really exist back then and I turned more to sci-fi. The first thing I remember seeing which had that mix of fantasy and the modern-day was a game, Mage: The Ascension, where "magic" was the ability to manipulate reality by will alone and "technology" was a form of magic which the general public had bought into so just about anyone could do it. (It's a nice concept, but it starts to break down if you look too closely.) At around that time, David Eddings' books were giving us "The Will and the Word," another reality manipulating magic. Ursula le Guin's Earthsea books feature magic which manipulates the world through language. This kind of relatively detailed, internally consistent magic system is a big influence on the magic in the Thaumatology series. What I wanted to do was write a story about people doing fantastic things, sure, but also about people trying to work out how magic worked; applying science to magic, that's what my stories are about.

Which brings us to the other influence on these tales: Wikipedia and the Discovery channel. More specifically, quantum physics, string theory, M-theory, the Standard Model of particle physics… The list goes on. Try looking some of this stuff up. It reads like a fantasy novel combined with badly translated VCR instructions! Reality is a fascinating place and it seems like the more we understand it, the less we know about it.

Null thaumatons, the particle Ceri sets out to discover in Thaumatology 101, are based upon gravitons. Gravitons are the force particles responsible for gravity (if they exist). They are hard to find because they don't interact with our world much. That's why gravity is a comparatively weak force compared to the other forces, like electromagnetism. Gravitons are supposed to be closed-loop strings, and that's what null thaumatons are too. My science would likely make a particle physicist weep, but this is fantasy not a scientific paper. Take a load of science, add a fantastic twist, and out comes the science of magic. There's more to come in the next book; Ceri's world has a magical equivalent of the Higgs boson…

So that's where my inspiration comes from. What about yours?

A New Anthology in the Works

I just wrapped the first draft of the first short story for a new anthology. I'm not sure when it'll come out since one story does not an anthology make, but it's going to be called Tales from the Dubh Linn.

The short is titled After Twilight at the moment, though it might get retitled. It's a story of vampire romance in the Thaumatology universe and since my vampires are a little more old school, it's quite a dark tale. That sets the theme of the anthology nicely; this is going to be a collection of darker stories. More sex, more horror, more views of the underbelly of supernatural society from the point of view of its denizens and those who come into contact with them.

The Dragon Queen

Brenhines, or Gwyn as she likes to be known when she's being informal, is a dragon. Her name means Queen, and when she appears in Dragon's Blood she is very much the haughty, regal character her name implies. She normally keeps herself to herself; living alone on the island of Anglesey off the Welsh coast and emerging only to give cryptic warnings, but she is also the dragon who gave Ceri her slightly modified genes and allowed her to be a sorceress, and Brenhines is protective of her children. And that's even if her children were born thousands of years after she was involved in the process.

We will definitely be seeing more of Brenhines in the future.

(As usual, the full size version of this art can be found on my deviantArt page. Link at the side.)

Too Risque?

Okay, readers, I'm trying to come up with a cover for the sixth Thaumatology book, Hammer of Witches. This is what I've got, but the question is, too risque? Your opinions sought.

PS. This isn't the final version if I do continue with it. It needs some additional work, but I wanted to see how the fire effect would look and work out whether it was a good plan to go with.