Marc Aplin's Blog, page 142

Star Wars: Bloodline by Claudia Gray

Bloodline is best novel of the new Star Wars unified continuity. It’s certainly one of the best Princess Leia tales ever told. Steeped in the myth, lore and continuity of the Star Wars films (all seven of them…) while remaining fresh and fiercely individual, Bloodline exists as a novel set in the Star Wars universe. […]

Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay

Children of Earth and Sky, Guy Gavriel Kay’s 13th novel, interweaves several individual tales into a larger story highlighting the pain and opportunity and fragility of living between clashing empires in an alternate Renaissance Europe. Although Kay likes to say his books are histories that take a quarter-turn to the fantastic, in this case, he […]

Game of Thrones: Content vs. Delivery

I’ve just finished the fourth episode of the current season and I’m more engaged with both the show and the world of A Song of Ice and Fire than I have been since A Dance With Dragons was published in 2011. This renewed interest in Mr. Martin’s world is 100% attributable to the fact that […]

Breaking the Glass Slipper: Podcast Celebrating Women in Genre

This month, I’d like to officially introduce Fantasy-Faction readers to Breaking the Glass Slipper. The brainchild of Megan Leigh over at Pop Verse, it’s a bi-monthly podcast focusing on women in genre. Charlotte Bond and I join Megan as co-hosts. Our aim is straightforward: we want to get people talking about women, be they authors, […]

HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

“This is all it takes for people to plunge into insanity: one night alone with themselves and what they fear most.” Witches have a long history running through folklore, myth and fable, through the fairy tale and into modern fantasy and horror. As such they tap into a deep and primal well of our fears […]

Create Your Own Fantasy Author Frankenstein Monster

Last year, in the build up to Fantasy-Faction’s Grim Gathering event, it was suggested to me that I would look a lot better if I had Myke Cole’s arms. One kind soul even photoshopped them in to my picture so I could really appreciate the difference. Faced with the undeniable glory of Mr Cole’s biceps […]

Otherbound by Corinne Duyvis

In my life, I’ve found that there are a few different sorts of books I wind up reading. Some are gifts. Some are books I explicitly sought out. And some are books I discovered randomly, requesting from the library and renewing and re-renewing until I’ve forgotten the reason I requested them in the first place. […]

SPFBO 2: One Reader’s Initial Thoughts

I’m one of Fantasy-Faction’s readers for this year’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off (SPFBO). And now that I’ve read the first chapters of all the books in our set, I thought I’d share my observations. First of all, I want to say up front that the standard is high. In itself, that doesn’t surprise me. I […]

Learning from Script and Screen

It’s important for a writer to learn about their craft wherever they can, for most this takes the form of studying the work of successful authors or flicking through a creative writing textbook. But one less obvious source is the script and screen. While today’s progression normally follows a successful book being adapted for a […]

When Good Turns Bad: The Reversed Hero’s Journey

The typical “hero’s journey” is a structure that can be found not only in fantasy fiction but also in many other genres. You can analyse the twists and turns of this journey in great detail – even break it down into archetypal elements like ‘the mentor’, ‘the helper’ and ‘the threshold’. In essence, however, the […]