Marc Aplin's Blog, page 150
February 28, 2016
5 Tips For Writing A Swashbuckling Scene by V.E. Schwab
V.E. Schwab is an author comfortable writing all kinds of stories. Over the years, these tales have included those for young readers within secondary worlds, a dark story of super villains on a collision course, a supernatural exploration into personal legacy beyond death and plenty more besides. Whereas V.E. Schwab’s previous novels had been successful and highly regarded, A Darker […]
February 27, 2016
Interview with Louisa Hall, author of Speak
We’ve featured a fair amount of Science-Fiction on Fantasy-Faction lately, far more than we usually do, and that has opened doors to chat with some fantastic authors writing within that genre. Today I’m speaking with Louisa Hall, who is an American novelist with a phD in Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. Our discussion will focus on […]
February 26, 2016
CITY OF BURNING SHADOWS by BARBARA J WEBB
Today’s review features another one of Mark Lawrence’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off Finalists. This will be Fantasy-Faction’s ninth review of the ten finalists and means we’ve got just one left to score over the coming days. Here’s the blurb for City of Burning Shadows, Book 1 in Apocrypha: The Dying World. Joshua “Ash” Drake is a […]
February 25, 2016
The Diversity of Today’s Cutting Edge Sci-Fi
When we talk about science fiction we divide it up. It’s too big for a single shelf, we have to break it into subgenres and swallow it in pieces. There’s hard sci-fi, which typically deals with complicated scientific concepts. I usually call this technical sci-fi, since it’s often predicated on the idea that the science […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Broken Empire FanFic
The challenge this month was to write fanfiction, which means the story should be set in an already existing fantastical universe. Writers could choose from the following book series as the setting for their story: Pratchett’s Discworld, Rowling’s Harry Potter, Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Lawrence’s Broken Empire, Lynch’s Gentleman […]
Catchup Interview with Jen Williams
Today, on the release day of The Silver Tide, Fantasy-Faction has been able to catchup with one of our favourite authors, Jen Williams. For anyone who hasn’t yet picked up Jen’s books, you probably want to check out this review and this interview and skip this one for now (it contains a number of book […]
February 23, 2016
My Experience Publishing With Angry Robot
Today, Peter Tieryas, author of United States of Japan coming from Angry Robot in March, has been kind enough to share his journey from a short story writer struggling with rejections to published novelist. In addition to being a damned good writer (I’ve read United States of Japan and thought it was excellent: in equal parts beautiful, […]
February 22, 2016
Split Worlds Series by Emma Newman – Review of the First Three Books
Spoiler Warning! I’m reviewing the first three books of the Split Worlds series. Consequently, when describing the plot of book three, it’s darn near impossible not to say things that are spoilers for book one, but I have minimized them as best I can while still talking about the books sensibly. If you are extremely […]
Emma Newman Interview: The Split Worlds Series, Writing, Tea, and More
On the eve of her February 23 re-release of her Split Worlds series, I caught up with author, narrator, and host of the Tea and Jeopardy podcast, Emma Newman to talk about her path to publishing, her writing style, finishing the Split World Series, her motivations for writing this story, being married to a novelist, […]
Five Legendary Swords of Fantasy Fiction
This was meant to be a post about five legendary weapons of Fantasy fiction – but when I started counting them off on my fingers, there were other styles of weapon, sure, but by far and away the greatest number of any one kind were swords. Heck, if I wanted, I could just stick with […]
