Marc Aplin's Blog, page 169

9 Things I Wish I’d Known about Writing from the Beginning

The other day, I had a lovely conversation with a friend who is also a writer. We both have very similar writing styles, but arrived there from two completely different paths. She is what I would consider a formally trained writer – she has a degree in professional writing. Me? I was home-schooled, most of […]

Loss of Identity in Twelve Kings

Today we welcome a good friend of ours, Bradley Beaulieu, to Fantasy-Faction. Bradley’s new novel Twelve Kings has been picking up incredible reviews across the Blogosphere and we wanted to know some more about Bradley’s motivations on certain elements of the novel. Details on where to buy Twelve Kings and find out more on Bradley […]

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho

One of my most anticipated books of this year comes out on September 10th – you may have seen people like Naomi Novik, Lavie Tidhar and Ann Leckie lauding Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown. Or you may have seen the finished hardback, which is beautifully covered in enough gold foil to make a dragon […]

So What’s The Fuss About Campaign Cartographer?

The map has been a feature of many a fantasy novel for over a hundred years. Whether it be Tolkien’s Middle-Earth or George RR Martin’s Westeros, fantasy fans have poured over imaginary cartography since a map of the Land of Oz was first included as part of L Frank Baum’s Tik Tok of Oz back […]

Priest by Matthew Colville – Fantasy-Faction’s SPFBO Winner

I was sent 27 Self Published novels to read as part of Mark Lawrence’s Self Published Fantasy Blog Off. The process of the SPFBO is that 10 Fantasy blogs around the world make their way through a total of 267 Self Published books and each selects a champion. Once a champion has been selected they are entered into […]

Terry Pratchett attacked by Guardian Journalist Jonathan Jones…

A disappointing article appeared in The Guardian today entitled “Get real. Terry Pratchett is not a literary genius“. The journalist who wrote the piece, Jonathan Jones, begins by telling readers that ‘I have never read a single one of his books and I never plan to. Life’s too short.’ I guess that on its own […]

The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker

Time flies: It’s thirty years since Clive Barker’s first novel, The Damnation Game, was published. A tale of Faustian proportions, it – along with his short story collections The Books of Blood – changed the face of horror fiction at the time. Barker’s writing was full of vital energy and visceral imagery that was a […]

Authors & Stories Announced for Warrior Women edited by Paula Guran

We love our Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologies here at Fantasy-Faction and although the title ‘Warrior Women‘ for Paula Guran’s upcoming collection had us a little concerned, we’ve been able to breathe a sigh of relief today upon the release of more details about it. We thought there was a good chance we were about […]

Magic: The Gathering – A Fantasy Lover’s Perspective

There are lots of games out there for fans of fantasy, both video and table-top. Dungeons & Dragons is probably the most well-known table top fantasy game, but Wizards of the Coast also publishes Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game that also belongs in the fantasy genre. But I noticed that there isn’t a […]

Gender and Stereotyping in Fantasy – Part Two: Switching Roles

In the first part of this series we began to explore a couple of points, not least of all the idea that we are creating a new kind of gender mould with our misguided insistence as to what constitutes a “strong female character”. This has two consequences: female characters are still just as stereotyped as […]