Claire Ryan's Blog, page 5

Cover Evolution: The Nameless Knight

Once again, Katrianna Anderson created the cover artwork for The Nameless Knight, and she went through a few different stages to produce the final version. Afterwards, I added the typography to complete it.

You can see that the initial sketch is very different to the end product! As always, major thanks to Katrianna – her skill for character illustrations is amazing. You can check out more of her work here.

I made the design myself in Inkscape. I have some background in graphics, so it’s not too much of a stretch to do layouts like this. The title text is composed of four separate layers with different filters on them in order to create the final composite, and it took hours of experimentation until I was finally happy with it! For indie authors who like a challenge and want to try making their own covers, I highly recommend trying out something like Inkscape. It’s free and open source.

The Nameless Knight is now in the proofing stage, which means we’re getting close to publication. I don’t have a set date because it’s hard to predict when everything will come together, but it’ll be soon. Watch this space!

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The Meldling is on Sale!

Moving up on archery

So! I’ve been back in the salle, doing Swordfit and cursing my muscles the day after. I’ve also been at the archery range in Burnaby, and I’ve swapped my Rakim Wildcat limbs for a set of Jando limbs that boost my bow’s weight from 18lbs to 25lbs.

Increasing the bow weight has been an interesting experience, I’ll tell you that much. At 18lbs, the draw was pretty easy, but I never felt like my arrows had enough power to be accurate. At 25lbs, the draw is a lot more difficult – far more than I thought it would be, considering the increase is only 7lbs. But my arrows are more accurate in a way I didn’t expect them to be. They fly true and hit with a very satisfying thunk.

Random I know, but there you have it. I don’t know that my groupings are getting any better, but I’ve got my first bullseye, so I’m calling that a win.

Speaking of bullseyes… I’m enormously amused by the fact that 90% of the other archers I see on the range are clearly very serious about it. I’ve yet to see another archer with a bow as crappy as mine, being carried around in a $20 bag for baseball bats, who also shoots at a target that consists of a cross made of two strips of masking tape. Everyone else has nice, expensive compound bows, or at least very good-looking recurves or traditional bows, plus stands, sleek, patterned arrows, viewfinders, and all kinds of devices and whatnot that I don’t know the function of, stored in hardshell cases. And they shoot at proper targets.

I don’t know why, but I just find it really funny when I see all these ‘serious business’ archers doing their thing, carefully aiming every arrow with zen-like mastery, and I rock up with my crappy bow and crappy target going WHEEEE LET’S SHOOT THIS SHIT, and being happy if I hit the 8ft target at all.

I’m probably just easily amused.

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April Giveaway – The Meldling and The Nameless Knight

I did promise you guys something good…

The Nameless Knight has returned from the editor, and now it’ll go through a round of cleaning up and proofing. It’s going to be a while until it’s done, but I’m getting closer and closer to publication. Busy busy and all that!

In the meantime, I want to reward all you nice folks who signed up to my mailing list – and anyone else who joins in from now until the end of April. The giveaway will be a two-fer, and it will consist of a case-bound copy of The Meldling – and a case-bound copy of The Nameless Knight.

Yes folks, if you want a physical copy of The Nameless Knight, this will be the first one I make, and it’ll be for you. It will not be a Raynfall Edition – I need to rework how I do the binding with the wooden cover – but it’ll be a Special Edition with marbled endpapers and it’ll look lovely, trust me.

Watch this space, guys. My second book is coming soon.

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The Lack of Fantasy TV

Why – WHY – is there no decent fantasy TV being produced apart from Game of Thrones? Why can’t I have some good TV in my preferred genre that isn’t cast in various shades of ash grey and dogshit brown?

I am over this, so very much. Someone PLEASE make some light-hearted, colorful fantasy TV, is that so much to ask? Sci-fi is booming like whoah, but sword and sorcery might as well be non-existent.

Remember The Princess Bride? Why can’t I have more of that?

And before you ask – no, Once Upon a Time doesn’t count because it’s not bloody well high fantasy. It’s set in Maine. And I’m not even going to look at the parade of indifference that is the urban fantasy and urban paranormal set. I want to watch TV that doesn’t dress every bloody character in grotty leather.

I mean, just look at this!

This guy’s a king, why’s he wearing armor that looks like it’s been left in someone’s damp basement for a year?! Does he not have anyone who can maintain his armor and weapons?

THIS is real gothic plate. Note the fine details, the polished steel, and the master craftsmanship. This is the shit the actual kings wore, for god’s sake, and I for one am tired of seeing mud-smeared knockoffs on any screen.

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The Nameless Knight Cover Artwork Reveal

Well, it’s time for something new, my friends! The Nameless Knight is officially out of editing hell, and it’s in the hands of my good friend Maria Boers Morris for a developmental review. Once it returns to me, it’ll get another round of polishing and then it’ll go through proofing…

…and then it’ll go to publication!

This can only mean that I have to reveal the cover art to you. Once again, Katrianna Anderson has delivered, and it is everything I could ask for. Watch this space, and it’ll be released as soon as possible. If you want to be kept up to date wth my new releases, make sure you subscribe to my mailing list – you may also be in with a chance to win a free book! I’ve got something really good planned for the next giveaway – I know I haven’t run one yet this year, due to being so busy with getting The Nameless Knight ready to go, but I promise I’ll make it up to you.

In the meantime, here’s the blurb for The Nameless Knight!

The forces of the Daeva-Ra have been routed, the daemons of Halca have become a part of the underground city-nation of Bastion, and the reclamation of the surface has begun. For many war-weary humanva and daemonva, the future is bright and happy.

But for the meldling Suzanna, there can be no peace.

The sorcerer who created her has struck again, and scores of unstable meldlings are attacking the humanva Outposts. These twisted, violent creatures, created from a fusion gone wrong of a daeva with a human, tear through the humanva knights with ease, and threaten the fragile treaty between Halca and Bastion.

Old fears die hard as panicked humans turn on the daemons among them, and when the first Outpost falls to infighting, the Council of the Distant Nine ask for Suzanna’s aid again.

The sorcerer must be found and stopped.

Suzanna is unique – the only stable meldling ever created – and she is the perfect bait to draw the sorcerer out of hiding. With the help of her companions, she follows the trail of the sorcerer to the Outposts and beyond, intending to capture him and stop his evil schemes for good.

But Dariem, the sorcerer who has evaded the Council’s magic at every turn, is more cunning than any of them anticipate. They are ambushed, and Lukas, Suzanna’s husband, is abducted. An unconscious daeva is left in his place – another meldling, with the armor of a knight, with seemingly no memory of his past, and without even a name.

Suzanna has to find Lukas before he becomes the sorcerer’s next experiment, and stop Dariem’s evil machinations for good. The nameless knight is the only one who can lead her to him. But how can she trust the word of a daeva meldling who might be one small step away from insanity?

THE NAMELESS KNIGHT is the Second Novel of the Daemonva, and continues the story of Suzanna and her friends.

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Mr. Darcy’s Proposal

As you may all know, I am somewhat obsessed with Pride and Prejudice. It is my favorite book.

Okay, that’s not really true. It’s more… this is the book by which I measure my own work. It has so much wit, and character! It has nuance and layers, and it’s timelessly fun. So light and easy to read, even two hundred years after it was first written. Jane Austen was one of the greatest novelists to ever contribute to English literature.

Anyway! Today I want to talk about something that I’ve been waffling on about lately. See, Pride and Prejudice has had plenty of adaptations to film and TV, and I’m fascinated by the differences in each. So… let’s talk about the infamous Proposal.

For those of you who are in need of education – Pride and Prejudice is the somewhat convoluted love story of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy. They are the ur-example of the trope where two people start off hating each other, and then their relationship turns to attraction and eventually romance. Halfway through the book (spoilers!), Mr. Darcy approaches Elizabeth, and basically says that he’s in love with her despite his best efforts to ignore it, and asks for her hand in marriage. After he insults the hell out of her family in the process, she throws it back into his face in a Crowning Moment of Awesome, and tells him to GTFO until he can behave like a gentleman.

The Proposal has so much going on in it. SO MUCH. Darcy’s feelings are finally revealed to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth finally calls him out on his bullshit. Everyone has been so polite to his face up to this point because he is a rich, privileged man, but she – just a woman, and very much powerless in comparison to him at that point in time – she turns into goddamn steel and hands him the verbal ass-whupping he so richly deserves. Not for nothing does he spend the rest of the book sucking up to her and trying to be a better person, because he learns, in that moment, that nothing less will make him deserving of her. What he says later in the book really resonates as a result:

You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.

So, needless to say, getting this one scene right in an adaptation is really, really important. And difficult. In fact, I’d rate only one adaptation as the one that works, and that is the BBC 1995 miniseries, with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.

See, it’s so potent because this one scene isn’t about love – or at least, it isn’t about an anguished declaration of love. It’s about Darcy’s desperation, that he has been brought this low by his feelings – and not once did he ever consider HER feelings, or the thought that she’d say no. It’s about Elizabeth’s iron-clad integrity; her loyalty to her sister, and being true to herself, means she’d never, ever say yes, no matter how rich and powerful Darcy is. Everyone else can be polite and pander to his ego, but she is having none of that shit right here, where it counts the most. And in an instant, she has all the power, and he has none.

I don’t know if there will ever be an Elizabeth and Darcy as good at this pair, honestly. They do it so well. But let’s move on – let’s look at a few other versions of this scene.

Okay, this is the 2005 movie, which has Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfayden. And this… what can I say? Macfayden is a fine actor, but he’s no Darcy. He’s too wishy-washy in this scene. There’s no sign of barely contained anger – at himself, not Elizabeth – and no sign of his rationality battling his love for her. Keira Knightley, too, is far too uncontrolled. At the point where they start shouting at each other, much of the power and the tension is lost.

Pride and Prejudice has always been about manners, and the maintenance of respectability and propriety. It’s about how two people navigate their relationship behind a mask of public image. Colin Firth performed Darcy so well because he was able to smolder his way across a room; the mask was always in place, but you could see the feelings bubbling underneath it. Jennifer Ehle was nothing but demure and controlled, but she delivered Elizabeth’s dialogue with enough bite to chop down a whole forest. Matthew Macfayden and Keira Knightley say their lines with plenty of feeling, but they just can’t sell the characters.

Here’s the other BBC miniseries, from 1980, with David Rintoul as Darcy and Elizabeth Garvie as, heh, Elizabeth.

I actually like this series overall, but it’s just lacking the emotion of the 1995 miniseries. It’s a period drama – very much a period drama, and it was filmed like a period drama. It’s mostly about the costumes and the setting. It goes too much in the other direction, being too controlled and too… flat, for want of a better word. It’s still a good adaptation.

Alright, up to today, I didn’t know this film from 1940 existed. And now, I’ve watched it almost all the way through. My friends, you’ll know from my previous post that I think the 2005 movie is a pretty bad adaptation because they had to compress one of the greatest works of English literature into a 90 minute film, and I am not afraid to say that just watching it made me want to toss my computer monitor out a window. This movie, however…

I can’t even be mad. This is the weirdest mashup of old Hollywood and English period drama I’ve ever seen. It’s so carefully crafted for an American audience that it confuses the hell out of me, like I’m seeing someone I know walking down the street in a chicken costume. Let’s not observe too closely, though – whoever did the costumes decided that a wardrobe left over from the Civil War would do just fine (hint: it doesn’t) and that everyone should act, and talk, like Americans attempting to be English. And the Proposal is reduced to this… whatever it is.

I had to stop the movie as soon as Darcy started talking here, solely because I was expecting the legendary lines:

In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

And they CHANGED it. They made it sound so horribly fake. Fair dues to Lawrence Olivier, because I think he at least looks the part, but there the illusion ends. He delivers Darcy’s iconic moment as if he’s giving a sermon on the evils of alcohol, which then turns into some horribly schlocky silver screen romantic nonsense. Greer Garson doesn’t have enough strength behind her lines. Like the 1980 miniseries, it comes off too flat.

I suppose it’s still an okay movie, if you like that sort of thing, but it’s not Pride and Prejudice.

So there you have it. One of the best scenes from one of the greatest novels ever written, as rendered on a screen, several different ways. Which one is your favorite?

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Get in Formation

So… okay. Real talk for a moment. You guys ever heard of Beyoncé?

That’s a trick question. I’m pretty sure none of you are living under a rock on Mars.

Way back in the mists of time, around 2010, I was young(er) and foolish, and I wrote a blog post about the idea of Beyoncé’s music having deeper meaning, and whether that meaning was being read into the lyrics by a critic’s over-active imagination as opposed to being put there by the artist. Now I read that post and CRINGE, you guys. I cringe to the deepest part of my soul. I sound so godawfully pretentious.

See, between then and now, some serious shit has gone down, not the least of which was me moving to the other side of the world. I’ve had some tough times, and I’ve felt real despair. And when I was down at my worst, Single Ladies saved me. There’s something so light, and bouncy, and happy about it, that I couldn’t listen to it without feeling a little better.

There was a while there when I had most of her dance tracks playing on repeat while I worked. Looking back, I credit the Freemasons Club remix of Ring the Alarm with really getting me into electronica.

I can’t believe Beyoncé’s music irritated me at one point. Single Ladies is literally one of my favorite songs now. I’ve completely fallen in love with much of her work, and there is no doubt in my mind that whatever meaning there is to be found in it – and there is a lot – was put there intentionally by her. I listen to plenty of music by black female artists now but she’s always the first among them, the one I revere most. (Yes, I am a card-carrying member of the Bey Hive and I will fight anyone who says shit about the Queen. You have been warned.)

This leads me to last Saturday, when Beyoncé surprised us all with a new track and music video called Formation (Dirty).

You guys.

I have so many feelings about this. SO many feelings. I love it and I’ve watched it a few times, and I’m still trying to parse all those feelings. Much as I’d like to dissect it, or analyze it, or… whatever, critique it, I can’t. This piece of art wasn’t made for me.

The think-pieces abound already, and none are more assholish than Vogue’s five-second take that describes Beyoncé’s hair and ‘athleticism’ as being the primary aspects of it. I’ve read so many comments that bash it severely, calling her racist, anti-police, a sell-out, and all manner of things in between. It’s been called boring, too political, uninteresting. Did I see the same video as these people? The level of hatred just floors me.

I want to grab them around the throat, and shake them gently while shouting “IT’S NOT FOR YOU!”

Not one frame, not one beat of the song, is for anyone but black people, and (it seems to me) specifically for black women. It’s all for them, their power, their culture, their lives; a celebration and a call to action all in one. And that looks terrifying, or at least baffling, if the only media you’ve ever consumed assumes whiteness as the default.

Like, that shot that pans across the graffiti that says ‘Stop Shooting Us’? White Americans look at it and think that Beyoncé is being ‘anti-police’. But she’s still not making this for them, and their perspectives are skewed. To me, it looks like a call-out to the Black Lives Matter movement, and solidarity with the black person who felt strongly enough to spray-paint that on a wall.

See what I mean? I can’t help feeling that a lot, a LOT of white people are getting their jimmies rustled over Formation because it so completely rejects their viewpoint. I keep getting this odd sense like, why should we care about your take on this? Your feelings are secondary, at best. It’s like (cisgender) men getting their collective underwear in a bunch because they don’t like a music video all about periods. It’s nice that you have an opinion, okay, but it’s just not relevant because y’all don’t ever get periods.

Now consider how much more rustled a person’s jimmies can get, if they’re used to their opinion ALWAYS being relevant.

I am just self-aware enough to know that this is an incredibly significant piece of art, and there are layers of meaning and inference that are completely closed to me because I’m a white Irishwoman. That’s okay! I’m totally okay with my every opinion of it being considered total nonsense. But I am not about to bash it for lack of context, nor dismiss it because it implicitly rejects my attention; it doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of it, or my admiration of Beyoncé. I’ll enjoy it, and let it cement my opinion that Queen Bey is perhaps the most influential music performer in the world today. This is one place where my usual instinct to analyze a piece of media just doesn’t apply.

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A long, strange January

It’s been a long, odd month.

I’m still stuck in editing hell with The Nameless Knight, but I’m working on it. The cover is done, so the only thing left to do is get the book finished and out to the copyeditor.

I’ve started a new job, and some of my time is being hosed by that, obviously. It’s good for me though. Makes me feel better, being back at code.

I’ve put my site through a transfer to a new server, which has not been entirely kind to it. I’m still trying to sort out how to improve the response times.

Apparently I’m going to buy a car this weekend.

So it’s been odd.

I’m going to get The Nameless Knight out to editing before the end of this month. I’m going to get that car, and drive it, and maybe go to the archery range. I’m going to keep my longsword in the trunk for fun.

Right now, though, I’m going to watch some more of Bob’s Burgers and play with my little daughter.

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The holidays, and rolling on to 2016

Happy New Year, everyone!

I’ve been having a quiet few weeks, just enjoying our first Saturnalia/Christmas/mid-winter festival with my little daughter. There have been many presents, and giggles, and all that fun stuff. There has also been more wrapping paper and boxes tossed all over my living room than I’ve ever seen before. My recycling bin is packed to capacity, I tells ya.

2015 was the year I finally published my first novel, and started doing the thing I’ve wanted to do my whole life. It was also the year that I wrote the sequel, which is currently lurking on my hard drive and daring me to finish editing it. I still have plans to publish it by the end of January, if I can manage to pull all the various bits together in time. I have the almost-finished cover art, which is the biggest thing.

It looks SO GOOD, you guys. So good. I can’t wait to show it to you.

So the next book, The Nameless Knight, will be coming soon, and with it, more copies for me to bind and give away! I’m thinking that I’ll keep offering The Meldling in my monthly giveaways for now, unless I’m specially requested to give away The Nameless Knight instead.

And now I have more news – I’ll be announcing the name of the last book in the Daemonva Trilogy soon! After I finished The Nameless Knight, I had this enormous revelation on how the series should end and what the last book should be called. I’ve mulled on it long enough, so when The Nameless Knight is released, the third book will be revealed as well.

Roll on 2016, my friends. It’s going to be an exciting year.

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