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Days of Thunder

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Hey, guys.

I had a pretty good post I was going to make about Bruce Willis and Die Hard and how hardship defines a character, but then I got into kind of a weird spiral about action heroes and hit something I called “The Schwarzenegger Anomaly” and it all kind of got away from me.  So today’s a housekeeping post in which I tell you some stuff.

Tor.com and I are having a brief love affair lately.  When we pass each other in the hallway, I always offer a little wink and it has written my name in its math book in seven different languages, just to see how each one sounds.  Don’t believe that a love such as ours can exist?  Behold…

The first four chapters of Black Halo, free to read, as Aidan Moher watches on jealously.

A Black Halo giveaway.

An Ask Sam Sykes plea.

You see what I’m sayin’?  Girl be all into me.  Happens, yo.  Ladies go wild in the presence of Sam Sykes.  Men, too.

But, enough about how you’re growing more breathless with rage thinking about what Tor and I have.

The Ranting Dragon is quickly becoming one of the better review sites for fantasy novels out there.  I’m not just saying that because they adored Tome of the Undergates, either.  They’re well-armed, well-organized and well-prepared with a plethora of content, reviews and interviews; if this were a post-apocalypse scenario, they would probably be one of the more menacing street gangs roaming the wastelands and enslaving lesser blogs for sport.

Also, they did an interview with me that you should check out because they asked a lot of cool questions about writing.

Amanda at Floor to Ceiling Books continues to prove how awesome she is by establishing the Genre for Japan charity and they’re auctioning off several cool things.  I’d definitely check it out and see what you can do to help out.

My latest battle with Ari Marmell continues over at Babel Clash in which I’m starting to lose my identity in a bizarre spiral of insults and crawdads.  One week left until we’re forced to say goodbye, Ari drops to all fours and lets me get on his back and we ride into the sunset, never to return…until they invite us back.

Seriously, though, we’re talking about writing more than anything else, so it’s well worth a look.

Gosh, is that it?  I guess it must be.  Nothing else of note has really happened…

…oh, except this.

Black Halo came out today.  Hope you enjoy it.

John Scalzi sure did.

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Her Sword is Her Power

My conversation with Sasha (A Trial of Blood and Steel)author Joel Shepherd is up at Tor.com. As I say there, “…on top of creating a brilliantly-realized, believable world, Joel also excelled in peopling that world with believable characters, most of them strong, confident women, and telling their tales in a politically-nuanced way that made a lot of his contemporaries efforts seem naive by comparison.”

Here is a taste:

Lou: So, tell us a little bit about Sasha, and how you came up with her.

Joel: Again, I like characters who break convention, and Sasha breaks a whole bunch. Firstly, she’s a fantasy character who reverses that old cliche of the common peasant who discovers they’re heir to royalty, or some other great destiny. Sasha was already royalty, but rejected it.

Secondly, she was born a princess but absolutely HATED everything that little girls are supposed to love about being a princess, and through a series of events becomes a warrior for a strange group called the Nasi-Keth. Not that she can ever stop entirely being a princess, and she still has relations with her family, but she’s certainly out of the power loop, to put it mildly. With too many little girls today still taught to love all princessly things, I found the idea of a princess who as a little girl would much rather play in the mud, ride horses (way too fast) and beat her siblings with a stick in pretend swordfights, just too irresistible. (I like to imagine Sasha sitting today’s little girls down and explaining that the fate of a princess in most realities is to a) marry someone old and ugly, b) spend all your life being told what to do by men of your family, your in-laws’ family (frequently including the mother-in-law from hell) and of course the priests of whatever dominant religion who will expect you to adhere to all their stupid, woman-hating beliefs, and c) to never ever have any fun at all).

And thirdly, I decided quite quickly that in order to become what she is in this patriarchal society, Sasha would have to be incredibly headstrong. That would make her a handful, to say the least, and some might say a nightmare, especially when she was younger. We see the personality type all the time today in top athletes— self-obsessed, almost pathologically competitive, and in Sasha’s case, prone to wild over-exuberance or temper. She can be a pain in the ass, but she has to be, because that’s the personality it takes to be what she is in this world. And I do think she manages to be lovable at the same time, because her heart’s always in the right place, and she’s absolutely selfless in her loyalty to friends and her belief in helping those who deserve it.

Read the whole thing here. 

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A Conversation with James Enge

Tor.com has just uploaded my conversation with James Enge, author of the just-released Swords & Sorcery novel, Blood of Ambrose.I’m fascinated by Enge’s world building, and his views on fantasy fiction in general. Check out the whole post, but here’s a taste:

Morlock, as suits his ornery nature, was born out of annoyance. I’d just been rereading Wells’ The Time Machine and I was annoyed because I thought (and still think) that Wells stacked the deck unfairly against the Morlocks. Somehow this merged with a longstanding grievance I have against Tolkien: JRRT worked too hard to make elves the good guys, often at the expense of dwarves. And—because I was reading a lot of Arthurian source material at the time—I realized that “Morlock” looked like a lot of names in Arthurian legend: Morgan, Morgause, Morholt, Mordred. And so this character named Morlock Ambrosius was born, who was supposed to be to Merlin something like what Mordred was to Arthur.

A Conversation with James Enge Read More »

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