Tag Archives: fantasy

Cannon Fodder

Hey, guys? I have exciting news. My last ebook, The Confederacy of Heaven, was published in the fall of 2010. Now, after three and a half years, I’m finally ready to publish another ebook.

Kelsey's concept of what the book will look like.

Kelsey’s concept of what the book will look like.

It’s called Cannon Fodder, and here’s a taste of how it goes:

The good guys always win – and Alec Nightshade isn’t going to take it anymore. Alec’s a fifteen-year-old member of the Norgolian Society of Evil Overlords, which means not having much of a life expectancy. When a hero hunts down and kills his aunt, the Viper, he sets off on the first evil scheme of his life to set things straight.

Starting an evil scheme proves to be harder than it looks. Alec catches a break when a friend tips him off about the Eggbeater of Doom, a device that can summon a kiloton-sized elder god with a grudge against those puny hairless apes. If Alec blabs about the Eggbeater, gets a hero to go after him, then kicks the hero’s ass, he can break the cycle of prophecy that dooms his side never to see the age of fifty. He doesn’t mean to hurt anybody else. But when another overlord steals the Eggbeater with the intent to actually level a city, Alec knows what he and his gang of minions will have to do: save the day. He will never get to live this down.

Like the sound of it? I’m running a Kickstarter campaign starting today to raise money for professional cover art. I’m working with Kelsey King, a local artist who’s illustrated my other ebooks. If you preorder a copy of Cannon Fodder through the Kickstarter, not only do you get to help support the cover art, but you’ll get the book at a discount.

Check out the Cannon Fodder Kickstarter campaign.

Want to know more about the project? Drop me a line. I’ll keep you guys posted about the campaign’s progress now through the end of March.

Twinja Book Reviews

Now here’s a blog whose time has come:

Twinja Book Reviews

Despite the name, this blog has nothing to do with twins and it’s only sometimes about ninjas. It’s a site dedicated to promoting multiculturalism in genre fiction. Great idea! In the 90’s, I was frustrated with how fantasy was stuck in a rut of medieval-Europe Tolkien knockoffs. We’ve made great strides to break out of that, but I still see a lot of urban fantasy with white people, paranormal romance with white people, and steampunk smack in the middle of Europe.

I’ve got a wishlist of things I’d love to see a fantasy writer try:

  • A fantasy epic that takes place in the medieval Arab world or Asia. More stuff like Across the Nightingale Floor, please! Or what The 47 Ronin could have been if only it had been a good movie. Sigh…
  • A steampunk that takes place in British-occupied India. That would be so cool.
  • Cultural mix-and-match works like Avatar the Last Airbender (the cartoon) and Firefly.

Have any of you got recommendations for good non-European fantasy writing? Anything you’d like to see?

… and Ravensdaughter’s Tale is 100% funded!

Wow, this is flabbergasting.  The campaign is only about half over, but I had a couple of people make big backings yesterday that put us over the top.

(For those of you who came to this blog just now, I’m running a Kickstarter campaign to make cover art for one of my short stories.)

What does this mean?  I can start aiming for one of the reach goals of the campaign.  I’m going to go talk to the artist I’m working with about doing more stuff, probably cover art.  If this project reaches one of its reach goals, everybody who backs it is going to get extra cool stuff.  More news when it’s ready.

Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Ever since the second book of the Abarat series was published in 2004, I’d been eagerly awaiting the arrival of its sequel.  For those who aren’t familiar with the books, let me tell you that the Abarat series is a strange beast: kids’ stuff by Clive Barker.  Yup.

Barker held back a bit with the weird and creepy stuff for the first two books as he told the story of Candy Quackenbush, a girl from Minnesota who finds a portal to a magical dimension.  But in the third one, Abarat: Absolute Midnight, all Hell breaks loose.  I can’t really describe the plot to you.  In third books of five-book series, plots are hard to describe.  But in a nutshell an apocalypse has come to Candy’s Abarat.

We haven’t just got Mater Motley now.  We’ve got eldritch abominations fighting other eldritch abominations.

Highlights include the gorgeous, Barkeresque language, the full-color illustrations every few pages, and Rojo Pixler, who’s like every creepy rumor you’ve heard about Walt Disney.

Romantic spoiler alert: Who the heck is Gazza?  He shows up halfway through the book and instantly he and Candy fall in love with each other.  I was rather rooting for Candy/Malingo.  Although it would have been disturbing, Candy/Carrion or Candy/Finnegan Hob would have made for an interesting story, too.

Cover of Artemis Fowl

Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer

I’ll admit I’m a bit late to the party on this one.  The first Artemis Fowl book was published in 2001, when I was a bit older than the series’s target demographic, so it got past me until just now.  But I’m still #12 on the library waitlist for Game of Thrones, so I thought I’d give it a try.  And after reading it, I want to know why these books were marketed only to kids.  The subtext here is brilliant.

Artemis Fowl is a millionaire, a criminal mastermind, and twelve years old.  His dad has conveniently gone missing after an explosion on a Russian cargo ship and his mother has shut herself up in her room out of grief, so he can run around and do his moneymaking schemes without too much trouble.  His accomplices are Butler and his sister Juliet, the butler and maid of the Fowl estate.  And… and… the awesomeness of these characters… you simply have to read about them for yourself:

The Butlers had been serving the Fowls for centuries.  It had always been that way.  Indeed, there were several linguists of the opinion that this was how the common noun had originated.  The first record of this unusual arrangement was when Virgil Butler had been contracted as servant, bodyguard, and cook to Lord Hugo de Folé for one of the first great Norman crusades.

At the age of ten, Butler children were sent to a private training center in Israel, where they were taught the specialized skills needed to guard the latest in the Fowl line.  These skills included Cordon Bleu cooking, marksmanship, a customized blend of martial arts, emergency medicine, and information technology.  If, at the end of their training, there was not a Fowl to guard, then the Butlers were eagerly snapped up as bodyguards for various royal personages, generally in Monaco or Saudi Arabia.

The whole book reads like this.

Artemis’s latest scheme is to kidnap an officer of LEPrecon, the fairy police, and hold her ransom for quite a lot of money.  Of course, the situation devolves into a standoff in which Colfer has the chance to trot out heist movie tropes and play with them.  There’s a fairy sergeant with a cigar in his mouth, a dwarven convict who’s sent to work in a plea-bargaining deal, and the smartass techie who walks the fairies through Fowl Manor via his headset.  He’s a centaur.  He loves carrots.

There are, unfortunately, parts of the book that induce giggles for the wrong reasons.  Artemis has at his disposal the most cutting-edge of 2001 technology.  Near the beginning of the book, he steals some data from a fairy in Saigon and then e-mails it to himself.  One can only assume he was using a Hotmail account.

But seriously, just read it for the Butlers.  Go read it.

Cover of Stealing Death

Stealing Death by Janet Lee Carey

Well, it’s been said that you can learn how to become a better writer both by reading great books and awful ones.  Turns out that you can learn from reading books that are just sort of okay, too.

Stealing Death by Janet Lee Carey was published in 2009 and is aimed at the YA market.  It’s got a neat premise: After a fire burns down his home, the Gwali, a sort of grim reaper/boogeyman, steals the souls of Kipp’s parents and puts them in a sack.  Kipp will go to incredible lengths to get that sack back.  It’s also refreshingly different that Carey decided to set this story in an African-like society.  (Although the girl on the front cover is quite clearly a white person with darkened skin.  But I digress.  That was the illustrator’s fault.)

I was disappointed to find that Carey took such a cool idea and made a mediocre story out of it.  There’s nothing at all wrong with this book.  But I got about twenty pages into it and wondered to myself why I didn’t care what happened next.  The answer: It’s only a made-up story.  Kipp isn’t real, so it doesn’t matter what happens to him.  When you’re writing fiction, this is a very bad sign indeed.

Carey tells us, outright, that Kipp is sad that his parents and little brother are dead.  Okay.  And he has a crush on his landlord’s daughter.  Okay, but where is the evidence for this?  Does he do anything to show that he’s sad?  No, he just sort of packs up his stuff and starts on his quest.  He’s okay, but he never makes that jump from “generic YA protagonist” to “person I care about desperately.”

I suppose the writing lesson to take away from this is that crafting a compelling story is hard work.

Cannon Fodder is Coming … Eventually

Hello, everybody, and happy new year!

It’s 2012.  I’ve mentioned earlier that I was expecting Cannon Fodder, the book I’m working on right now, to come out in 2012.  I’m writing this post to explain that it might take longer than that, but I have a very good reason: I’m going to try to sell this one.

For the past … oh … many years, I’ve been sort of learning to write and sharing it with people.  If that short story about the mushroom alien was in sixth grade, that was 1999, so about thirteen years.  I’ve learned a lot from the experience, and I think it’s time to give it a shot.

That sort of thing takes a lot of time, no matter whether I try for traditional publishing or go Amanda Hocking style.  I’m going to run Cannon Fodder through critique group and get the thing seriously ironed out.  Then I’m going to go through the process of pitch to an agent, pitch to another agent, agent pitches to an editor, editor asks me to make revisions, editor go talks to a typesetter, which can take a couple of years.

But never fear!  There will still be regular updates on this blog, and I’ll let you know how it’s going.  Until then, I hope you all have a great year 2012.