Guest Post! Complementary genres – fantasy and heavy metal

Last but not least... :o)

When I sent out a call for guest posts, Jamie Gibbs was the first to reply with an offer of a post on Fantasy and Heavy Metal. I'd never even thought about the relationship between the two so was interested to hear more. Through no fault of Jamie's, I wasn't able to put the album covers onto the blog so have linked to the images on Amazon where I could (have a look, they're gorgeous) Check it out...

First off, a big thank you to Graeme for having me here. His blog was the first one I followed when I first started my own, and he’s been a big inspiration. It’s an honour :)

As a genre, fantasy is able to adapt itself to suit almost any medium of expression, and music is no exception. I'm not talking about the sprawling epic soundtracks that accompany movies like Lord of the Rings, but rather that unique blend of imagery and music that is found in the metal genre. There is something about this kind of music that is particularly open to fantasy influences, and it does a great job at conveying elements of the fantastic through music.

Here are some concept albums and songs that have borrowed heavily from fantasy novels, and a few that have told their own fantasy story exclusively through music.

Dragonland - Under the Grey Banner 

As a genre, fantasy is able to adapt itself to suit almost any medium of expression, and music is no exception. I'm not talking about the sprawling epic soundtracks that accompany movies like Lord of the Rings, but rather that unique blend of imagery and music that is found in the metal genre. There is something about this kind of music that is particularly open to fantasy influences, and it does a great job at conveying elements of the fantastic through music.

Here are some concept albums and songs that have borrowed heavily from fantasy novels, and a few that have told their own fantasy story exclusively through music.


Kamelot - Epica/The Black Halo 

Kamelot are one of my all-time favourite fantasy metal bands, and this dual concept album is some of their best work. Based on the story of Faust by Goethe, Epica and The Black Halo tells the story of a brilliant philosopher who sells his soul to the demon Mephisto for untold knowledge.The narrator eventually falls in love with Helen of Troy and realises soon after that you should be careful what you wish for.

Check out Epica’s “Descent of the Archangel” for the initial bargain struck between Mehpisto and the narrator; a brilliant track that shows off the vocals of former singer Roy Khan and the persuasive nature of the demon in the tale. Kamelot are masters of concept tracks and have a host of excellent songs under their belts including a trilogy of songs about Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a four-part saga about a vampire lord, and the upcoming original concept Silverthorn with new singer Tommy Karevik.



Blind Guardian - Nightfall in Middle Earth 

Any list about fantasy metal wouldn’t be complete without Blind Guardian, who are heavily influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Nightfall in Middle Earth is a musical version of The Silmarillion; as well as full-blown tracks, Blind Guardian narrate a number of passages from The Silmarillion to connect parts of the story. Vocalist Hansi Kurch sings like a medieval bard, lending an authentic fantasy-like quality both to the songs and the narration.

Listen to “Nightfall” for a flavour of this one; it tells of how the dark lord Morgoth and the spider Ungoliant destroyed the Two Trees of Valinor and brought darkness to the land.

… And the songs

These are just a few of the concept albums that take on fantasy stories in sweeping, 15-track arcs. There are also a load of individual tracks that cover self-contained fantasy stories in themselves:

• “Dante’s Inferno” by Iced Earth is a sprawling, 17-minute epic number that takes you on a journey through all nine circles of Hell.
• “Tower of the Queen” by Falconer follows the political upheaval of a plot to overthrow the Queen and her tyrannical rule.
• “A Storm to Come” by Van Canto is an acapella rendition of the 19th Century Norwegian play, Peer Gynt, which plays with the line between reality and fantasy and how they can be blurred.

The list goes on. Fantasy and metal music blend well together, and it can be a great inspiration when writing your own fantasy worlds. Fantasy as a genre is immersive and filled with imagery; qualities that are shared by the music that it inspires.

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Jamie Gibbs is that bearded, caffeine fuelled zombie fan from the fantasy book review blog Mithril Wisdom. He claims to be a full metal head, but likes to listen to Billy Joel when no one is looking. If you want any more fantasy metal goodness, throw him a message on his Twitter.

Cheers Jamie!

Guest Post! 'The Road There and Back Again' (Jennifer Williams)

I love reading Jen's blog, and really enjoyed 'The Copper Promise' too (go and read it), so was chuffed to bits when a cheeky request for a guest blog was met with a 'Yay!' (really, it was)
If there's one thing I've found out this week it's that I'm better at asking for guest posts than I am at saying what should go in them. Lucky for me then that everyone has come up with great posts of their own; posts like this one (coming with its own map, a first for this blog)...

The Road There and Back Again

I do like a book with a map at the front. It’s a fantasy fan thing, I guess. I was once lightly teased on a coach trip because the book I was reading had a map in it, but I think they are rather lovely things – little snatches of imaginary worlds, briefly pinned down to paper. It’s pleasing to think that if you were deposited there, transported via a magical storm or a wilful piece of furniture, that you could even navigate your way to safety, avoiding the parts marked “abandon ye all hope” and “spiders here”.
With this in mind, I wanted to share with you a piece of my own personal fantasy map, a guide to the journey that has taken me from a small child endlessly colouring in dragons with felt-tip pens, to a writer banging out fantasy novels of her own.

At the Sign of the Prancing Pony

This is a weird thing to admit, but when I was very small I don’t think I really understood books. I was an excellent reader, always at the top of the reading group, but in truth I was just processing words. I never really felt connected to the book I was reading; they were just exercises to be completed, and if I didn’t really comprehend what was happening it didn’t matter. I vividly remember reading several books in junior school and having no clear idea what they were about, despite being able to read and understand each word. Weird kid.
 I remember picking up The Lord of the Rings at the library because it was famous, and because it was fat. “Aha,” I thought. “This will be a challenge. Look at all these words to process! I will process the shit out of ‘em.” (That’s probably not exactly what I thought – I was ten years old and convinced the monsters under my bed would eat me if I swore). 
LOTR was really the start of books for me. For the first time I was truly transported by a novel; I remember reading it while on a caravan holiday with my family, and in my head I was more in Hobbiton than Dymchurch. I went with Frodo and Aragorn to another world, and it was a place I wanted to see more of.
    It’s perhaps a little easy to be dismissive of Tolkien now, partly because it can feel old-fashioned – Crom knows these days I prefer my books with a touch more sex and violence – and partly because it has been copied ad-nauseam (when I mentioned I was writing a blog on fantasy, a friend suggested “Why don’t you ask why fantasy hasn’t moved on since Tolkien?” – I don’t agree, which is why I’m not talking about that. I can be slippery sometimes) but it’s clear that LOTR and The Hobbit are often a gateway drug to the larger world of Fantasy, along with D&D, and there’s a good reason for that. Middle-earth is a complete world, and so many of the books I was reading as a kid were about children travelling from our world to another, and then, disappointingly, back again. I was in the middle of reading the Narnia series when I picked up LOTR; once I’d seen Rivendell I never went back through the wardrobe again. Hobbiton was the start of my adventure, just as it was for Bilbo and Frodo, and so the Shire sits at the bottom of my map, awaiting the long trek north.

When You’re Tired of Ankh-Morpork…

The Discworld books are so close to me that I almost can’t separate them from myself. Does that make sense? After all, didn’t I grow up in Ankh-Morpork? (I’m half convinced that my great love of London is partly born of its fictional shadow-sister) Wasn’t Nanny Ogg an aunt of mine? Didn’t I take holidays on the Chalk? Sometimes it feels like I did, and that Sir Terry Pratchett’s books have been with me all my life.    The Discworld is famously a satire of Fantasy, but when I started reading it, it simply was Fantasy. It was dragons and wizards and witches and wild, dangerous magic, and yeah, it was all very funny, but that’s as it should be – I’m sure the Discworld books contributed to my need for human fantasy; that is to say, fantasy where the characters aren’t all po-faced and spouting thee’s and thou’s. People are funny, even when things are going wrong; it’s what makes them so brilliant.
It wasn’t until relatively recently that I started reading the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber and realised where all that stuff came from; the Thieves Guild, the dodgy taverns. Pratchett may have started off gently lampooning the genre, but in the end the Discworld became the centre of it, for me at least, and consequently Ankh-Morpork sits at the very heart of my own fantasy map.

A City Unconvinced By Gravity

We skip forward now. A line of red dots marches across the map, and as we zip past the wildly differing landscapes we take in such sights as Derry and Castle Rock (never really human places, don’t you believe it), and the doom-laden city of Lud on the edge of Mid-World. We see the crumbling mansion of the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair in the distance (a terrible, dimly lit place), and onwards through the Six Duchies to the stalwart fortress of the Drenai empire, until we reach somewhere altogether… different. In short, reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville was like being smacked upside the head with a giant mallet made of drugs. I have a thing for weird cities (you may have noticed) and New Crobuzon was the Weird City. I read it just as I was starting to take writing a little more seriously, and it showed me that fantasy can be anything; that the language of dreams is infinite. It took what I thought I knew and stuffed it full of dreamshit, and so New Crobuzon crouches at the gateway to new and unexplored territories.

I am the Watcher on the Walls

I first picked up a copy of A Game of Thrones a couple of years ago, just before they announced a TV series was going into production. At the time I was feeling a little jaded about Fantasy as a genre, having read a number of books that felt rather cold, the characters quite distant. At the same time I was in the midst of a full-blown obsession with the video game Dragon Age: Origins. If you are unaware of this prince of RPGs, it’s a game that gathers up traditional fantasy and gives it a sexy little cuddle; the story is great, the characters become your best mates, and there’s an extraordinary amount of depth. I was looking for the novel equivalent of that, and while A Game of Thrones is definitely nothing like Dragon Age, it did have characters that ripped my heart out and trampled on the juices.

A Song of Ice and Fire is fantasy given a thick coating of meaty-flavoured realism, and the magic, when it does appear, is dangerous and unpredictable. This was the human fantasy I’d been looking for; people make bad decisions (come on, Ned, you twat), they do terrible things to each other, and they have sex, and they argue and bleed and eat, just like real people. Almost all the characters are morally dodgy and George R.R Martin continually turns you on your head – the essentially good characters do terrible things, like the honourable Catelyn Stark treating her step-son like an unexpected turd in her cereal, and the horrendous bastards end up being your favourite characters (I’m looking at you, Jaime Lannister). The series’ most iconic figure must be Tyrion, and aside from him always having the very best lines and generally outwitting everyone else, I think he represents the books’ whole ethos: for your traditional fantasy hero he’s the wrong shape, and he’s aligned with the most evil family in the book, but Tyrion is a wonderful collision of sharp wit, scheming cleverness and a genuinely good heart underneath it all. Ask anyone who’s read ASOIAF, and Tyrion will either be their favourite character or at least in the top three, and we’re not even sure if he’s supposed to be a goodie or not. This is a long way from Tolkien. And so are we. The winding road north has taken us through lands dangerous and startling, and now we’re heading up into the frozen wastes. Who knows what we could meet up there? So let’s fill our pockets with lembas bread, oil our best swords, and head deeper into fantasy country.

Guest Post! “Are there really too many zombies Graeme?” (David Moody)

Back in September I wrote a short piece questioning whether there are just too many zombie books out there now and if the quality is suffering as a result. When David Moody very kindly offered to write a post for the blog I couldn't resist the opportunity to have a guy who has written several very well received zombie novels answer that question for me. Put yourself in my shoes and you wouldn't have passed up the chance either. Here's what David had to say and there's a lot for me to think about...

“Are there really too many zombies Graeme?”

Firstly, it’s a pleasure to be guest posting here at Graeme’s site today. I’ve been a loyal follower since he reviewed the original self-published version of my novel Autumn way, way, way back in the dim and distant past. He’s been very kind to my work over the years, posting positive reviews of my books, many of which feature zombies, or variations thereof. So imagine my horror when, back in September, Graeme wrote a post entitled: Too Many Zombies? Thing is, to an extent, I think he’s absolutely right. But I don’t think we should completely write the living dead off just yet. I’ll explain...

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. People are always interested when they ask me what I do for a living and I tell them I’m an author. The inevitable follow-up question is always ‘what do you write?’. When I tell them I write horror, many folks are admirably honest and explain that they don’t really like horror, then proceed to spend the next ten or fifteen minutes telling me exactly what they do like. But here’s my concern... of those who continue the conversation because they genuinely are fans of the genre, many of them switch off as soon as I mention the dreaded ‘z word’. So why is that? Is it just a question of overkill?

One of the living dead’s greatest strengths, I think, is their adaptability. Think of a situation and, one way or another, if you try hard enough you can usually find a way to get zombies in there. As well as the usual tried and tested shopping mall and isolated farmhouse scenarios, more recently we’ve had zombies in Iraq, zombies in the Arctic, zombies at a Star Trek convention, Nazi zombies, Viking zombies, zombies in Star Wars, zombies in the past, present and future, and so on and so on. When you boil stories down to their most basic level, wherever there are people, you can almost always shove in a zombie horde or two. As well as being a strength, though, this adaptability can also be a problem because as a result zombies seem to have become the lazy horror writer and film-maker’s monster of choice. A bit of blood, the odd groan, a slow, stilted walk with arms outstretched, a bag of offal from the butcher’s and there you go... Bob’s your (undead) uncle. It’s very easy to go for drama only to quickly descend into Zombieland-like parody.

It doesn’t help matters that the typical zombie story has become something of a cliché either. It usually goes something like this: initial outbreak > denial/cover-up > it’s too late, the Z-poc’s here > a small group of survivors escape and hole-up somewhere > they have a plan > it doesn’t work > one of them gets infected and tries to hide it from the rest > he/she ‘turns’ at the least opportune moment > almost everyone else gets bitten/eaten > a lone survivor is forced to admit defeat in a bleak and nihilistic ending. Along the way there will be copious excuses for ‘intense scenes of graphic, bloody violence’ (as it usually says on the back of the DVD). Of course, there are people who only want ‘intense scenes of graphic, bloody violence’, and I’m sure they’re happy with the way things are. But I don’t think those folks are likely to be frequent visitors to Graeme’s blog.

My time with the living dead is coming to an end through personal choice. I’ve written more than my fair share: five Autumn novels, more than 120,000 words worth of free zombie fiction (available at www.lastoftheliving.net), copious short stories, not to mention the three book Hater series which isn’t about zombies at all but which everyone still insists on labelling as zombie novels anyway... I think I’ve done as much as I can do with dead bodies (and I appreciate how wrong that sentence sounds). But I’m still fascinated by the zombie sub-genre, and remain an unashamed fan. Here’s why.

For every few bad zombie stories you have to plough through, you can usually find at least one gem. I said earlier that wherever you have people, you can have zombies. The undead are a mirror: you and me in an uncomfortably familiar yet wildly different alternative reality. They are the people we love, and the people we hate. They are the world outside your window. They are the faceless corporation you work for, the government you didn’t elect but are stuck with anyway. They are your kids and your parents, your lover even. They are everyone but you. Zombies are capable of bringing out the very best and the very worst in us. They can give you a reason to fight and survive or, just as easily, they can drag you down to gutter level and render you helpless and lost.

To an extent, though, the dead are simply the dead – devoid of all character, no longer young, old, male, female, short, tall, able-bodied, disabled, etc. etc.... just dead. It’s the other characters in zombie stories which matter most, and how they deal with the situation they’re presented with. So whether it’s the suicidal overweight vicar in Adam Baker’s Outpost, the disillusioned police officers of Belfast in Wayne Simmons’ Flu, the jaded zombie-hunter from V M Zito’s The Return Man, the Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes, or anyone else from the many other excellent zombie stories I’ve read recently, it doesn’t matter.

I think a zombie novel’s success boils down to its focus and the bottom line is this: give me an intelligent, thought-provoking story with characters I care about and I’ll lap it up, and if that book also happens to feature hundreds of thousands of zombies, then so be it. But if your book is about walking corpses and just happens to feature a few survivors, then I’m with Graeme: too many zombies!

Thanks David :o) 


You can find David's website over Here and he's right, I've reviewed a fair few of his books. You'll find reviews Here, Here, Here, Here and Here; all of them are worth picking up.

Black Library Expo in Canada - A Guest Post...

This post should have gone up yesterday but... erm... better late than never I guess :o)

There's a Black Library Expo in Canada, fairly imminently, and I was asked if I'd like to host a guest post (from a BL author) talking about the event. Of course I said yes and totally lucked out with who was writing 'my post'; Chris Wraight is no stranger to this blog and now he's back to tell us a little bit about what you can expect to find in Chestermere at the beginning of October...

Being a writer is a privilege. It’s easy to forget that sometimes when the deadlines are looming like banked thunderheads, but it’s incredibly fortunate to be allowed to write stories for a living. It’s even more fortunate when people want to buy those stories, and then talk about them, and then turn them into new stories in turn. And of all the ways to do it, working in a shared universe is surely the most sociable and the most satisfying way to write. It feels at times like being part of one huge narrative, constructed over decades and drawing in the talents and energy of dozens of creative minds.

Taking part in events like the Black Library Expo in Chestermere is like going back to the wellspring, having a chance to chat to the readers, the enthusiasts, authors and editors, the people who ultimately drive the whole thing and keep it going. I’ve always come away from such events with more energy, more ideas and a renewed sense of direction. That’s very useful, as otherwise we spend most of our time working alone. The Internet generates a lot of feedback, of course, but that’s a double-edged sword: people behave differently online; it’s far more rewarding to speak to readers face to face.

It helps when the places we go to are exciting and unfamiliar, as Canada is to me. I’ve never been before, and plan to make the most of it during the short time we’re there. The utterly marvellous Gemma Noon, who’s been organising the event with zest and flair, has been merrily sending out pictures of Alberta for weeks, and it looks stunning. Really stunning. A bit like Fenris, I suppose, without all the murderous fauna lurking around every corner (I hope).

And there’ll be plenty of stuff to talk about. The ink is barely dry on the huge Fear to Tread, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of feverish anticipation over Pariah too. I’m hoping to get a look at Orion: the Vaults of Winter, as well as have a good chat with Nick Kyme about The Great Betrayal and its sequels. As for my own stuff, I’ll be looking forward to discussing recently completed things, like the unremittingly dour Wrath of Iron and the slightly less unremittingly dour Swords of the Emperor omnibus. By the time the doors open there’ll be other projects I’ll be itching to talk about but will probably have to be careful with: more Space Wolves, some dragon-riding High Elves, and in all probability some jetbike-riding White Scars.

It promises to be amazing. Having been lurking on the horizon for a while, it finally feels very close, and I can’t wait. So if you’re in the neighbourhood, or can find a way of getting there, come along. Events like this one don’t come along very often, and you’re not going to want to miss it.

 

Chris will be hanging out in Chestermere, Alberta, on 6 & 7 October, at the BlackLibrary Expo –the first event of its type in Canada. Tickets and further details can be found at www.ChestermereExpo.caand at www.facebook.com/ChestermereExpo

Blog Tour - 'Arctic Rising' (Tobias Buckell)

I don't normally go in for these things but when I was asked if I'd like to be part of Tobias' blog tour I had to say yes, having enjoyed the books of his that I've read in the last few years. The reading pile is teetering once again but I'm planning on reading 'Arctic Rising' sooner rather than later.
Here's what Tobias has to say for himself today...

So I have a new book out after a roughly three year gap. And it's been a weird three years. Most people might remember me from the far future space opera steampunk type mashup books I did with dreadlocked Caribbean cyborgs putting the smack down on colonialist masters. So now Tobias is doing a near future novel? Something he calls an eco-thriller? What gives?

I think in Silicon Valley it's called the art of the 'pivot.'

I really fell head over heels for the cyberpunk writers back in the mid 90s thanks to a chance discovery. It was Bruce Sterling's Islands in The Net that hit me upside the head. The first third of it was set in a near future Grenada. I grew up in Grenada. It was the first moment where I thought that maybe I could fuse my Caribbean background and experiences with my favorite genre, SF, and make a career of it.

I loved writing those first few big action books, but I've secretly always wanted to do a tech-oriented, near future piece. I've always wanted to play with what's just over the horizon, like the master authors I wanted to follow in the footsteps of while in high school.

Arctic Rising was a chance to head in a new direction and explore a near future that may be around the corner. Explore some interesting social technologies and hacks. Through the eyes of someone we don't normally see in SF adventures. Welcome to the ice-free Arctic.

I am an awful blog tour host, having no idea what the schedule is or where Tobias will appear next! I'm guessing that you should be able to get the information here... ;o)

Guest Post! Michael J. Sullivan ('The Riyria Revelations')

You won't see that much of me this week but that doesn't mean that I'm just leaving you high and dry in the meantime. No sir, I've got some bits and pieces lined up for you and I'm kicking things off in fine style as none other than Michael J. Sullivan has kindly agreed to provide a guest post here. Thanks Michael! I'll leave you in his capable hands...

MICHAEL J. SULLIVAN…DOING IT ALL WRONG

I want to thank Graeme for inviting me here while he’s away. I promise not to leave too much of a mess, and if you notice a beer or two missing from the fridge, well I don’t know anything about that.

I doubt many here will know who I am, but hopefully you will soon...being here is certainly a step in the right direction. I’m Michael J. Sullivan and my Riyria Revelations has just been released by Orbit (Theft of Swords available now in the UK and coming November 23 in the US.

I feel a lot like the new guy at school, certainly a freshman, and as such I try to listen and learn from the cool guys hanging out at the table reserved for seniors. Recently I was at the Baltimore Book Festival and four seasoned authors from the SWFA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association of America) were chatting about the biggest mistakes new author’s make. Yep, you guessed it I’ve done every single one of the things they advised against.

Don’t Self-publish: The overall consensus was that no self-respecting author would ever resort to self-publishing. I had originally been published through a small press, and after they sold out the first printing (and having decided not to reprint), the rights reverted to me. I saw self-publishing as the only way to keep the books on a six-month release cycle. In the end, I put out five of the six books of The Riyria Revelations through a small press (Ridan Publishing) started by my wife and ended up selling more than 70,000 copies (mostly in ebooks) before they went out of print to make way for the Orbit versions.

Don’t write a series: The advice was to write a standalone novel, and if that goes well, then you can always write more afterward. This way you won’t waste time on something that has no legs. Ouch. Not only is mine a series, but I wrote all of them before any attempt was made to publish the first book. So okay, I knew that was a crazy thing to do even while I was doing it. But I’m actually really glad I made this choice. The Riyria Revelations starts off simply but by the end is actually a pretty complex tale. Often I found myself having to insert something back in book one or two based on what I was writing in book four or five. I would have regretted not being able to add an important plot point because the books were already out there.

Study the market: The advice was to determine what would sell…otherwise you’re just wasting time. Yeah, on the surface that makes a lot of sense, but I went a completely different way. When I started the series I had no intention on publishing the books, you see I had tried writing for the market for more than a decade and after getting nowhere I quit. When I finally picked it up again (another ten years later) I decided to write something that was light, fun, had dashes of humor, some mysteries, and would escalate as the series progressed. My target market was very narrow (me, my wife, and our dyslexic daughter). I know nowadays a lot of people like gritty, realistic fantasy, but I concentrated on creating something reminiscent of the fantasy books I fell in love with as a kid.

Write the strongest book possible: Also makes perfect sense, and I’ll tell you right now that The Crown Conspiracy (book one of Theft of Swords) is probably the weakest of the six books – and I did that by design. Keep in mind that I wrote everything before publishing the first book and I wanted the books to escalate…for layers to build…mysteries to deepen. My goal was to make each book better than the one that came before so that the final book, Percepliquis, is actually my magnum opus. Constructing the series this way is a huge risk. Some people may find the beginning too light for their tastes and leave the series before getting the full effect. A big part of what makes the last book so good is that I slowly reveal the world and my characters…a bit at a time…with careful planning and deliberation. It won’t be until the final book is released
that I’ll really know whether my gamble paid off or not.

Don’t quit your day job: Well, technically I had no day job, so I actually didn’t go against this advice. I started writing full time in 2005 while my very supportive wife provided our sole income. In April, we had a big enough nest egg set aside from self-publishing, Orbit’s advance, and a whole slew of foreign sales that she was able to quit her day job. I must say that as rewarding as writing this series has been, being able to do this for Robin is probably what has provided me the most joy.

So, there you have it…confessions of a fantasy author newbie who has done everything wrong and is hoping that it all turns out right in the end. I’m going to go get the vacuum now to destroy the evidence of the chips I ate while writing this. I just wanted to say once again thanks to Graeme for inviting me over and I’m hoping to see what he thinks of my little project sometime soon.

Guest Blog! Kirsten Imani Kasai

Kirsten Imani Kasai's 'Tattoo' is one of a few books that I'm working through, at the moment, so you can expect a review up in the next couple of weeks I reckon :o) In the meantime, I asked Kirsten if she would like to contribute a guest post here and the answer was yes! I'm really glad Kirsten agreed to blog here as, for one day only, the blog heads in an unexpected and more than slightly alcoholic direction. Check it out and then check 'Tattoo' out as well...

To celebrate the recent launch of my second novel, Tattoo, I decided to “import” some of my unique creations from the world of the Sigue to our own and serve them at the book release party. Well-versed in the imaginary properties of “strawberry milk” the question was how to reproduce a substance whose ingredients aren’t even real? To develop the drugs Chen peddles in Tattoo, I turned to a trusted research source, http://www.erowid.org/, “an online library containing tens of thousands of pages of information about psychoactive drugs, plants, and chemicals…”


I decided on a unique combination of plants and herbs to be distilled into a syrup: Tabernanthe iboga, from Africa, is a bitter, hallucinogenic shrub that can cause numbness to the skin and mouth. South American ayahuasca is mixed with other herbs to produce a psychotropic brew. Galangal is a rhizome, similar to ginger. You’ve probably seen slivers of it floating around your Thai tom yum soup (mmm, tom yum). It’s purported to have very mild hallucinogenic and aphrodisiacal properties. Dog-thistle berries are the magic, fictional ingredient—juicy, crimson cranberries that pack a mood-altering punch.

“Strawberry milk, Zarina thought, was like cranking the flames beneath your brain. Everything took on this lovely pink sheen—your whole body felt warm and deliciously alive. Tongues and fingers became highly sensitive, and everybody was your best friend. Strawberry milk made the House of Pleasure a play palace of throbbing, open and willing bodies…” –TATTOO

So what would strawberry milk actually taste like? In my mind, it’s a cordial-like liqueur tasting of berries, and black and red currants, deep rose in color, slightly sweet and thick, and buzzing on the tongue. It would impart calm, sensual expansiveness, increased pleasure and a general sense of goofy well-being, although like any drug, taken in the wrong amount or mixed with incompatible substances, it would have the potential to turn nasty and cause anxiety, heart palpitations and hallucinations with jaw-grinding intensity.


Leery of the potential legal and health complications of mixing up my own hallucinogens and serving it to the public (getting busted for running an herbal meth lab isn't exactly the kind of publicity I'm looking for), I searched for a reasonable (and safe) substitute. Nestle Qwik would have been the obvious choice—I loved the stuff as a kid, but the drink served in the clubs and pleasure houses of Neubonne was clear. Google delivered—“how to” recipes for making Portuguese milk liqueur.

 I added whole, organic milk, strawberries, organic cane sugar and vodka to a large jar and let it sit in the cabinet for two weeks, shaking it every day. It took four hours of straining through mesh and paper coffee filters to remove all the solids and extract a lovely, sticky pink liqueur. I also made a chocolate milk liqueur using unsweetened cocoa powder and chopped, 70 percent cocoa chips. The strawberry was good but too sugary for me. The chocolate was better, smooth and sweet with a distinctive, malty taste. It was a kick to pour these otherworldly cocktails into tiny shot glasses and serve them to my guests—an enticing cross-over from the fantasy world to the real world. I’m tempted to create more recipes from the Sigue, maybe dabble in making a special cake for their New Year’s celebration, Haymaz, a week-long festival of feasting, dancing, partying and prayer.


I’ll definitely make more milk liqueur, this time with a new array of nonfictional ingredients: bourbon, heavy cream, caramels or toffees and black cherries. Maybe this time, my real-world experimentation will flavor the fictional world and inspire my characters to make toffee liqueur to serve at their parties. I hope they invite me!

Kirsten Imani Kasai is the author of the science-fiction/fantasy novels “Ice Song” and “Tattoo”, published by Del Rey/Random House. Connect with her via Facebook.com/kirstenimanikasai or www.IceSong.com.

Guest Blog! Simon Marshall-Jones (Spectral Press)

After having reviewed a couple of the chapbooks from Spectral Press (and enjoying them) I found myself wondering just what it was that led Simon Marshall-Jones to set up Spectral Press in the first place... and why ghost stories? I also found myself wondering if Simon would be happy to contribute a guest post here that would answer my first question; luckily for me, Simon was only too happy to oblige. Check out what he has to say...

Life is full of odd little twists and turns, and the birth of Spectral Press is no exception. So why, when there are already hundreds of small independent presses out there (not to mention the ‘e-presses’), did I decide to start up my own imprint?



Perhaps I should begin by winding back the tape to just over a year ago, to last year’s FantasyCon in Nottingham in fact. I was more of an aspiring writer then, and the thought of a) becoming a publisher and b) editing other people’s work were the lowest items on my long list of ambitions. I was also reviewing books for a couple of websites at that time and more than a few books were thrust into my hands. Of the thirty or so I came away with, the products of two publishers stood out: Ray Russell’s Tartarus Press and Nicholas Royle’s Nightjar Press, for completely different, but ultimately related, reasons. First, Tartarus produce some extremely handsome (and hefty) hardback volumes, the kinds of books that, because of the attention to detail and sheer quality lavished upon them, anyone would be proud to display them in pride of place on their bookshelves. Nightjar Press, on the other hand, specialise in a format that became the direct inspiration for Spectral: the chapbook. They, too, were produced to the highest quality, being as handsome as the Tartarus books, in my view. And I realised, after I’d reviewed these fantastic little booklets, that it was a perfect format for showcasing an author’s short story-writing talents. Additionally, they’d be great for allowing readers the chance to ‘try before buying’ those authors they’d heard about but whose work they either hadn’t encountered or weren’t sure whether they’d actually like them.


And so was sown a little seed, one which continued to germinate over the next two or three weeks, until I suddenly decided that setting up Spectral Press was more than a good idea. Despite my enthusiasm, I did still harbour some doubts, as I’d just wound up another business in January that same year, a record label that simply didn’t get off the ground for various reasons (not least of which was my inexperience in the music industry). Even my wife thought setting up another venture a bad idea, although she let me go ahead on the proviso that I had to raise all the funds myself. So, I started the ball rolling and the initial aim was to launch the first ‘issue’ at THIS year’s FantasyCon in Brighton.


Having decided that, I needed to hit upon what Spectral was going to publish. Genre publishing spans a very wide spectrum, but I thought that I’d go for something a little different – so, rather than concentrating on ‘horror’ as most people think of it, I decided I would aim more for the supernatural end of said spectrum. I took, as my initial cue, the work of Robert Fordyce Aickman (1914 – 1981). Many consider his literary output to contain elements of the supernatural, but he himself denied this. That was an idea I found intriguing: a ghost story with no ‘ghosts’ in the tale itself.


I’m also a fan of the stories of HP Lovecraft, a writer who created creeping dread and cosmic terror using suggestion and implication, rather than outright in-your-face horror. Add in to the mix the fact that I’d read a lot of ghost stories, of the classic ‘haunting’ type, when I was a great deal younger, stories which I remembered with some fondness (Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was a perennial favourite), and so my choice became obvious. It just struck me that this was a particularly fruitful direction in which to go. Don’t get me wrong – I like modern horror as well, being a big fan of early Clive Barker, but I think that there are plenty of publishers who cater to that kind of material already. I, as is entirely typical of me, wanted to tread a different path, a path that’s seen as being less frequented these days than of yore. And so, I began looking for stories that rely more on atmosphere, suggestion and implication than having everything splattered onto the page.


I’d built up a lot of goodwill amongst the authors I’d met through both Facebook and attendance at FantasyCon, so they were the first people I contacted. The response was incredibly positive – some even sent me a manuscript or two. Gary McMahon’s What They Hear in the Dark was one of the first sent to me, and I felt that it would be a spectacular opening gambit for Spectral. After a while, the project took on a momentum of its own and it was almost a certainty that something would indeed happen. However, there was one major obstacle: I had no money with which to do anything.


It was at that point that I came up with the subscription idea: exactly the same as people can subscribe to a magazine for a certain number of issues, I thought it might a great idea to offer potential readers the chance to ‘buy’ a year’s worth of chapbooks at a time. Having thought that up, even I pondered whether it was a bit cheeky, considering that I was something of an unknown quantity. Well, I needn’t have worried; not only did people start buying subscriptions almost immediately, but they were being bought in such numbers that I was able to start publishing a lot earlier than planned – in the January of 2011 instead of the September.


And I am glad to say that I went ahead with it – all three chapbooks so far have sold out, and Volume IV, Paul Finch’s King Death (which is due in December), is almost on its way there too. I have received a great deal of positive press for Spectral, which has validated taking that step to plunge into the heady world of publishing, as well as justifying all the hard work and effort I’ve put into it over the last year (including that of graphic designer Neil Williams). I’ve enjoyed every second of it – and now I have plans to publish novellas next year and then single-author collections in 2013. Exciting times are indeed ahead for Spectral Press.


The Spectral Press website can be found at: http://spectralpress.wordpress.com/ – hope you can drop by!

Simon Marshall-Jones is a UK-based writer, editor, publisher, artist and blogger: also a book, wine and cheese lover, music freak and is covered in way too many tattoos.

If I can find enough pennies down the back of the sofa I have every intention of taking out a subscription; based on what I've read so far I'd recommend you do the same if you're into supernatural fiction, no question about it :o)
 
Thanks Simon!

Guest Blog! Pat Kelleher (Author of 'No Man's World: Black Hand Gang')

Going back to June last year, I said that Pat Kelleher's 'Black Hand Gang' was 'a thoroughly entertaining tale that promises great things for the future' (check out the full review Here if you like). 'The Ironclad Prophecy' (sequel) will be with us imminently so I thought that now would be a great time to ask Pat if he fancied sharing with us where some of the ideas and inspiration, for the series, came from. Pat was happy to oblige (thanks Pat!) and gave us the following piece below. I'm looking forward to 'The Ironclad Prophecy' even more now :o)

IN THAT RICH EARTH, A RICHER DUST CONCEALED...


The No Man’s World series is about a battalion of British Tommies, the 13th Pennine Fusiliers, on the Somme in 1916. They go ‘over the top’ only to vanish along with a huge section of the battlefield, leaving behind a huge hole that became known as the Harcourt Crater and an even greater mystery. The battalion, on the other hand, find themselves and their section of trenches displaced to an inhospitable alien world and have to struggle to survive while searching for a way home.

Why World War One?

It came about through a swirling coalescence of ideas that slowly drew in more and more influences, but started with a few core inspirations with enough mass in my mind to kick-start the headlong rush of ideas.

I first became aware of some of the conspiracies and mysteries of the First World War back in the early 1970s through World of Wonder, a sister magazine to Look and Learn. They had a regular ‘Strange Stories’ feature. That was where I first came across things like the Piltdown man, Spring-Heeled Jack and the Tunguska explosion. It was there, too, that I first learnt of Percy Toplis, as well as the WW1 regiment that vanished into a cloud. But I was also reading comics and among the usual Battle Action stories of World War 2 daring do, was Charley’s War, a World War One story written by Pat Mills and drawn by Jack Colquhoun, following the experiences of young Charley Bourne during the Great War.

Those stories stayed with me and having to study Goodbye To All That, Robert Graves autobiographical account of his experiences in the First World War for ‘A’ Level, along with the War Poets, ensured that World War One became indelibly engrained in my head one way or another.

The Monocled Mutineer


Percy Toplis reared his head again in 1986 with Alan Bleasdale’s The Monocled Mutineer, starring Paul McGann. It retold the story of the small time criminal who volunteered as a stretcher bearer in the Royal Army Medical Corp and had a penchant for desertion and impersonating officers. He was also an alleged ring leader of the 1917 mutiny at the Etaples training camp in France when several hundred men ran riot, protesting at the cruel treatment of their trainers. He managed to avoid capture until 1920, when he was shot by police. There is, however, evidence to suggest he was nowhere near Etaples and was in fact with his regiment on the way to India at the time. The truth may not be known until the Government records are opened in 2017, an extraordinarily long time for such records to be sealed. It was a great starting place for a protagonist like Jeffries.

The Lost Regiment


There was also a book called All The King’s Men, by Nigel McCrery that came out in the early Nineties and detailed the true fate of the Sandringham company, formed from volunteers working on King George V’s estate in Norfolk. As part of the Norfolk Regiment they were dispatched to Gallipoli to fight the Turks. They were sent into battle and never returned. Contemporary eye witness reports claimed a cloud descended onto the battlefield and when it lifted the men were gone. After the war, it turned out that the eye witness reports were wrong; wrong day, wrong direction and the truth was much more tragic. The survivors of the Sandringham Company had been captured and executed by the Turks, their bodies dumped in a mass grave. But rather than let the unpalatable truth get out, the King and Queen decided that perhaps it was for the best that the mystery be allowed to remain and the myth to stand. So the Sandringham Company joined other World War One myths like the Angel of Mons; where the vision of an angel in the sky was supposed to have rallied the retreating British Expeditionary Force, and the Phantom Bowman – actually a short story by Arthur Machen, about the ghosts of Agincourt archers leading Tommies into battle, which was told and retold so often that the origin of the story was lost and it became real in the minds of many. Surely one more myth, like the disappearance of the Pennine Fusiliers, would be in good company.

Lochnagar Crater, La Boiselle


The creation of the Harcourt Crater, too, was also forged in the heart of a real event.


Prior to the battle of the Somme, the British had spent some time digging deep tunnels under the German stronghold on Hawthorn Ridge and filling them with sixty thousand pounds of explosives. At 7.28am on the morning of the June 1st 1916, the mine was blown. Earth was thrown almost four thousand feet into the sky and the resultant crater was ninety feet deep and three hundred feet across. To that date, it was the loudest human-made noise in history and the explosion was heard in London. Named after the trench where the mine had begun, the Lochnagar Crater has been preserved as a memorial and can be visited in France, today. Unfortunately, even that wasn’t big enough for me, so I drew further inspiration from Meteor Crater, near Flagstaff, Arizona.

Here Comes the Science Bit...


Having decided to use the First World War as a setting, it seemed not only natural but necessary to reference the Scientific Romances of the time, rather than contemporary science fiction, for inspiration. H.G. Wells was the first port of call, along with Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Edwin P Arnold, if not in specifics, then certainly in spirit. Then you can throw the net wider to include Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, W Somerset Maugham, Edward Bulwer Lytton, William Hope Hodgson and to a lesser extent, Jules Verne among others.

The sense of wonder they engendered was irresistible, depicting as they did a time when the world was still full of mystery and harboured dark corners beyond the reach of the sun that was slowly setting on the British Empire.

And don’t worry, the War poets leave their mark on the novels, too. Each chapter title of the books is a phrase or line from a war poem or song of the time. I like to see them as some kind of perverse Easter egg for anyone who, like me, had to study them at school. ; )

Thanks Pat!  Everyone else  - look out for 'The Ironclad Prophecy' in July, read 'Black Hand Gang' in the meantime :o)

Guest Blog! Adam Baker (Author of 'Outpost')

I reviewed the apocalyptic 'Outpost' last week (link Here) and couldn't put it down; the only reason I put it down is because it eventually came to an end. I wanted more though and thought it would be interesting to ask Adam if he wouldn't mind contributing a guest post about... you guessed it... the Apocalypse. I gave Adam free rein to address this one however he wanted and the end result was, well... check it out. There's certainly a great deal of food for thought here. Pardon the formatting, my computer had its own little apocalypse...

Perspectives of the Apocalypse.

Is there a coming apocalypse? Will the sun go out? Will the Earth be swallowed in darkness? Of course. It will happen to each of us in turn. A personal doomsday. We will endure our own individual Armageddon while lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by drip stands and ECGs, while the bustling world beyond our hospital room continues regardless. This, surely, is the root of the horror genre. Beneath the hyperbolic entertainment, the hoards of vampires, aliens and zombies, is a pre-occupation with mortality. Horror stories might be categorised as fantasy, but they demonstrate a clear-eyed appreciation of our precarious position in the world that plenty of supposedly realistic genres ignore.



Doomsday fiction thrives during times of catastrophe. The archetypal pandemic tale, Daniel Dafoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, was written in 1722. It is a fictional account of The Great Plague of London, however the events it describes (mass graves, mass suicides, an exodus to the countryside) were still within living memory. Dafoe’s novel is often treated as oral history.


The big-daddy of science fiction cataclysm, HG Well’s War of the Worlds, was also written during a time of existential threat. War of the Worlds was published in 1898. It was part of a phenomenon that came to be known as ‘invasion literature’, a body of popular fiction created during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrating a preoccupation with invasion from abroad. This was a period that saw a rapid expansion of German naval power, a threat reflected in novels like The 39 Steps, Dracula, and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.


In fact one can track the ebb and flow of western paranoia over the years by examining various productions of War of the Worlds. The original novel was published during the slow slide into the First World War. The second notable production, Orson Welles’ classic radio drama, was broadcast on Halloween 1938, and reflected a US fear of foreign attack borne out by the bombing of Pearl Harbour three years later. The 1953 movie was released in the dying months of the Korean War and was saturated with nuclear paranoia. The film featured the use of atomic weapons to repel the Martian invaders, and the central character was re-cast as a Manhattan Project scientist. The 2005 Steven Spielberg version added post-9/11 imagery. The movie featured dialogue references to terrorism and added a lengthy sequence involving a crashed passenger jet.


Dafoe’s A Journal of a Plague Year and HG Wells’ War of the Worlds both share a similar perspective. They are both stories of ‘little guy’ protagonists struggling to stay alive in a world gone to hell. The protagonist of Dafoe’s novel is a young man attempting to flee plague-ridden London and find refuge in nearby countryside. The hero of War of the Worlds is a London journalist struggling to survive the anarchic chaos of invasion and locate his wife. Both novels pre-figure the rash of found-footage POV movies which have become a standard feature of the apocalyptic genre, for example Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, The Last Broadcast, Cannibal Holocaust, and Rec.


This spate of found-footage movies is, of course, largely driven by technology. Narratives like Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead and Rec are only possible because the protagonists have access to light-weight digital camcorders. And we have been trained to accept this kind of shakey, poorly-focused subjective camerawork by news bulletins. The recent Japanese tsunami was considerably smaller than a massive tidal wave which swept across the Indian Ocean in 2004 and killed a quarter of a million people. Yet the Japanese flash-flood made a much greater impression on the global psyche. The reason is obvious. A combination of CCTV footage and camera-phone clips captured astonishing images of the tidal surge as it washed across Japan. Years ago, this event would be relegated to a paragraph in the foreign news section of a newspaper. But, thanks to cameras and social networks, we find ourselves on the streets, experiencing terror and confusion as the disaster unfolds around us. Similarly, the current civil war in Libya would, in times past, been consigned to the mid-section of a broadsheet newspaper. But thanks to mobile phone footage, we find ourselves sharing the dusty streets with placard-waving rebels, witnessing the bullet-strikes, blood and screaming.


This represents a welcome shift of perspective.


Compare two alien invasion disaster movies. Independence Day (1996) and Cloverfield (2008).


Independence Day was made during the complacently prosperous nineties. We have a God’s-eye view of the action. We follow the major players in an alien attack: scientists, generals, fighter pilots, the president himself. They defeat the alien invaders in a cathartic air-punch series of explosions. This wish-fulfilment is fun, but ultimately bogus. We know, deep down , that the cheap, implausible victory does not reflect the reality of life. The idea that the hero can defeat an entire race of aliens is an essentially a childish daydream of omnipotence and invincibility.


We instinctively understand, when we watch Cloverfield, that the reality of a disaster situation is chaos, panic and indecision. The hero of Cloverfield is an unremarkable guy struggling to survive in a city gone to hell. He is one of the crowd. He, like the narrator of War of the Worlds, is simply trying to cross a ravaged landscape and reach his partner. He has no hope of defeating the alien invader. He just wants to save his girlfriend and get to safety.


This, ultimately, is the great lesson of apocalyptic fiction. End-of-the-world stories are tales of tenacity and Stoicism. Skyscrapers topple, city populations are reduced to ravening undead, heroes face-down on-rushing death. Our lives may seem humdrum in comparison, but we wrestle similar anxieties. We may not battle zombies every day or navigate streets filled with smoking rubble, but we confront our own mortality each time we look in the bathroom mirror and inspect slackening skin and greying hair. Every human life is a story of disaster postponed.


A dark fate awaits us all.

Guest Blog! Jon Steele (author of 'The Watchers')

I've been dipping in and out of my copy of 'The Watchers' these last few days and what I'll say is that I haven't been able to get into the whole 'Angel' sub-genre... until now. I'm only a few chapters in but there is a lot to recommend 'The Watchers' already (I'd give you a blurb but the only one I could find was one line long, pick up the book instead). There was enough, in fact, for me to get in touch with Jon's publicist and see if Jon would like to write a guest post about how life pointed him in the direction that eventually produced this novel. See what Jon had to say below, quite possibly the most honest guest blog I've had the fortune to feature here...

So how does a guy from the high plains of Montana, who got through high school with damn near a straight D-minus average, then grew up to work as a news cameraman for British TV and travelled and worked in more than seventy countries across six continents (spending more time than he should have along the frontlines of some of the world’s more shit-hole places) end up writing a mystical-noir thriller about the last of the good angels hiding out in Lausanne Cathedral?


Step One: whilst in Baghdad on the day the war begins, he puts his camera on the ground and quits.

Step Two: he hides out in a small village in the south of France and takes long walks in quiet places. Drinks lots of wine, smokes enough dope to kill an elephant.

Step Three: drifts to Lausanne, Switzerland and drives by the cathedral as the bells ring the hour one night, and sees the shadow of a man in the belfry with a lantern moving around the tower and calling the hour over the sleeping town. And then, suddenly, he knows there is a story in his head, a story that pulls together all the disparate threads of a life lived around the world, a life that served as witness to violence and death visited upon tens of thousands of innocent human beings; a life now struggling with depression and post traumatic stress disorder… a life desperate for some truth or myth or legend, or just a story to answer the question: why is the world such a fucked-up place?

Then there’s Steps Four through One-Billion.

See, I grew up Catholic, with a capitol ‘C.’ My life was nuns and priests and Catholic schools. I learned to recite the Mass in Latin and served as an altar boy, the one very one who carried the cross at the head of processions and rang the bells during the consecration of the Holy Eucharist. I believed that bread and wine was transubstantiated into actual blood and flesh of Jesus Christ. I spent many lunch hours during grade school in the chapel on my knees begging for a sign from Jesus dying on the cross or the statue of Mary, or one of the saints. I would work myself into hypnotic and babbling states of true faith. Through the nights of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, I kept all-night vigils in the sacristy, where the tabernacle was left open to view the consecrated Eucharist. Jesus had been abandoned by most of his followers, he had been tortured and crucified and buried… I did not want Jesus to be alone in his tomb again. I wanted to be a priest, I wanted to care for the forgotten and heal the world.

But it didn’t work out.

First came rock and roll, then came sex, then drugs. By the ripe old age of twenty-two, I was living in New York, divorced with a four-year-old son and living with a woman who liked to pack my nose with cocaine and say things like, ‘Wouldn’t OD’ing on coke be the most beautiful way to die?’ She was the absence of light in my life and I was crazy about her. Mixed in was working as a postman (think Charles Bukowski on speed), a janitor in a primary school (think the guy with a mop in the Nirvana video), and a liquor store (think the faceless shop clerk you couldn’t remember it your life depended on it).

I liked working in the liquor store best. It was a night job and I could smoke joints and sell Mad Dog 20/20 to the bums who’d collected enough spare change to buy it by the pint. I didn’t really have a place to live so I slept on cases of whiskey and bathed myself as best I could in a sink the size of a lunchbox. Best part was reading books, lots of books, and listening to WNEW-FM every night in the days when FM radio was the real thing and not the mindless juke-box it is today. Jonathan Schwartz (he could segue from Sinatra’s ‘Come Fly with Me’ into Led Zeppelin’s ‘When the Levy Breaks’ without skipping a beat) and Allison Steele (the Nightbird who opened every program with poetry and an invitation to sail away to a place of wonderful dreams) became my imaginary friends. They ventured deep into albums, read poetry and prose, talked to me and only me, enlightening me with the great cosmic message, ‘We’re all reaching for something, man, and the truth is it’s already here, now. Just open your eyes.’ They had ordained me into the priesthood of the airwaves.

I had my mission. I went West, lied my way into a job at the KBCO-FM in Boulder. I worked six to ten in the evenings. I did my best to spread the word. I got good ratings and had a pretty big following. Then I got fired, and was without a job for two years. I wound up in Washington, DC and lied my way into another job. This one with ITN, London. Started off as a soundman, became a cameraman, then an editor. And then came a life I never could have dreamed. A wrote about it all in a book called, War Junkie - a life I can’t talk about anymore, unless it’s with someone I shared a dangerous road with, or a ditch, or a moment of fear, of horror. And that’s where these words began.

Now here I am, with a novel called The Watchers - the first installment of a trilogy, with the second book to be titled, Angel City, and the third, The Way of Sorrows.

Some people call it ‘fantasy fiction’. I take that as a fine compliment, though it’s not what I intended. If anything I was looking for Raymond Chandler does The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But as these things go, the characters took me down a different path.

But is fantasy is trying to hold on to that shred of light that you have seen extinguished in the eyes of the innocent all over the world, then fine, it’s fantasy. But for me, it’s more the acknowledgement of the one truth that has kept me alive through the darkest turns of my life: there is no heaven, there is no hell. There is only this place, and this place is all the paradise there is; born of a singular point of unknowable and eternal light that lives in each and every one of us.

Guest Blog! S.G. Browne talks about the influences behind his new novel 'Fated'.

A few weeks ago, I was asked if I would like to be part of the blog tour to mark S.G. Browne's new book 'Fated', of course I accepted! The plan was to read/review 'Fated' but I wasn't able to get hold of the book in time. If you read my review of 'Breathers' though, you'll know that I'm looking forward to getting my hands on 'Fated'; look out for a review later in the month...

In the meantime, Scott also kindly agreed to provide a guest post about the inspirations and influences that started him writing and ended up with 'Fated'. Here goes...

I’m often asked about my influences.  The authors and books that have inspired me or inspire me still.  And while the answer is an easy one, the thing is that I’ve grown up on movies and television as much as on books.  Maybe even more so, as I didn’t read much for pleasure until the summer before my sophomore year in college.

That’s when I discovered Stephen King.

Although I’d read Carrie years before, I didn’t become a fan of King until the summer of 1985, when I picked up The Stand.  That was the first time I ever had to stop reading a book to mourn the death of a character.  From that point on, I was hooked on King, and horror in general, and started consuming a steady diet that consisted of King, Koontz, Straub, McCammon, and F. Paul Wilson.  Then I read The Talisman.  While not my favorite novel by either King or Straub, I found myself so caught up in the story unfolding within the pages that the world outside of the book ceased to exist.  And I thought: “I want to make other people feel this way.”

That was the first time I realized I wanted to be a writer.

After graduation, I moved to Hollywood and got a day job and wrote for a couple of hours in the morning before work and at night and whenever I got the chance.  With a few exceptions of stories that were more darkly comedic, the majority of the short stories and novels I wrote over the next twelve years tended to be straight supernatural fare.  Ghosts and alternate realities and things that went bump in the night.

And then, in 2002, I read Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk.

Up until that point, I’d never read a novel that combined comedy and satire and the supernatural.  At least not in the way that resonated with me the way Lullaby did.  After finishing the novel, I thought about the handful of short stories I’d written that were a blend of dark comedy and the supernatural and I thought:  “He manages to pull this off.  I wonder if I can, too.”

That was what inspired me to take “A Zombie’s Lament,” my two-thousand-word short story I’d written a year earlier, and turn it into my fourth novel, Breathers, which became my first published novel.  It also provided me with the direction in which I wanted to take my writing, shifting from straight supernatural to dark paranormal comedies with a social context that pokes fun at humans and human nature.  And the writing that inspired me along this new path mirrored that.

In addition to authors such as Chuck Palahniuk and Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job, Bloodsucking Fiends), over the past decade I’ve been inspired by screenwriters Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich), Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), David O. Russell (I Heart Huckabees), and the comedies of the Coen Brothers (Fargo, The Big Lebowski).  I also love the writing and humor of the television series Seinfeld and Arrested Development, which I often find dark, subversive, and laugh-out-loud funny.

When shifting to my inspiration for Fated, there isn’t one moment or book or author I can point to and say, “Look over there.”  It was more a combination of several events that eventually coalesced into a singe idea: a journal entry in 2003 about a character who can see the future because he’s Fate; a scene written in a shopping mall in 2004 from the point-of-view of the same conceptual character; and the splitting of the often married concepts of fate and destiny into two characters.

The separation of fate and destiny came about as I began writing the first chapter, which takes place in a shopping mall much like the scene I wrote in 2004.  For the most part, people think of the concepts as one in the same.  But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like fate and destiny should be different concepts.  After all, fate carries these negative connotations (a fatal disease; a fate worse than death), while destiny implies a much happier outcome (he was destined for greatness; it was her destiny).

Plus, you never hear about anyone being “fated for greatness” or suffering “a destiny worse than death,” so it just made sense that there should be a distinction between the two.  And that Fate would be overworked and frustrated dealing with his single-term Presidents and one-hit wonders, while Destiny tormented him with her Super Bowl MVPs and Pulitzer Prize winning authors.

That distinction was one of the most important influences for Fated, as it formed one of the central concepts upon which the story is based.  Of course, I realized that Fate and Destiny couldn’t exist without associates, friends, and co-workers.  So I created characters that included Karma, Death, Lady Luck, Honesty, Love, Secrecy, and most of the Deadly Sins, among others.

I had a lot of fun personifying abstract concepts and imbuing them with unique characteristics.  I laughed a lot.  And that’s what I enjoy doing most in my writing: making myself laugh.  If I happen to tickle someone else’s funny bone, then that’s a bonus.  And if I can make someone laugh, maybe even get them to lose themselves in the story, then I feel like I’ve done a good thing.

Thanks Scott! Like I said, keep an eye open for my review of 'Fated', probably in the next couple of weeks or so. Here's the blurb to be going on with,

Over the past few thousand years, Fabio has come to hate his job. As Fate, he's in charge of assigning the fortunes and misfortunes that befall most of the human race - the 83 per cent who keep screwing things up. And with the steady rise in population since the first Neanderthal set himself on fire, he can't exactly take a vacation. Frustrated with his endless parade of drug addicts and career politicians, it doesn't help watching Destiny guide her people to Nobel Peace Prizes. To make matters worse, he has a five-hundred-year-old feud with Death, and his best friends are Sloth and Gluttony. And worst of all? He's just fallen in love with a human. Sara Griffen might be on Destiny's path, but Fabio keeps bumping into her - by accident at first, and then on purpose. Getting involved with her breaks Rule No. 1 - and about ten others - setting off some cosmic-sized repercussions that could strip him of his immortality...or lead to a fate worse than death.

If it's anything like 'Breathers' then I'm in for a good read.

Guest Blog! David J. Williams

Once the baby stops screaming for two minutes I'll be getting stuck into 'The Machinery of Light', the concluding part to a trilogy that I've been following since just after this blog began! If you like William Gibson, Richard Morgan or a mixture of the two then you owe it to yourself to give these books a go!
In the meantime, I thought it would be cool to see what David himself had to say about the sources of inspiration and influence that led to the series. Luckily for me, David thought that would be pretty cool as well. Here's what he had to say for himself...



Thanks to Graeme for the space, and congratulations on the arrival of his new addition to the family! Over here at AutumnRain HQ, I'm working on unveiling my own 'offspring', THE MACHINERY OF LIGHT, which completes the trilogy that began with THE MIRRORED HEAVENS and THE BURNING SKIES. And I thought it might be interesting to talk about the Autumn Rain trilogy as a hybrid work that combines several elements, drawing on my favorite influences, and whipping them up into one big stew:

Cyberpunk: I think anyone who writes near-future SF is writing cyberpunk by definition. And yet old-guard cyberpunk's focus on rival corporations battling each other in an age of weakened/vanishing nation-states never quite rang true to me. .. and makes even less to me now that we seem to be entering upon a new age of cyberwarfare (witness Russia's shutdown of the Georgian nets in 2008). Rather than being mercenary street samurai, my hackers are all intel agents working to Keep America Safe. Of course, that brings us to ..

Espionage: I grew up on Cold War thrillers – Deighton, LeCarre, etc., which had a marked influence on the direction I took with the Autumn Rain trilogy. I used to warm up for writing sessions by re-reading pages from LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, so when my agent sold the trilogy to Bantam as "LeCarre on sci-fi crack", it couldn't have made me happier.(I'm still working on finding a good dealer for sci-fi crack, though.) But of course this is espionage in the 22nd century, so the enemy could be inside your head already. And those memories of yours? – let's just say you'd be wise not to trust them completely…



Military SF: I find the Manichean world painted by a lot of military SF to be somewhat tedious, in that real life tends to be more complex than Forces of Good battling the Evil Hordes. But at the same time, I love a great battle sequence, and was really looking to raise the bar here, with supersonic maglev trains beneath the Atlantic, powered armor slugouts at the lunar south pole, O'Neill cylinders with asteroids stapled to their poles and as much cool weaponry as possible. Which leads me to:

Space warfare: Not exactly a separate category—and frankly, not even fiction – but this is where the books had their genesis, when I became fascinated by how the center of gravity of modern warfare is inexorably moving into space. The orbits are already militarized—every time an American GI uses GPS, that's drawing on space's militarization – but the question remains what it's going to look like when nations (and insurgents) start putting weapons up there. That this is likely to occur in tandem with the maturity of directed energy weapons (e.g., lasers, particle beams, etc.) is almost certain to put international tensions on an absolute hair-trigger. My Earth-Moon system is an armed camp, divided between the two superpowers. . . .and last year, I also released an essay on my website that details the likely evolution of warfare's next stage (and presented it at the National Academy of Sciences and the Library of Congress last year, which was a lot of fun).

Video games: A totally separate medium, sure – but it's where I got my start. A quirk of fate put me in the cockpit of Relic Entertainment's Homeworld franchise back in the day; I have story concept/co-writer credits on the first game, and was a contributing writer on the Homeworld 2 sequel. That experience taught me all about the importance of spectacle .. . . and it also made me contemplate an approach to characterization and story where one holds back key elements in order to draw the reader further into the narative – to make the reader function in some ways as a character – as they do in video games -- in that they're the only one who has the vantage point necessary to see across the strands of interlocking conspiracy woven through the books….

But video games also left me eager to render some of the books' content in a visual medium. Not only does my website feature a lot of cool art relating to the trilogy, but I'm also pleased to unveil this kick-ass trailer created by one of the visual-sound maestros behind Homeworld, my friend Paul Ruskay. Roll 'em for MACHINERY OF LIGHT. . .



And thanks again Graeme!

No worries :o) You can check out David's website over Here and like I said, I'll let you know what I thought of 'The Machinery of Light' as soon as I've got a spare second to read it...

Guest Blog! Gail Z. Martin

Gail Z. Martin (author of the 'Chronicles of the Necromancer' series) was the latest author to very kindly agree to supply a guest post for the blog, thanks Gail! I left the 'post remit' open ended, to see what I got back, and got myself a very interesting piece on vampires. Have a read and see what you think...

Why a good vampire never goes out of style

Given that vampire stories have been told in just about every country on every continent across thousands of years, I think it’s safe to say that something about vampires has captured the human imagination.

Over time, the attributes we focus on with vampires change, but the overall concept has stayed amazingly intact. If you read the old tales, the legends and folklore, the vampires are often menacing, ugly and have exceptionally bad breath, but other legends give them the ability to appear beautiful, and co-mingle their need for blood with the attributes of an incubus or succubus. While most of the popular vampires in fiction today veer toward the good looking and sexy side of the legend, pretty much every retelling shows a darker side of power and hunger.

I think there are a lot of reasons we’re drawn to vampires. Most of the time, they’re shown to be clever, beautiful and powerful, with wealth and sophistication accumulated over lifetimes. They don’t get sick and die, and they can stand back from the tumult of daily human life with detachment, taking a long view of things. Politics, petty bickering, even the rise and fall of kings become trivial irritations to vampires, while mortals who feel their fates controlled by such things have difficulty rising above the mundane.

At the same time, vampires retain humanness many other “monsters” lack. It doesn’t require a big stretch of the imagination to envision the loneliness of outliving one’s friends and relatives or even one’s own era. Many people have felt the condemnation of religious purists who take issue with the essential nature of what they are, without regard to how they live their lives. It’s not difficult to imagine that someone who has superior strength, speed or power could become ruthless, but we’re intrigued by the vampires who cling to honor, friendship and love because those are the qualities life does its best to pound out of mortals as well.

Who would you be when the markers of identity we take for granted are wiped away by time? When you’ve outlived your family, your contemporaries, perhaps even your nation, kingdom or empire, and maybe your religion? If you had immortality, what would you make of yourself? If clinging to your humanity made you vulnerable, would you do it?

The vampires that intrigue me are the ones who wrestle with the choice between retreating into their power where they are safe, both emotionally and physically, and those who choose to keep the best parts of their humanity, to love, to care about the consequences of temporal issues on the lives of people around them, and to a personal sense of honor.

My personal view of the vampire is as an archetype for someone who has suffered intense physical or mental trauma or abuse, and who stands at a moral crossroads. Does he side with the oppressor or abuser and lash out at others to ease the pain, or does he take the more difficult road to regain humanity by siding with the victim and choosing to feel love, compassion and suffering? Does he use his wealth and power to protect himself and turn his back on others, or does he become a champion and a protector for others who lack his strength and wealth? While some people live out a more made-for-TV-movie of that kind of choice, I think it comes in one form or another to each of us, after life has knocked us around for a while. And while Bones McCoy cautioned that “Evil usually wins unless good is very, very careful,” I choose to put my money on the hero.