Category: Guest Post
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Out today – Philip Palmer’s Artemis
by - December 2nd, 2011
Artemis is the heroine of my fifth novel for Orbit Books, and she’s a lot like me in many ways. She’s a cool, sexy, superfit, ruthless, murdering bitch who loves reading books.
Okay, she’s a lot like me in ONE way. I also, um, love reading books.
I find I’m naturally attracted to characters with a hint of evil in their souls. Like Lena, or indeed Flanagan, in DEBATABLE SPACE. Or Saunders in RED CLAW. Even Sharrock in HELL SHIP is a warrior, and hence a cold blooded killer.
Some of the characters I’ve created in these books are, however, Good Guys. Version 43, for instance, in the novel called (would you credit it?) VERSION 43 is an honest cop in a dishonourable world. He may have flaws but he’s not corrupt. In fact his main flaw is that he’s not nearly corrupt enough. He is, exasperatingly, too good to be true; because he’s a cyborg and not a true human. But, as time goes by, he gets more and more human…and that makes him, in my view, easier to warm to. And he’s also very good at his job, of enforcing law and order, usually by killing people.
Artemis, though, is very much at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum of amorality. She is a one woman killing machine. But does that make her an unsympathetic character? Well, I’d argue not. Because she has reasons for what she does. Good reasons…
But she’s flawed, without a doubt. Highly flawed. Murderous – sometimes selfish – obsessive – and vengeful. I like characters with flaws; perhaps because I am myself a character with many flaws… And I believe firmly that characters who are nice and full of virtue aren’t the ones we root for when we read stories. That’s why Satan is the one we cheer on in Paradise Lost, not those wretched angels; certainly not God.
Mulling on this theme, I’ve coined the term ‘Rootability’, to refer to that special quality in a character that makes us want to root for him, or her. Tyrion Lannister (in George R. R. Martin’s Games of Thrones series) has it in abundance. Eddard Stark is far more heroic. Daenerys is more exotic, and has those wonderful dragons. But Tyrion is the evil dwarf we love to hate; he’s the underdog; he’s the smart one.
Harry Potter, for my money, DOESN’T have Rootability. He’s too powerful. He’s too nerdy. He has those glasses. I’d like those stories much more if Hermione were the heroine – the ‘little girl’ who no one takes seriously but who always wins the day. But then again I’m strange; and JK Rowling’s fans seem to like Harry’s books just the way they are. Read the rest of this entry »
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The Horrible, Horrible Roots of the Science Fiction Genre
by - November 14th, 2011
Last month, I posted a piece on my own blog highlighting some of the real people and places from history that show up in The Edinburgh Dead, including a dastardly graverobber called Merry Andrew and houses of ill-repute called the Holy, Happy and Just Lands (the Scots had a rather dry and ironic sense of humour even then).
But shortly after posting it, I realised I’d left out arguably the most interesting fragment of historical truth lurking in the whole novel. Annoying in one way – because when I first started thinking of doing that post I made a mental note to be sure to include that particular snippet, and then … didn’t, obviously. D’oh! – but fortunate in another, because on reflection it’s worth more discussion than I would have given it over there, and probably deserves a post of its own here at the happy home of Orbit on t’Web.
So: here comes the tale of Mathew Clydesdale, his gruesome fate and what it has to do with the very beginning of the whole science fiction genre we know and love today. Never heard of him? I’m not surprised; neither had I, until I began researching The Edinburgh Dead. But trust me: it probably won’t take you long to realise how he connects to the origins of science fiction. Read the rest of this entry »
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The Birth of the Comarré
by - November 2nd, 2011
Kristen Painter’s House of Comarré series continues this month with FLESH AND BLOOD. Book 3, BAD BLOOD, will be available in December. You can keep up with Kristen at the official Facebook page.
One of the questions I get asked most often is where the idea for the comarré came from, these hybrid humans bred to be blood slaves for the vampire nobility. Usually I say that I’ve carried the idea of Chrysabelle around in my head since college, which is true, but that was just a blurred image of a woman in a slinky white dress dipped low enough to reveal a gold tattoo on the small of her back. It wasn’t the comarré, exactly. More like the seed that grew into Chrysabelle. Read the rest of this entry »
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Interview with Uri
by - October 26th, 2011
In honor of my Days of the Dead blog tour, I’d like to introduce you to one of my vayash moru (vampire) characters from the Chronicles of the Necromancer and Fallen Kings series. Vayash moru play an important part in my books, aiding–and sometimes opposing–Tris Drayke and Jonmarc Vahanian.
Here, I’d like to introduce you to Lord Uri, a member of the Blood Council. In life, he was a thief and a card sharp, and in death his ethics have been questioned even by others on the Blood Council. He is not overly fond of mortals, especially not Jonmarc Vahanian, with whom he has repeatedly sparred verbally.
Q: What has immortality taught you?
A: Mortals never learn. This creates great opportunity for those who do.
Q: You have repeatedly shown disdain for Jonmarc Vahanian, yet in the end, you have grudgingly chosen to side with him rather than against him. Why?
A: Jonmarc Vahanian annoys me. I knew his kind quite well when I was mortal. And while he made a lot of money for me when I bet on hi back when he was a Nargi fight slave, I find him arrogant in his abilities. But I have to admit, he is good at fighting. And after last year’s vayash moru insurrection, I find myself owing him–a damnable situation.
Q: Like most of the Blood Council, you chose to ally with the mortals of the Winter Kingdoms against the Temnottan invaders. Why?
A: In this, the living and the undead have common cause. Temnotta will not be a kind master if the northern forces prevail. I endured far too much of that kind of oppression in Nargi to serve another such master. Once again, to my great annoyance, I find Jonmarc Vahanian and I to be on the same side.
Q: What is your biggest disappointment about immortality?
A: That despite superior strength and speed, my kind still fall prey so easily to those who would destroy us.
Please check out my Days of the Dead online blog tour—there are lots of other free downloads, drawings for free books, excerpts, interviews and fun—details are at www.ChroniclesOfTheNecromancer.com
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Form, Structure and Scouting
by - October 25th, 2011
“What I love about this,” the director said, “is the form of the piece.”
I locked my expression into ‘polite neutral’ and tried nodding and smiling. We were in a scout hut in Kew, rehearsing a play that I’d written for a reading in a few weeks time, and the director was twiddling a pencil between his fingers in the manner of a repressed creative genius just waiting to strike that rogue comma with the sharpened point of HP.
“I love the way the form and the structure both reflect the cascading nature of the language and narrative as it builds out of control from the prime inciting incident to the moment of character curve completion.”
I kept on smiling. This was, I felt, the most polite thing I could do under the circumstances. I feel I should add that the director on this particular literary project was nothing if not brilliant. A damn good director, a very good bloke and a man I would happily write for again. But, and this was a bit of a sticking point for me, he also knew damn more about writing than I did.
This is not the same as being able to write – he confesses that he can’t write for toffee – but on the other hand, he’d had a lot more training in the area by which he was able to discover this truth. Whereas I have always just… muddled by. Working with him was, therefore, something of a painful reminder of a constant truth… that sometimes being a good writer, is not the same as being a good author.
Talking about your literary works is, I personally think, one of the hardest things a writer has to do. There are a lot of problems stacked against you, of which the first and usually most deadly, is personal bias. As the writer, I naturally know, as no one else can, that my epic, 700 page-long tome – ‘What I Did That Tuesday Afternoon When I Had Gastroenteritis’ – is nothing short of a scintillating work of literary genius. My heart, my soul, and quite possibly other bodily fluids, judging by the title, have been poured into this, along with a great deal of time and a lot of earnest thought. When, therefore, my editor turns round and suggests that it’s a light-hearted romp beside sold alongside ”Funny Jokes For Farting Fathers’, a certain blindness overwhelms my otherwise calm literary judgment. Under these circumstances, answering questions coherently about ‘Tuesday Afternoon’ and why it and it’s puce-coloured cover are sat in the Silly Section of the bookshop, and even the most thoughtful of authors struggle to see through their own bias to a clear and sensible reply. Read the rest of this entry »
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Ten Things I’ve Learnt about Writing about Death
by - October 10th, 2011
I’ve written about Death a little bit these last few years, just in case you hadn’t noticed, and I’ve learnt a thing or two, or (to tie in with the title) ten.
1. People have to die.
Or Death just twiddles its bony thumbs, and starts a lawnmowing business. And then people die either of boredom, or because you’ve kind of ripped off Terry Pratchett a little bit, and you’re answering emails asking if you realized that that was the plot of Reaper Man (sort of).
2. Death isn’t a joke.
Death can be cruel, ridiculous, and tragic, but if you treat it as a joke, it becomes meaningless. I was writing comedy, but not farce. Death’s the punchline, but it isn’t the joke. Though sometimes you just want to tell the one about Death walking into the bar – it’s a real killer.
3. Death wants all the cool lines.
Seriously, it does. I think the moment a character says, “ I am Death,” there’s a certain amount of inescapable gravitas. Though if it then reveals that it can’t really play chess all that well you’re undercutting it a bit – unless you have this story where Death has entered a chess tournament in order to win enough money to say an orphanage from evil property developers. Remember, with cool lines comes great responsibility.
4. Not everyone dies every day.
Even in a book about Death. Death itself isn’t a story, it’s an ending, or a beginning (depending on how you want to look at it). People die, people live to die another day, or something like that.
5. Death isn’t dying.
Death really isn’t dying – dying through illness or accident is the sort of stuff life manages (you’ll notice how life doesn’t usually bother with the proper noun, it figures it doesn’t need the capitalization to sound important, life’s a bit smarmy). Death can be an ending to suffering. It’s not the suffering itself. People often get the two mixed up. Which is why Death is frequently regarded as an object of horror, or even a monster. But don’t blame the messenger. Death’s really just there to keep the dead company until they pass onto the other side/place/state of being – it even keeps a game of travel Scrabble in the pockets of its cloak*.
6. Death hasn’t had a pale horse since it bought its first car in 1928.
Hardly surprising, I mean, horses are high maintenance, and my Death lives in a city that isn’t exactly horse friendly, and when was the last time you saw a stables outside a morgue, mortuary, gym or anywhere else in town?
7. People have been writing about Death since writing began.
Death, the Underworld, and dying they’ve been obsessions of people and cultures for a very long time. I guess that’s what happens in a world where things die. There’s a rich history of Death in mythology and popular culture. Everything from Ankous to Psychopomps and sparrows. Actually you’d be hard pressed to find anything that hasn’t been used as a symbol of death – except, maybe toothbrushes.
8. Scythes are kind of cool.
They really are, there’s lots of excellent words that concern themselves with scythes, like did you know that the shaft of a scythe is called a snath? And that to lop something off is to snathe. Next time you get a haircut tell them you want a thorough snathe, make sure they finish well above the neck.
9. Death is a good dancer.
Well, actually, no. Not that that matters because the Danse Macabre is really just a conga line, and that’s easy as long as you can kick in time with the music. However, Death has an exceptionally awesome taste in music. At least in my books it does. Every good death needs a brilliant soundtrack (hmm, I think I have the subject of my next blog post).
10. When writing about Death, you’re really writing about life.
Death is meaningless without life. You don’t get a great ending, narratively speaking, without something at stake – usually the bigger the better. In the Business of Death all life on Earth is threatened by an ancient and very angry god. There’s a great deal of irony involved when only Death can halt the Apocalypse. But I guess it’s true what they say there’s only two things you can count on in this life Death and taxes, and when did the taxation department last save the world?**
*This may not be Death Works canon.
**I’m sorry, I’m sure the Taxation Department is always saving the world. In fact, if there isn’t a series about a Paranormal Tax Investigation Agency there should be – just send me four percent of the royalties.
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The only right word
by - October 5th, 2011
First, I’d like to say that it’s Eli Monpress week over at Mel’s Random Reviews! This was entirely her own idea and I was flattered to take part. You can read reviews of the first three books plus an interview with me and a very swoon worthy meme about Eli, book boyfriend. All in all, very well done, and you really should check it out! – R
The other day I received the following question on Twitter “why did you add more “offensive” language from each Eli book instead of leaving it younger audience friendly?”
To say this threw me for a loop would be, as Eli would say, the bedrock of understatement. See, I go out of my way to try and keep the language in my books as clean as possible. This doesn’t mean the books are prudish (well, Miranda might be, but no one who’s spent one chapter with Eli Monpress could ever accuse him of being puritan), it just means that I steer clear of the sort of extreme violence, language, and gore that you find in darker fantasies. This isn’t to say I don’t have violence or unpleasant circumstances, I just don’t roll around in them. I leave that to Joe Abercrombie, who does it much, much better than I ever could.
As I explained to The Write Thing a while ago, keeping my books clean wasn’t a decision I took lightly. It all came down to readership. The long and short of it was that, while the Eli Monpress books are written for adults, with adult themes like paying the price for chasing your dreams, how not all love is healthy, and what it actually means to be uncompromising, I still wanted the series to be accessible to everyone no matter their age or who was censoring their reading. I didn’t want someone who could enjoy my work to turn away just because of stupid language choices.
But (as most authors will tell you) sometimes there’s only one right word, and when that word happens to be a word you can’t say on network television, the time comes to make an executive decision. For those of you wondering what word I’m talking about, the obscenity in question is bitch, and the person it was applied to was Benehime. Now, if you’ve read my books (and if you haven’t, it’s not exactly a spoiler), you know that Benehime is, in fact, a bitch. And when you get to read The Spirit War and Spirit’s End next year, you’ll be amazed by my restraint at only calling her bitch and not… other things I’ll refrain from saying here because my mother reads this blog. But yes, in Spirit Eater, Benehime is called a bitch, and very rightly so. So rightly so, in fact, that I’d actually forgotten I’d used the word until this question reminded me.
In all fairness to my poor reader, he was listening to the audio version, and after two books of straight up PG reading, the bitch can hit you out of nowhere (as bitches are want to do). While I am sorry the word came without warning, I’m not sorry I wrote it. It was the right word, the only word to use in that particular instance. Far more interesting than the actual bitch, though, was why I felt the need to break my cursing ban in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »
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The Big and the Little
by - September 23rd, 2011
For me it’s always about the big and the little, even before reading John Crowley’s amazing novel Little Big. As a kid nothing excited me more than thinking about how vast the universe was, and how small the world was, and how small my home town was within it, but that it was still part of this universe that included massive gas giants, black holes (who isn’t thrilled by those monsters) and super novas. I always had trouble fitting that into my mind (I still do) I positively ached with the excitement of it, but I had so much trouble expressing that, letting it out until I started writing.
It was writing that helped me contain the big and the little. And made me understand that one doesn’t really have much meaning without the other.
Read the rest of this entry »
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The Truth behind Theft of Swords and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
by - September 22nd, 2011
I’m honored and incredibly excited that Orbit’s release of the first book in my Riyria Revelations, Theft of Swords, has been selected as Library Journal’s Fantasy Debut of the Month for September.
In the conclusion of LJ’s review they said, “VERDICT: Fans of Fritz Leiber’s classic “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” novels should welcome the adventures of Hadrian and Royce. A winning debut for fantasy lovers.” This is not the first, and probably won’t be the last, time that my series has been compared to Fritz Leiber’s classics that were mainly published between 1940 and the mid 1970’s. As my series features two unlikely heroes, a larger fighter and a smaller thief, there are valid reasons to make correlations between the two.
But here’s my dirty, little secret…I’ve never read Leiber’s works, so any similarities are completely coincidental. I know. I know. You’ve just met me and already I’m admitting to what could be a fatal fantasy faux pas. Yes, I admit that I’m not an expert in all the classic fantasy that has come before I showed up. But my shame goes even deeper…I didn’t even know that F&GM even existed! Let me explain how I found out about them. Read the rest of this entry »
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Plumbing The Depths
by - September 21st, 2011
I don’t know exactly where Mal came from (other than the twisty recesses of my mind), but I can tell you what his building blocks were — a host of dark emotions: disappointment, anger, impatience, bitterness. As I mentioned in my first post about the events that led me to write Blood Rights, that book started as an outlet for my frustrations – something I highly recommend to those of you feeling bummed at the way things are going with your career! And since the bones of my heroine, Chrysabelle, were already developing into something very distinctly bright and full of light, I knew I couldn’t pour all that darkness into her.
Mal became the perfect receptacle. He is, to me, the embodiment of the dark, tortured hero. He’s got soul deep wounds that aren’t going to be healed in four hundred pages. If you don’t already know, he’s also a vampire, but he’s so much more than that.
Let’s back up. Let’s start when Mal was human, before his existence fell apart. I decided as his back story to make him a headsman. The job of executioner in the late 1500s, when Mal would have been alive, was one that both isolated and somewhat vilified the individual that held it. Superstition said that the executioner took upon him the sins of those he was paid to dispatch, the full weight of the souls of those rapists, murderers and thieves. Read the rest of this entry »
