US cover

UK cover

Today it really came home to me that there are just on 6 weeks to go until The Gathering of the Lost is published! That is, just under 6 weeks in the USA & Canada, and just very slightly over in the UK/AUS/NZ.

I “knew it” intellectually, but for some reason it hasn’t seemed quite real—possibly because there have been  so many other things happening in the “here and now.”  But seeing an advance post on the wonderful Beatties Bookblog the other day stsrted the process of ‘making it real’—if interested you can read that post here.

So now I’m thinking that I probably need to do something to get into that countdown mode. For The Heir of Night I had some ARCs (Advance Reader Copies) to give away, but that’s not the case this time around, so I shall have to put my thinking cap on …

But I can confirm that I will be doing a Big Idea post on John Scalzi’s Whatever blog on 29 March—and yes, there is actually a big idea for The Gathering of the Lost that is different from that for The Heir of Night, although I didn’t realise it myself until I’d finished writing the book. So it’s a kind of underground big idea—but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until 29 March to find out more! 😉

Meanwhile, if you want to read the Big Idea post for The Heir of Night again, it’s still here.

I recently discovered this quote from Alan Moore—and loved it so much I ‘just had’ to share it here:

“Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction, cowboy, detective novel.”

Oh yeah! (Air punches!)

Enjoy your Saturday, gentle readers! 🙂

Somewhat guiltily, I have to confess that this “just arrived’ some time ago now—but I have only “just unwrapped” the packaging so does that count? I think it does and so moving right along …

Blue Remembered Earth (Gollancz) is straightout Science Fiction from UK author Alastair Reynolds And yup, it’s Book One of a series, Poseidon’s Children.

Here’s the tagline: One Secret, Two People, An Infinity of Futures

And here’s what the back cover says:

“The Mechanism knows everything. It knows where you are. It knows what you are thinking, what you are feeling. There is no crime. You are safe.

But in a utopia like this keeping a secret can be a deadly business.

Geoffrey and Sunday Akinya want no part of their family and its wealth. The Akinyas have ridden Africa’s economic boom into orbit and beyond. Wherever humankind has gone in the Solar system, the Akinyas have profited.

…

But when their grandmother dies she leaves behind a secret that throws Geoffrey and Sunday into a desperate race against their family. A race run beneath the unblinking eye of The Mechanism.”

And there is even a trailer, here:

Blue Remembered Earth

It does sound interesting … and once I’ve read it I also hope to bring you an interview with Alastair Reynolds. So as the saying goes “watch this space.”  (I just realised that was probably a pun—but don’t mind me! ;-))

On January 16 I posted the very exciting news, here, that The Heir of Night has been nominated for the Gemmell Awards in both the Morningstar (Best Fantasy Newcomer) and Legend (Best Fantasy Novel) categories.

The Gemmell Awards have been established to honour heroic fantasy author David Gemmell—and to celebrate excellence in the heroic/epic fantasy genre.

As epic/heroic fantasy is very much The Heir of Night—and The Wall of Night series—heartland territory, I thought I’d talk a little bit today about why I consider it a great honour to be nominated for these awards.

It’s pretty simple really: I have loved David Gemmell’s epic fantasy writing for a very long time and consider his work one of the formative influences on my own enthusiasm for this style of fantasy.

You might say: how so? And that is a fair enough question, since someone picking up Legend or Waylander, for example, and putting it side by side with The Heir of Night might say: ‘But they’re quite different stories.’ In fact, I hope they do—but I still believe there is an influence there.

Because from the moment I first picked up Waylander and began reading (Waylander was my very first Gemmell) I was utterly absorbed: by the sweep of the story and by the sense of contending light and dark, but also because there were so many shades of human fallibility in between those extremes. And because David Gemmell wrote heroism—not larger than life remote heroes, but real, caught-in-the-moral-and-conflicting-value-system-crosshairs human beings who have to make difficult choices. And some of them, occasionally, make the right choices and that leads them—willingly or unwillingly—to being in the place and time that will also make them “heroes.” And they really are heroes, only grounded in that base of realism and struggle.

I also liked that sense, always present in Gemmell, that right and wrong is a choice we make, but that it isn’t always straightforward and it certainly isn’t easy. And I really liked the way that the characters’ choices are often around sacrifice and duty—The Thirty exemplify this, but it is a continuing theme for Gemmell characters. But David Gemmell’s stories also touch on the importance of friendship and love and their ability, in rare circumstances, to transcend the pressures of ambition and self-interest. The example that always stands out for me in this respect is the friendship between Tenaka Khan and Ananais in The King Beyond the Gate (which is possibly my favourite Gemmell novel.)

The grand sweep of story and adventure, difficult choices around right and wrong, sacrifice and duty—and the frail barques of friendship and love set against the  overwhelming seas of ambition and self interest: this is heartland David Gemmell territory. But it is also, I believe, heartland The Heir of Night territory as well. And that is why I feel so honoured that Heir has been nominated for the Gemmell Awards: because it was David Gemmell who showed me, through his writing,  that it was possible to tell great stories of this kind—and inspired me to write such stories myself.

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The "kitty"

I believe it is traditional, at this juncture, to exhort you to vote for Heir “else the kitty will get it.” But the said kitty being now in his 20th year, with days centred on a deeply ingrained pattern of regular sustaining snacks, much sleeping, the occasional leisurely stroll around the desmesne, and quality peeps time ‘on demand’—I am just not sure I could put his wellbeing at risk in so cavalier a fashion!

So instead I shall simply reiterate what I posted on January 16, which is that if you feel you can in good conscience do so, then I would love it if you felt able to click on the following links and vote now for “The Heir of Night.”

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The Morningstar Award:  to shortlist The Heir of Night for Best Fantasy Debut—vote here

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The Legend Award: to shortlist The Heir of Night for Best Fantasy Novel—vote here

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With respect to the Legend Award, I do note that my very good friend and fellow author, Mary Victoria, also has not one but two books on the list—Samiha’s Song and Oracle’s Fire, which are the second and concluding novels in her The Chronicles of the Tree trilogy. You can only vote once and obviously I can’t help hoping that you will vote for Heir. But Mary’s books are also very worthy contenders, so if you haven’t checked them out already then you should definitely do so—right away!  (I also note that both books are also eligible for Sir Julius Vogel and Hugo Award nomination this year—so you might like to have a wee think about that as well.)

An Interview with John R Fultz

First up, you may recall I  did a “Just Arrived” post for John R Fultz’s Seven Princes recently, here. Well now I am pleased to tell you that I have finally gotten my act together and sent John—a fellow epic fantasy enthusiast, writer and Orbit author—some questions for an interview: wOOt! I say ‘wOOt’ because I asked John ages ago if I could do an interview when his book came out and he has been Really Very Patient waiting for me to get my, um, stuff, together.  So with luck the interview should be posted next week.

Book Month Events Coming Up!

First of all I should really say that NZ Book Month is coming up, which is something I look forward to every year—and something I always try and particiapte in too, ie making my contribution to the wider writing community as an author. Last year I was privileged to be invited to deliver a series of workshops as the guest of the Dan Davin Literary Foundation and reported on a very enjoyable week spent in Wakatipu and Southland, here.

This year I have two events coming up.

Flights of Fancy—Kiwi Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror

SpecFicNZ have organised a Book Month Event right here in Christchurch on Sunday 18 March, with seven NZ speculative fiction authors reading at the Air Force Museum in Harvard Avenue, Wigram, from 1-3 pm. The line-up, in alphabetical order, is Diane Berry, Jennifer Fallon, Amanda Fitzwater, Liz Gatens, Jane Higgins, Helen Lowe and Paul Mannering. And a very big thank you to Catherine Ford of SpecFicNZ for putting the event together.

(Psst—I am hoping to read from The Gathering of the Lost which will be Almost Officially Out: so exciting!)

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And Then There’s “The Great NZ Book Race”, here.

“Are New Zealanders really only separated by 2 degrees?

Students from Katikati College (Bay of Plenty)  and Papanui College (Christchurch) will be supporting their local writers by reading, reviewing, and then passing on books , from person to person, until they reach the other school by the end of Term Three (see BOOKS ON THE RUN for complete list.) Their aim is to get their book read and reviewed by the most New Zealanders.“

Find out more by clicking the above link—but Thornspell is one of the books featured and you can see its feature page here. This is another really great NZ Book Month project and one I am honored to have been invited to join and am proud to support.

In this case, many thanks to Lee Murray and Piper de Mejia for getting the event up and racing.

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US cover

UK cover

And of course, The Gathering of the Lost will be released in the USA on 27 March and in the UK, Australia and New Zealand on 4 April — but more on that “anon.”

WHENAS in Silks My Julia Goes

WHENAS in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!

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by Robert Herrick, 1591-1674

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Today is Valentine’s Day and I wanted to choose a poem that was both “romantic” in tone, but also light hearted. I also wanted to go with this one because of the very different content given to the word “liquefaction” compared with what we have come to know, far less pleasantly, in Christchurch during the past eighteen months.

Robert Herrick was a 17th century clergyman and poet, and a member of the group of Cavalier poets known as the “Sons of Ben”—poets with an enthusiasm for the work of Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatist and poet, Ben Jonson.

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To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets around the world, click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

From the Residency Desk

It’s just on a month now since I posted about my big writing goal for 2012, here—namely that:

“I would like to try and complete Daughter of Blood, The Wall of Night Book Three, by 31 July of this year–without compromising on the quality of the work.”

I should add that 31 July is the end date for my current writer’s-in-residence stint at the University of Canterbury, so that is one reason for aligning my ‘big goal’ to that date.

I also talked last month about how I thought I might go about achieving the goal, including:

~ internet free writing time (keeping my residency office at the Uni internet free is the biggest part of that plan)

~ treating every month like NanoWriMo, ie aiming for a monthly target of 50,000 words on paper

So here’s the data for ‘month the first’ :

Overall word count for the month: 26,786 words

Chapters completed: 5, with the 6th well in train.

Highest New Word Count Per Day: 3200

Average New Word Count Per Day: 1100

(I almost always revise the previous day’s work and then write forward from there, so ‘new word count’ means on top of any revision done.)

Clearly 26,786 words is a long way from 50,000—but I am also very mindful that it’s not just about the quantity of words. It’s also, to paraphrase Coleridge, about getting “the right words in the right order.” So 1100 ‘right’ words in their ‘right order’ can be as valuable, if not more so, than 3000, or 5000, or 10,000 that need to be totally rewritten.

Having said that, getting words on the page at all, no matter their quality, is absolutely vital—as even having something (whether 100, 1000, or 10,000 words) that must be totally revised is still 100% further along the track than an empty page. A set word target can really help with that process—but it has to be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Another reminder that consciously embarking on the big writing goal has brought home, is that the project can’t all be about getting to the destination, ie the finished book. Completion is very important, certainly, and so too is getting one’s writing out there—but a big part of being a writer has to be enjoying and feeling rewarded by the actual process of writing and creating the work. An undue concern with word counts per day could potentially mitigate against that: a lot, in fact.

As always it’s about creative tension, walking that highwire between getting a book written at all and writing it right. This point seems “obvious”, a truism even as I post these words now. But the great thing about writing books is that with each one I am starting afresh as well as ‘making it new’—and the early stages, with all those blank pages still stretching ahead, is a very different place than the final reworking of a completed draft. And a good place to remind myself about what’s really important in the process.

So that’s it from month-the-first: close on 27,000 words and 5-6 chapters. Having said that, I’m pretty sure that one of the first things I’m going to be doing this next writing month is tearing up one of those chapters and if not starting again from scratch, at least rewriting it substantially. And the whole “no internet” thing—definitely part of the solution!

When I was updating my website yesterday, I was thinking about writing a short piece on “The Writer’s Life is Like …” And then I thought: “Nuh—because it’s so obvious!” (Plus done before by just about every other writer—big press, small press & indie–under the sun!)

I mean, of course the writer’s life is like any other small business! You do the book writing (and or doughnut selling, whiteware repairs et al) by day and everything else “after hours.”  (That’s night times and weekend, folks.) And run to stand still, or at least inch forward in small increments—because writing is a small business. So, duh!

While on the other hand,  not being a business at all. That’s because it’s also a vocation, ie most folk who write feel called or compelled to do so, regardless of whether it makes good business sense. Which, again of course, it usually doesn’t! Opportunity cost: high. Likely chance of ever breaking even let alone returning a  profit: low.

This of course means that you can look on the writing life as a ‘Lifestyle Choice.’ Or alternatively, as a ‘Life Sentence’—it all depends on one’s point of view. Also, possibly, on whether one can find someone else willing to underwrite one’s Lifestyle Choice. This could be called Patronage (grants, residencies etc fall into this category)—but more often it’s “Wife”, “Husband”, or “Still Doting Parent.”

Conclusion: the writing life (aka ‘being a writer’) is A Conundrum.

Or in the immortal words from the movie Shakespeare in Love: “It’s A Mystery.”

One, I suspect, of the world’s few remaining Great Unsolved Mysteries—and perhaps that’s ‘the answer’ to the Conundrum, because there is nothing quite so beguiling, or addictive, as a good mystery …

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Well, you have probably cottoned on by now to the fact that I am not in an entirely serious mood, and might even be accused of being tongue in cheek … Although like most jests, my ‘terribly important thoughts’ contain at least a grain of truth, possibly even more than that. But you see, here’s the thing: to find out for sure, you have to be willing to enter the maze and walk it’s paths for yourself—and to return to the mystery part of the conundrum, I’ve heard it whispered that everyone, on entering, is given a different ‘key.’  Which means that there is no universal truth about the writing life that anyone can share with anyone else—except possibly (I would go so far as to say ‘probably’) the one that Lilith Saintcrow tweeted the other day:

“Writing is not the problem. Writing is the goddamn solution. Get solving.”

“Oh yea!” I say. “And again: yea!”

And now, with post o’ the day done, could be time to go do some solving! 😉

10,103 earthquakes now since September 4, 2010 and still counting—now ain’t that something?

Details are as per the Christchurch Earthquake Map, here (explaining how it works) and here.

Monday 6 was Waitangi Day, the holiday that celebrates New Zealand’s founding as a modern nation, and in my blog post, here, I talked briefly about the importance of contemporary Maori writers in the NZ literary scene.

The day before I had discussed a few of my favourite retellings of the Arthurian legend, here, and yesterday I followed up with a few more favourites that draw on the Arthurian cycle without actually being retellings, here.

But doing the post for Waitangi Day and then following up with a traditional tauparapara/karanga as my Tuesday Poem, here, also got me thinking about the use of Maori myths and legends in contemporary New Zealand SFF–and a few of my recent favourites. (But I certainly haven’t read everything that’s out there, so if I miss your personal favourite, that’s probably why—but fear not, you can tell me about your picks in the Comments!) But otherwise, here goes!

Probably the most well known, recent retelling of a Maori legend would have to be Witi Ihimaera’s Whale Rider (1987), mainly because it was made into an internationally successful film in 2002. Whale Rider draws on the legend of Paikia, an ancestor of the East Cape’s Ngati Porou, who was reputed to have been saved from drowning in a canoe journey from Hawaiki (the ancestral homeland in Maori myth) and brought to New Zealand by a humpback whale, thereafter being known as ‘the whale rider.’ The novel tells the contemporary story of Kahutia Te Rangi Paikea Apirana, a twelve year old girl who is a descendant of Paikia and struggling to gain recognition from her conservative grandfather, Koro, in the leadership of their family line. You don’t think this is speculative fiction? Then all I would say is: read the book, especially the part about the actual whale riding. ‘In my book’ it’s at least a strong contender for the tag of magic realism.

In terms of the use of Maori myth and folklore in contemporary SFF, I can’t go past Karen Healey’s Guardian of the Dead (2010.)   I think it’s an excellent book—an intriguing mix of urban fantasy set right here in Christchurch, as well as in Napier in the later part of the book, that has been woven together with Maori legends of the patupaiarehe (fairies) and taniwha, as well as the myth of Hine-nui-te-Po, the Goddess of Death. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the critical replication of the myth of the trickster demi-god Maui’s (unsuccessful) encounter with Hine-nui-te-Po, is that it has been interwoven with the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Entirely successfully in my view, but I will leave you to make up your own minds—because if you haven’t read it already, then you should definitely read this book.

A third tale that I really enjoyed recently was Tina Makereti’s short story, Shapeshifter, which was included in the Tales for Canterbury anthology last year. As you may know, Tales for Canterbury was put together by editors Cassie Hart & Anna Caro as a fund raiser following the February 22nd Christchurch earthquake. To help promote the collection I featured intros to some of the stories on my blog (you can find them here)—but I could only do a selection and didn’t quite manage to include Shapeshifter. But in fact it was one of my absolutely favourite stories in the anthology—I loved the twist given to the story of Pania of the Reef, the ocean maiden (the Maori equivalent of a Greek nereid) who was the lover and secret wife of local (Napier again!) chieftain Karitoki. I also love the way Makereti captures a distinctively Maori ethos in the story, yet someone who has never been in New Zealand could still read and completely “get” the story.

Anyway, those are three of my favourites—another story sequence I am aware of is David Hair’s  The Bone Tiki  and The Taniwha’s Tear, which I understand draw extensively on Maori sources, but as I haven’t read them yet (mea culpa—so many books, so little time!) I can only mention them here. But if you’ve read them, or have other favourites you would like to discuss, please do so in the Comments. 🙂