My new novel, Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell, is out now. In it, Holmes and Watson are flung headlong into Clive Barker’s Hellraising universe to confront his most famous villains, the Cenobites. It’s the world’s greatest puzzle-solver up against the world’s greatest puzzle, not least in the form of the Lament Configuration puzzle box. Hopefully, it should appeal to fans of both franchises – but I also wanted the book to be a standalone, something that you could dive right into even if you know nothing about either. But I don’t want to spend the whole of this blog just talking about my work; instead I want to point you in the direction of a few publications you might enjoy if you pick up and like Servants. If you haven’t already read them, of course… Continue reading
Guest Post
Guest Post: “Writing Games vs. Novels” by Brian Hastings
For some reason, back in college, I had the audacity to think I could become an author. As if that was just one of the options available in the career center. It turned out finding any job at all was a lot trickier than I expected. But I knew how to program computers, so I ended up joining a startup video game company that we would later name Insomniac Games (because of how little we slept back in those days.) And Twenty-Two years later I’m still making video games.
But for the first time in my life, I can now say that I’m an author.
Song of the Deep is both a game and a novel, and each reveals different parts of a mysterious world. But creating a novel in conjunction with a game ended up being a challenging journey in itself. Continue reading
Guest Post: “Beginning, Ending and Extending Book Series” by Gail Z. Martin
With six different book series in various stages, it seems like I’m always contemplating beginnings, endings and extensions.
I’ve got a new epic fantasy series coming out in 2017 from Solaris Books (which I’m not allowed to name or reveal details about), so beginning a new book and starting a brand-new series have both been on my mind as I finish up that manuscript. In March, Shadow and Flame marked the final novel in my Ascendant Kingdoms epic fantasy series (Orbit Books), so wrapping up not just a single book but a story arc and a series is also fresh in my thoughts. The Shadowed Path (Solaris Books) is a collection of eleven of my Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures short stories that are prequels to The Summoner and my Chronicles of the Necromancer series, which has wrapped up (for now). Continue reading
Guest Post: “My Top 5 Sci-Fi/Fantasy Books” by Melinda Snodgrass
It was difficult to list my five top science fiction or fantasy books because there are so many books that I have loved. I’m going to make my criteria books that have touched emotionally me rather then books that I think are important in the field so there may be some odd choices.
Guest Post: “Progressive World-building: Screw Restoring Order to the Kingdom” by Jon Skovron
Now look, I love Shakespeare. Like, a lot. In fact, I was actually a classically trained actor who did a fair bit of Shakespeare back in the day (mostly the comedies, although I still think I could have killed it as Richard III). And not only did I act in Shakespeare, but my first Young Adult novel was called Struts and Frets. As in:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
My book was mostly about a kid in high school who starts an indie rock band while dealing with his grandfather’s dementia. But throughout the story, he’s reading Macbeth for a school assignment, and passages from it keep coming up relevant to his life. Because for a play mostly about killing people, it’s remarkably thoughtful. Continue reading
Guest Post: “Travel in Both Directions” by Malka Older
Infomocracy takes place across 17 different locations, only one of them in the United States. This is largely a function of the fact that, as someone who worked or consulted for international organizations for years, that was what my life was like. Over one ten month period in 2011-2012, I went to eleven different countries – three of them twice. So it made sense to me, while I was writing, that activists, anarchists, and political operatives working on a global election would have a similar itinerary. Continue reading
Guest Post: “Finding Burroughs” by Ren Warom
My first encounter with Burroughs was in the drawling, high-pitched lectures of Tom the Priest in Drugstore Cowboy. Of course, now I know Burroughs better, I figure he was playing himself. Not Tom, then: Bill. Bill the Priest. El Hombre Invisible. A modern day Buffalo Bill with words for bullets, playing out his last stand forever on the sun-baked, hard-packed desert of postmodern expression.
I saw Naked Lunch the movie before I read the book. God I love that movie, it’s one hell of a trip. I didn’t dig the book though, total DNF on the first try. Then I went to MMU as a mature student in my early twenties as a single mum of one, and I sort of collided with Burroughs headlong, ended up tangled together like I was trying be the same damn person. Continue reading
Guest Post: “Buffy, Books and Roleplay: On Childhood Influences” by Paul Krueger
As a fantasy author who grew up in the 90’s and 00’s, I come to you with all the classic touchstones you’d expect: Harry Potter, obviously. Scott Pilgrim. Animorphs. Buffy, Angel… hell, the whole Whedon canon. I watched VHS copies of the original cut of Star Wars until the tapes wore out, because that was a thing that could happen to screen media back then. I stayed up late on Saturdays to sneak episodes of Cowboy Bebop and Trigun on our spare TV upstairs. Was I anyone’s first choice for Homecoming king? Not so much. But who cared, when I’d gotten my hands on a new Gotrek & Felix paperback?
I could probably fill a whole book with a tour of my pop cultural influences — after all, Stephen King did it, and the result was one of the best texts on the craft of writing in the past twenty years. But today, dear Civilian Readers, I’d like to talk to you about another corner of my history where I cut my teeth as a writer: in the lost world of message board-based online roleplay. Continue reading
Guest Post: “The NOMAD Soundtrack” by James Swallow
I’m always in two minds about music when I’m writing. Some days, when my focus isn’t where it needs to be, I have to have as near to absolute silence as I can get in order to zero in on what I want to get down on the page. Other times, a little musical accompaniment is exactly what I need to prime the pump and get me writing.
I tend not to listen to songs when I’m writing scenes, because I find myself paying too much attention to the lyrics, and sometimes subconsciously assimilating the words into my own work. Orchestral and thematic stuff works a lot better. I have a massive collection of classical music and soundtracks that I will queue up into five-hour-long playlists. For example, working on my new thriller novel NOMAD, my working score included Salt (James Newton Howard), Inception (Hans Zimmer), Tron Legacy (Daft Punk), The Sweeney (Lorne Balfe), Watch Dogs (Brian Reitzell), Bangkok Dangerous (Brian Tyler) and The International (Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek & Reinhold Heil). Continue reading
Guest Post: “How I Write, and How It’s Changed” by Ian Irvine
I’m not sure when I had the idea of writing a fantasy novel, though I first acted on it in 1977 after reading Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara. My inspiration came from the sketchy map in the book and I decided to create my own realistic fantasy world, though worldbuilding soon became an obsession. I was supposed to be writing my doctoral thesis in marine science but I redrew my fantasy maps in greater and greater detail until they were the size of house doors. I had created the Three Worlds.
In 1979, on a train above the Arctic Circle in Finland, I wrote the first snatches of a story, including a scene that I later used – Faelamor’s dramatic defeat of Mendark in the abandoned city of Havissard. Then it stopped for nearly a decade. What with finishing my thesis, taking a demanding job that involved a lot of travel, children, and renovating a decrepit Victorian house in Sydney, there wasn’t time for writing.
But I had to write, and in September 1987 I began A Shadow on the Glass with a dramatic event – Karan, compelled by Maigraith, breaking into Yggur’s fortress of Fiz Gorgo to steal the Mirror of Aachan, a corrupt magical artifact that contained a deadly secret. I wrote three pages a day I’d have a first draft done by Christmas. Continue reading
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