I have no reason to post this other than that I thought it was cool. Full credit to artist David Hsu Yen for the artwork.
Monthly Archives: June 2011
Well, season one’s over. What did you think? Spoilers Ahoy in the comments section!
As they’re wont to do, Suvudu has released another 50-page excerpt of an exciting new novel on their website. This time around, it’s Mark Charan Newton‘s City of Ruin, one of my favourite novels of last year!
‘Last year?’ you say.
‘Well,’ I respond. ‘You see, Newton’s books are released about a year ahead of time in the UK and Canada… so I get to read them early!’
‘I wanna read them early!’ you whine.
‘Then rejoice! Just check out The Book Depository. Free worldwide shipping from the UK! Even better, if you like City of Ruin, you can also order its sequel, The Book of Transformations, which won’t be out in the US for at least another year!’
‘Thanks, Aidan!’ you shout. Absolute jubilation warps your face and tears of joy rolling down your cheeks. ‘You’re an amazing blogger and advocate of great Fantasy novels.’
‘Yah, I know.’
Newton has some interesting thoughts on City of Ruin:
[City of Ruin] is about a siege. It’s a war story. Villiren is a city under threat from an outside force, a race not natural to the world in which the book is set. I invested a lot of the narrative in building up to the war, because to make this war story more powerful, I added in some personal stories. The reasoning was that if the reader was invested in characters beforehand, then they would care when the invasion begun and their lives are at threat. So there are love affairs, a crime plot (with a serial killer), a gang leader whose marriage is breaking down uncontrollably.
You can read the first 50 pages of City of Ruin, and read the rest of Mark’s thoughts on the novel, on Suvudu.
Today, the dead town seemed completely empty, though he knew it wasn’t so. Wax had come here hunting a psychopath. And he wasn’t the only one.
He grabbed the top of the fence and hopped over, feet grinding red clay. Crouching low, he ran in a squat over to the side of the old blacksmith’s forge. His clothing was terribly dusty, but well tailored: a fine suit, a silver cravat at the neck, twinkling cuff links on the sleeves of his fine white shirt. He had cultivated a look that appeared out of place, as if he were planning to attend a fine ball back in Elendel rather than scrambling through a dead town in the Roughs hunting a murderer. Completing the ensemble, he wore a bowler hat on his head to keep off the sun.
A sound; someone stepped on a board across the street, making it creak. It was so faint, he almost missed it. Wax reacted immediately, flaring the steel that burned inside his stomach. He Pushed on a group of nails in the wall beside him just as the crack of a gunshot split the air.
Despite having some issues with the final two volumes of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy, I loved, loved, loved the first volume, The Final Empire. It’s with that enthusiasm that I choose to look towards The Alloy of Law, Sanderson’s next Mistborn novel, set hundreds of years after the events of the original trilogy.
In anticipation of the release, Tor.com has released the prologue and first chapter of The Alloy of Law. There are five more excerpts to come. My first impression? Waxillium is still a stupid name.
When you write a story, what is the first thing that comes to your mind as an all-powerful, God-like creator? The world on which the action will take place or the characters?
Worldbuilding is both about the macro and the micro, you know – you must pay as much attention to one single person in your story as you would of the city you are creating or borrowing details from.
As I recently wrote for the Culture Share column in Juliette Wade’s blog, I have this recent story (still unpublished) called ‘The Remaker’. It’s based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote. My novelette basically tells the story of a researcher who discovers a future writer who revels in rewriting works by famous authors of the past, and how this can be done (and why someone even would do this) in the mid-21st Century.
One of the biggest challenges I faced in this story wasn’t creating the protagonist (a 60-year old scholar who still loves paper books in an all-digital era), not even his sort-of nemesis/antagonist (the Remaker of the title), but his girlfriend, who doesn’t appear in more than half a dozen pages, if that much.
Let me tell you what little the reader knows about her right in the beginning of the story: her name is Midori, she is a scholar on Gender Studies (a PhD), she met our protagonist in a conference in Canada, and they have a steady relationship, each one living in their own apartment in São Paulo.
She is also a transsexual.
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