Two great authors, two great excerpts from their upcoming novels. Both Steven Erikson and Tobias Buckell have just recently released excerpts from their upcoming novels, Toll the Hounds and Sly Mongoose respectively.

Steven Erikson

Erikson’s upcoming novel, Toll the Hounds is, with the unlikely chance of a 2008 release for A Dance with Dragons, is the probably the biggest release of the year for a large portion of fantasy fans. Fans have been clamoring for the prologue of the novel for a long time now and the folk at Malazan Empire have finally got the go ahead from Steve and his publisher to repost on the prologue on the forum.

You can find it (in all it’s ill-formatted glory) HERE.

Also, in case you missed it the first time, I had the chance to hang out with Steve for a couple of afternoons and recounted my experiences HERE and HERE. There’re also a few tidbits about Toll the Hounds scattered throughout the two articles.

Tobias Buckell

Carribean-born Buckell, author of Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin recently released the prologue to the third novel in his loose trilogy, Sly Mongoose. I absolutely adored Crystal Rain (REVIEW) and Toby was terrific to work with on the interview we conducted a few months ago (HERE). If you haven’t had a chance to read Buckell yet, you can find the first 1/3 of his first two novels HERE (Crystal Rain) and HERE (Ragamuffin).

The first chapter of Sly Mongoose can be found HERE.

One subject that I often see pop up in areas frequented by aspiring writers is that of word count. I know it’s something myself have often wondered about, and so when I ran across these two great blog posts about the subject, I thought I’d pass them along to those of you who are hard at work on your first masterpiece.

The First is courtesy of Nathan Bransford, a literary agent (and great blogger) working for Curtis Brown Ltd., who, by his own admission, is a little lackadaisical about word count:

You can read the whole thing HERE.

The nameless scribe of Editorial Ass is a little more stringent when it comes to taking a look at submissions:

You can check out the full post HERE.

Hopefully this shed’s a little light on the mystery!

Unshelved, a great web comic, had this great comic that made me chuckle. Apparently, according to them, Joe Abercrombie, author of such fine works as The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged and the upcoming Last Argument of Kings, is to Fantasy what Quentin Tarantino is to movies. As a Tarantino fan myself, those are pretty big (but fairly accurate) shoes to fill!

I won’t reprint the comic here (you know, credit where credit’s due), but you can check it (and the rest of their great site) HERE. Definitely a must see for any fan of Abercrombie’s work.

So, in leiu of Neil Gaiman’s soon-to-be-released-for-free American Gods, I was perusing his (incredibly deep and awesome) web site and ran across this cool little tidbit of paraphenalia that the writer in me just found so damn cool!

Gaiman scanned up and released several pages of his handwritten notes he used in to craft American Gods. If you have the patience to decode his stereotupically messy writing (I wonder if there’s an author out there who doesn’t write with an indecipherable scrawl… I know my hand writing’s pure chicken scratch), there’s a lot of interesting information in there showing how the novel developed. Definitely worth a peak for Gaiman fans and aspiring writers alike! If you haven’t given American Gods a shot, I urge you to do so; it’s one of my favourite novels and is unlike anything out there.

You can check them out HERE.

Just a quick note to let those of you in the United States of America know that the second novel in Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law Trilogy, Before They Are Hanged, is shipping now (several weeks early!) from Amazon.com

Thanks to Joe for the heads up. Before They Are Hanged has been available in the UK and Canada for several months now, so no one has an excuse not to pick it up!