Here’s how we’re going to do the post today:
- First, I’m going to drop a tease.
- Then I’m going to give some instructions.
- And then I’m going to tease again.
Ready? Here we go.
Here’s how we’re going to do the post today:
Ready? Here we go.
I just found this post in draft form, never published, and I thought since The Songweaver’s Vow is the March 2018 read for the Fellowship of Fantasy online book club (join us!), now would be a good time to add some more background. (Check out the rest of the posts in the series.) Plus, everyone likes to talk about Loki.
Warning, some spoilers ahead.
We need to step back sometimes to be able to see the bigger picture.
I had been a little down on myself for not publishing as much as I’d wanted and being behind on my idea list. I have a beefy project list that feels like I’ll never catch up. (I wrote it out as an Idea Debt Inventory for a productivity lesson. Lemme tell ya, that’s simultaneously inspiring — look how much I can create! — and super-depressing.)
But then I started doing the math for this year, and wow, I’ve had a more productive year than I thought. No wonder I felt busy.
Continue readingYOU GUYS ARE AWESOME.
I asked for help when Nova & Reaver made the #EquusFight semi-finals, and you came out in droves. Herds. Voting closed at 100-33 in favor of the trained war unicorns. You rock.
And thus, we come to the finals.
Continue readingBrag moment! Even though I get no real credit for this one.
I’ve been an avid appreciator of Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer site for some years, and I keep an eye on his cover design awards and commentary as a useful educational tool (and a fun one). I’ve entered several of my covers, commissioned and self-designed, and gotten nice feedback on them. But this month I landed the coveted gold star. Continue reading
It’s St. Patrick’s Day. Do you feel lucky?
No, not in a Dirty Harry sort of way. More of a, Are you ready to achieve your dreams? kind of way.
Let’s listen to some Irish talk about dreams. Continue reading
Today’s another entry in the Background & Research posts for The Songweaver’s Vow.
When Thor goes to fight Jörmungandr, he seeks the sea-sized serpent at a place he calls the Wyrmhole, baiting him out with a bull cut into quarters. The Wyrmhole is shamelessly based on a real place I visited in Ireland. (Though I saw fewer sea serpents.)
Continue readingSpoiler alert: Baldr dies.
Okay, seriously, there be spoilers ahead. Mythology nerds likely already know some of what goes down in The Songweaver’s Vow, but if you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you grab a copy and then come back for the background material. (Though to be perfectly fair, even knowing the base myth won’t give you a complete picture, so as long as you’re fully apprised of the spoiler-ific nature of this post….)
Continue readingSo to start, we don’t know very much about Norse mythology.
Oh, sure, we have quite a lot of stories, and we’ve made them into quite a lot more stories. But we don’t really have a grasp of how old proto-Germanic religion functioned, how seriously people took these stories, and how these stories fit together.
The Songweaver’s Vow was a tough book to write, for a number of reasons. For one, this was the first time I was writing a story which wasn’t entirely mine and I had to follow a previously-defined plot, as the base story of The Songweaver’s Vow is a Greek legend. And Euthalia brought her Greek stories with her to Asgard, so this meant that I had two separate mythologies to blend while simultaneously trying to make the determined plot my own. It was like writing historical fiction which had to fit both our history and an alternate Earth history. Not gonna lie, it was a workout.
Continue readingYou know it’s been a busy month when you have three book releases in two weeks.
Fortunately, two of those are anthologies. Covalent Bonds dropped on Valentine’s Day — because romance — and D is for Dinosaur hits the streets today — because dinosaurs. Continue reading