Congrats to the Justins!
Random.org has declared Justin Steele and Justin of Staffer’s Musings the winners of this week’s copies of INFIDEL (they do not appear to be the same Justin…).
I’ll be contacting you both for your info via the email addresses you provided when you commented.
Congrats!
Thanks much to everyone who entered. If you’re looking for more free books, follow me @KameronHurley on Twitter, where I’ll be giving away boatloads more books this week!
Read More...This week at the Night Bazaar, Kameron Hurley is giving away two copies of Infidel, the sequel to her acclaimed debut God’s War!
The only thing worse than war is revolution. Especially when you’re already losing the war…
Justin Landon of Staffer’s Musings/BookTrib said, “Hurley’s brilliantly constructed characters, authentic and fully realized world building, and pull no-punches style, makes Infidel not only a worthy addition to God’s War, but a whole sale improvement…If no one has started driving the Kameron Hurley train to the Hugos, consider me the conductor.”
(Want to sample Infidel first? Read a sample, check out the book trailer, and visit the series website.)
Entering is easy: just comment on any of our posts this week (starting with Douglas Hulick’s guest post tomorrow) with an example of a great team in SF/F/H (whether a duo or larger group of characters). Want to up your chances of winning? Comment on multiple posts (one entry per post).
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This week at the Night Bazaar, Thomas Roche is giving away two copies of his debut science fiction/horror novel The Panama Laugh!
EX-MERCENARY AND PIRATE INTERDICTION SPECIALIST Dante Bogart knows he’s the one who handed his shady employers the virus that makes the dead rise to devour the living while laughing their asses off. Whether they were using it to create super-soldiers, build biological weapons, or live forever, he hasn’t got the foggiest. But he knows the virus escaped. Dante even tried to blow the whistle on the nightmare via a tell-all video that “went viral”—but that was back before the black ops boys deep-sixed him at a secret interrogation site on the Panama-Colombia border. So he wakes up in the jungle with the five intervening years missing from his memory and his hippie ex-girlfriend married—to his best friend, no less. Dante knows he’s got to do what he can to cure the laughing sickness that’s slaughtering the world. Doing that will require a trip in a hijacked nuclear warship through the nightmare that was the Panama Canal, then around Cape Horn to San Francisco, where survivalist hackers have holed up in the Moorish castle known as the Armory to resist laughing corpses and corporate stooges alike, taking Dante’s whistle-blowing viral video as their underground Gospel.
(Want to sample The Panama Laugh? Read a short excerpt courtesy of Baen’s Webscription site.)
Entering is easy: just comment on any of our posts this week Sunday-Friday with the name of a monster or creature you find scary. Want to up your chances of winning? Comment on multiple posts (one entry per post).
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Sorry I’m late on this. Been a little frazzled this week. Using the random number generator, I have determined the winners of last weeks giveaway.
GregLincoln and Paul (@princejvstin) come on down! You’ve won your very own signed copies of Southern Gods.
Please email me at x@y.com where x=jhj and y=atomictomato with your addresses.
That is all.
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It’s finally out! John J Horner’s Southern Gods! Comment on a post this week and you might win a free copy!
While it would be lovely if the Internet has magically solved all our research needs, there are definitely soft spots in the data shell. Yes, online thesauruses and dictionaries help us find and use words like defenstration, but good Youtube videos of it? Still a work in progress. For the longest time, I had a hard time finding in-depth medical knowledge (Normal ranges for bilirubin in urine sample or X-rays of all the varieties of morphology of the human spleen, for example). It was a dead zone, but that has been filling in. Same thing for abstract mathematical theory. You usually have to go get the book. There still isn’t a comprehensive searchable online database for math research, but Google Research has its moments.
At the other end of the spectrum is researching your characters. How does a Muslim fireman in Bolivia feel about marriage? What would a vat-born cyborg soldier think about raising kids? Yes, there are a million blogs out there, a million voices shouting unheard, but if you really go looking, it’s hard to find truly interesting people talking about what makes them interesting. For example, I wanted to research this idea for a Water World concept, so I went looking for boat people blogs. Sure they are out there, but nobody just online journaling about how what they had for breakfast, how they shower, their favorite shoes, etc. Actually, Cameron’s blog is really quite good. A diabetic lesbian science fiction writer in middle America? That’s frickin’ interesting. And she occasionally just talks about her life and includes pictures of her blinged out insulin kit? That’s a good blog.
Figuring out how to see the world through another person’s eyes is a facet of writing fiction that really requires you to go out and talk to the people of the world. Which is fine by me. One of my favorite weekend pastimes is pouring liquor into strangers and asking them wildly inappropriate questions. (more…)
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So, as all of my other co-bloggers here at The Night Bazaar have mentioned (thanks guys!) I’m giving away a signed copy of Southern Gods this week to a randomly picked commenter. Comment on any blog entry this week and your name goes into the hat. It’s that easy.
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Research. In my mind there’s two types that come into play when you’re writing fiction, and I’ve dealt pretty extensively with both. But before we get into that, let’s define it, shall we?
Research (for ficiton): When an author must go to reference, source materials to provide verisimilitude in his or her prose, providing enough detail in the reader to trust the author and suspend their disbelief.
That’s my working definition, anyway.
I’ve had to do extensive research for my novels in two instances. The first was for Southern Gods. Because parts of SG are set in 1880 and 1951 and a few years in between, in Arkansas, and many possible readers would be alive during that time with some frame of reference. I knew I had to get things right, otherwise the book would be a big steaming pile. I strove for historical veracity. (more…)
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This week at the Night Bazaar, John Hornor Jacobs is giving away two signed copies of his debut southern gothic/noir/horror novel Southern Gods!
Jedidiah Ayres of the Barnes & Noble Ransom Notes blog said, ”Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs is flat-out one of the scariest books I’ve read in a long time; a sweaty, sultry trek through the secret geographical and spiritual places of the American South fueled by a delta blues soundtrack so transcendent and graphically conjured you’ll not be able to shake reverberations of the spectral tunes you’ve never actually heard for weeks (and the dreams they’ll conjure will keep your local mediums, pharmacists and psychoanalysts in the manner they’re accustomed to for years).”
(Want to sample Southern Gods first? Read a short excerpt courtesy of Baen’s Webscription site.)
Entering is easy: just comment on any of our posts Monday through Friday this week with the name of a book set in a different time period you enjoyed. Want to up your chances of winning? Comment on multiple posts (one entry per post).
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J M McDermott‘s first novel was plucked from a slush pile and went on to be #6 on Amazon.com’s Year’s Best SF/F of 2008, shortlisted for a Crawford Prize, and on Locus Magazine’s Recommended Reading List for Debuts. His short fiction has appeared in Weird Tales Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Apex Magazine, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among other places. He has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and an MFA in Popular Fiction from the Stonecoast program of the University of Southern Maine. By night, he wanders a maze of bookshelves and empty coffee cups, and by day he wanders the streets of Atlanta, where he lives and works. He tries to write in between.
[Editor's Note: J. M. McDermott will give away one copy each of his novels Last Dragon and Never Knew Another to one lucky blog reader - just comment on this post by 11:59PM MDT Saturday August 20th to enter the drawing!]Different processes produce different results. I use Microsoft Excel. I’ve talked about this before. I like spreadsheets. Some people like to use the same tools they use when they run DnD campaigns. Some people just make it up as they go. Others keep detailed notes, in hand, or draw maps in mapping software, or all sorts of other things. World-building is a good idea in fantasy, because you get to make the world your own.
What does it matter, really, what tools you use as long as your world suits your narrative?
Often, I am bored by world-building in the books I read. I’m not really into “cool” worlds. I read for characters and to find the questions of my life that I did not know I was supposed to be asking. I mean, really, what matter whether a river is purple or a mountain is made of glass if the people of that world are not changed by it in some fashion, and not just in that they need special shoes to walk on the purple water and climb the glass mountains? I mean imagine that the glass of the mountain is a metaphor for a bright, shining, religious lie, and it is so massive that all the stained glass windows in the world have been thrown up together into one, huge monument to the lies. I mean that the character who climbs this mountain discovers a truth upon it that makes the monument a lie, because the thing that inspired it all was wrong to begin with. Things are different for a reason, and it has to do with art. Otherwise, we’re just messing with reality for the sake of making reality cooler than it is, and it feels lazy to me because reality is actually very cool, already. (more…)
Read More...Good news: since we had so many great comments this week, Courtney decided to give away 5 signed copies instead of 2! Congratulations to the lucky winners:
NicoleL
Stace
Bastard
Greg Lincoln
PhoenixFalls
Courtney will contact you via email to get your mailing addresses. For anyone still wanting a chance at a signed copy, Courtney’s got another giveaway still ongoing at The Qwillery – comment on her interview there by Thurs Aug 18 answering the question “What would be your favorite adventure?” to enter.
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This week at the Night Bazaar, Courtney Schafer is giving away two signed copies of her debut adventure fantasy The Whitefire Crossing!
Robert Thompson of Fantasy Book Critic said, ”It’s not very often that I get to say this, but Courtney Schafer’s The Whitefire Crossing is the complete package. Fully developed characters. Across the board world-building. Intriguing magic. Accomplished writing. Engaging storytelling. Thrilling adventure… Add it all up and there’s no doubt in my mind that The Whitefire Crossing is not only one of the best fantasy debuts of 2011, but it’s also one of the year’s best fantasy novels period…” Don’t miss your chance at a free copy!
(Want to sample The Whitefire Crossing first? Read a short excerpt on Courtney’s website, or the first 6 chapters for free in PDF form over at Night Shade!)
Entering is easy: just comment on any of our posts this week (starting with Martha Wells’s guest post tomorrow) with the name of a favorite SF/F world or culture. Want to up your chances of winning? Comment on multiple posts (one entry per post).
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