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Posts Tagged "The Winds of Khalakovo"

  • The given topic is “Lightspeed vs. Landlock – Intergalactic Travel vs Mundane Fantasy.” I’ve been puzzling over that all week, to be honest. I’m not sure what “mundane fantasy” might be.

    My go-to definition for science fiction is about our relationship to technology – how we deal with its advances, and how it in turn changes us. This can lead into class, politics, and government as found in Dune, 1984, and Brave New World; but such studies are not unique to science fiction. Fantasy offers a wide variety of futures and alternate timelines that offer views of human (or elvish, or orcish, etc.) rule, for example Mark Lawrence’s Broken Empire or Bradley Beaulieu’s The Lays of Anuskaya series. (more…)

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  • Bradley P. Beaulieu

    I was one of the inaugural members of the Night Bazaar, and during that first year we talked about villains, and an interesting thing came up in the comments. I’d talked about favoring the heroes and villains should be both be gray, and Doug Hulick, of Among Thieves fame, countered my post by saying (essentially) that sometimes it’s ok to have black and white villains and heroes. I’ll admit. I was pretty ensconced in my viewpoint, but I do try to step outside of my preconceptions when someone takes a view that opposes mine. So I noodled it for a bit. I thought about it. And, well, while I understood where Doug was coming from, I still didn’t think that sort of story was for me. And in fact, I’ll admit it, I kind of looked down on that type of story as simplistic. Literary popcorn.

    But, as the mind tends to do, now and again my hindbrain would bring the subject up, especially when I thought about my basic approach to writing. I kept going back to an observation my agent passed on to me after he’d read my first book, The Winds of Khalakovo. He said that in general (there are always exceptions) stories with fairly easy to comprehend villains do better in the marketplace. At the time, I scoffed, not at my agent, but at shortsighted readers. I’m part of the gray crowd, I told myself. I’m a disciple of Glen Cook and George R.R. Martin.

    But as I thought about this more and more, I started to see the value in making the villain more black and the hero more white. I think the biggest benefit of such an approach relates to how deeply the reader roots for the heroes and heroines. Said another way, it’s about the level of investment on the part of the reader, how emotional they become over the fate of the characters. Part of this equation is the level to which they sympathize with the heroes. (more…)

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  • Bradley P. Beaulieu

    Do I experience envy? Um, need you ask? Of course I experience envy. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

    First of all, for me, it’s inevitable. Most wouldn’t know it from talking to me, but I’m very competitive. Strangely enough, this may stem from not playing enough organized sports when I was a kid. I played, you know, neighborhood stuff, and in school gym class and such, but not much beyond that. I did, however, get a high from getting good scores on tests. I wasn’t a die-hard when it came to studying, but man I loved getting A’s.

    That translated to my adult life, not so much in my career in software programming, where things are hard to measure, but certainly here in the writing world, where it seems things are all about measuring. At least they are nowadays. Back before Bookscan, who knew what other writers’ numbers were like? You were lucky to get royalty statements that made a lick of sense for your own books, much less someone else’s. But now? Well, you hear about sales being made. You know, the Publishers Weekly nice deals, very nice deals, major deals, and so on. And now you can see (in stark relief) such things as Amazon rankings and number of reviews on any number of sites. You can look at their Facebook followers, Twitter followers, Google+, Pinterest, and on and on and on.

    It’s numbing to the point that if you allow yourself to fall into the pit of envy, you may never come out again. That’s one of the things I had to be careful about early on. I’m a numbers guy. I wanted to know how well my books were (or weren’t) doing. So I would compare and analyze and try to rank myself in some way. In the end, it’s is a pretty useless exercise. It fed my “want to know now” urges, but little else. It was without substance, like trying to fill yourself up on lettuce alone.

    And yet I began this post by saying that envy isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you experience envy, I think it’s important to channel that into something else, and for me, it’s trying to make my work better. But let me first differentiate between a couple kinds of envy. The first (and most self-possessed) is the kind in which you look at someone’s success and it feels (to you, anyway) unwarranted. Maybe you don’t like the person. Maybe you don’t respect their work. Maybe you feel like they’ve jumped the line. It’s very much like the feeling I get when I see a movie franchise like the Transformers succeed the way it has when movies like (picking a recent favorite out of my hat) Melancholia hardly got any play at all. There’s no use in paying attention to this sort of envy. In fact, it’s counterproductive. It saps energy, and it takes your eye off the prize. (more…)

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  • Bradley P. Beaulieu

    Hi all. My name is Bradley P. Beaulieu (Brad), and I was one of the charter members of the Night Bazaar before it was subsumed by Night Shade Books. I’m terribly pleased to have been asked back to chat more with all of you, in part because of what being invited back means.

    And what does it mean? Well, I’m glad you asked. It means that I have a book coming out with Night Shade. Again. My debut novel, The Winds of Khalakovo, came out last April, and its sequel, The Straits of Galahesh, came out… When was it again?

    Oh, yeah. Yesterday!

    I thought, to re-introduce myself, I’d share a bit about how and why I got into writing fantasy, and who some of my influences were. I’ve been reading fantasy practically since I learned how to read. I came across The Hobbit in third grade—I even remember the friend that turned me onto it: Jim Vogt, my best friend at the time—and I’ve never looked back. It was a wondrous experience, walking through Middle Earth with Bilbo and Gandalf and the dwarves. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like had I found another seminal work in a different genre. Would I now be a mystery writer had I read Sherlock Holmes or Sexton Blake when I was young? Would I write spy thrillers if I had somehow stumbled across James Bond? I like to think the answer is no. Fantasy feels like a part of me at this point, so strong was my reaction to The Hobbit and, later, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. I can’t imagine a world that feels more internally consistent, more whole, than those volumes.

    And I think this is what eventually drove me to be a writer. As I matured I started to read other things, things like Piers Anthony’s Split Infinity Series, Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Terry Brooks’ Shannara Series, Thieves’ World from Lynn Abbey, and Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné. While I enjoyed these and many other books to varying degrees, none of them quite had that sense of history, of scope, that Tolkien had created in his stories. So as I started to dabble in writing in college, while I didn’t realize this consciously at the time, I was trying to recreate that sense of wonder that I’d found while traveling toward the Lonely Mountain to steal into the lair of Smaug. (more…)

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  • I know this post is supposed to be about the year in review, but I think it’s very much about looking forward as well.

    One thing this year has taught me is that “I can do it again,” meaning I know how to write a novel more than once. The Winds of Khalakovo came out this year, but I turned in Book 2, The Straits of Galahesh, a few months back, and I’m well on my way to completing the first draft of Book 3. So I’ve gained a sense of confidence that I can do this at a high level. And this is important. Ever since I’ve started writing novels and short stories, it’s always felt like I won’t be able to do it again. Like “this time” was a fluke, and the “next time” the story’s going to fall flat on its face. Never is this feeling more apparent to me than in the first third of writing a new book. I’d written three books before Winds was picked up by Night Shade, so I’m essentially writing my sixth book now. And damned if the same feelings don’t crop up again and again, even on Book 3. But now that I’ve gotten some good feedback from my editor and my beta readers on Straits, I’m more confident that it, and my writing, are doing fine.

    So in some ways, this is a transitional period for me. I have the first year of publication under my belt. I’ve learned a lot in the past year, not just in how to write, but how to promote, how to balance my time, and deal with the pressures of publication. In other words: I’ve learned how to be a professional writer. A young pro writer, mind you, but a pro nonetheless.

    The second thing I’ve learned is that I really, really like this business. It pays chump change a lot of the time, and there are a lot of things that are a pain to deal with, but the act of creating something from scratch and sharing it—which assumes, of course, that people are reading your stuff—is really gratifying. And it’s enjoyable to be around so many other creative people. It’s why I’ve gone to conventions and such in the past, but more doors have been opened for me this year, and I’ve come to enjoy those new interactions—with my publisher, reviewers, bloggers, and other authors. (more…)

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  • Martha Wells‘s novel The Cloud Roads is FREE on the Kindle right now!  Hurry on over and get your copy before the promotion ends!  And go read N.K. Jemisin’s post on the Book Smugglers for a rousing recommendation of both The Cloud Roads and sequel The Serpent Sea (out Jan 3, so not much longer to wait!).

    Thomas Roche was interviewed about ebooks, the future of reading, and The Panama Laugh at the blog Beyond Black Friday. His interview also appears as part of the Kindle subscription blog Me and My Kindle.

    Brad Beaulieu’s novel The Winds of Khalakovo got a great review from Pat of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, and made Pat’s top ten SFF novels of the year – congrats, Brad!

    Courtney Schafer participated in an SF Signal Mind Meld, discussing her favorite SFF books and TV shows of the year.

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  • Huge congratulations to Katy Stauber, who sold her second novel Spin the Sky to Night Shade, for publication in fall of 2012!  Spin the Sky is a science fiction reinterpretation of the Odyssey, set in near-Earth orbital colonies.

    Martha Wells has a guest post on the Book Smugglers blog for their Smugglivus Fest, sharing the books she loved in 2011 and the novels she’s looking forward to in 2012.  She also has signed copies of The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea entered in the Magick4Terri fundraiser auction.

    Brad Beaulieu had an interview with Justin Landon over at A Staffer’s Musings, where Justin grills Brad about Russian literature and themes and stuff (it’s a long but very interesting interview!).

    BradCourtney Schafer, and John Hornor Jacobs also contributed signed novels (and one ARC, in Brad’s case) to Patrick Rothfuss’s Worldbuilders charity fundraiser – see here for details.

    Only three weeks left of the Night Bazaar in its current incarnation!  During our final weeks we’ll be discussing our lessons learned as debut authors and looking back at the year we’ve just had from both professional and personal perspectives.  And tune in tomorrow for a guest post from Howard Andrew Jones, author of The Desert of Souls and editor of Black Gate magazine.

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  • One of my Clarion instructors back in 2006 was Chip Delaney (Samuel R. Delaney). Chip came in during our first week, and I’m glad he did. He imparted plenty of good wisdom to the collection of noobs who’d gathered in sweltering East Lansing that summer, but one bit of advice comes to mind when I think about strengths and weaknesses. He said it isn’t sufficient to simply write. Writing with no forethought will only serve to reinforce bad habits. One must recognize his weaknesses and work actively to strengthen those weak writing muscles in order to make them stronger. Consider golf swings, or pitching motions, or gymnastical dismounts from the parallel bars. They’re (in varying degrees) easy to understand, and it seems as though, given enough time, you could learn to do what the pros do. But you can’t simply do it over and over again and hope pig-headed repetition is going to make you really, truly good at it.

    Now, sure, there are those savants that seem to be able to pick things up quickly and learn to do it very well. And there are those that work at it for a very long time and eventually become decent at it. To those arguments I would say this: the people that succeed because of innate talent are few and far between, and the others often succeed despite their poor form, not because of it. I can’t help but think of Tim Tebow from the Denver Broncos. He’s on a bit of a tear, but no one would claim that he’s a good quarterback. He’s succeeding with grittiness, his scrambling ability, and perhaps by catching his opponents a bit off-guard by the very fact that he isn’t a prototypical quarterback.

    I’m not claiming that repetition isn’t important. It is. You’ll certainly learn a number of things by stubbing your toe on them. Still, I would very much recommend taking Chip’s words to heart. In order to do that though—to really work on your writing—you have to know what your strengths and weaknesses are. This, to me, is the biggest reason to join peer-to-peer critique groups (whether virtual or in-person). It’s also a good reason to go to professional writing workshops. In either case, you’ll receive critiques of your own work, and this is good to a degree. It helps to identify your strengths and weaknesses. I would argue, though, that you’ll find out more about yourself as a writer by critiquing work that others have also critiqued. Assuming that the others critiquers know their stuff (and you’ll get a sense of this over time) you will find others commenting on something you completely missed. Be very aware of those things, my friends, because those are your blind spots. Now, don’t worry if it’s only one other person that brings up some issue of plotting or tone or dialogue. But if three people bring up basically the same issue and you missed it? Take note. (more…)

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  • Courtney Schafer has an interview over at the Chimeras blog, in which she talks about engineering vs. writing and gives a sneak peek of The Whitefire Crossing‘s sequel, The Tainted City.  Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist also has a free exclusive excerpt from The Whitefire Crossing, as part of Night Shade Books’ holiday countdown/advent calendar extravaganza.

    Brad Beaulieu‘s book The Winds of Khalakovo has had a busy week. It got two great reviews, one from A Fantasy Reader, and the other from A Staffer’s Musings. Brad’s also going to have an interview posted with Justin Landon at A Staffer’s Musings as a follow-up to that review, so keep an eye out for it.

    Also, Brad and Greg Wilson, over at Speculate, interviewed Maurice Broaddus. They spoke to Maurice about writing balancing life, writing, and editing, how faith intersects with speculative fiction, and pimping airships.

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  • From our friends.

    When this subject came up, the initial urge was to thank everyone who’s ever had some sort of influence on my writing. I’ve done a lot of that already, though, here on this blog and posts on my own blog. I’ve done it in my acknowledgements. I’ve done it in person when I’ve seen them. And I made a point to email those that I felt deserved direct thanks once The Winds of Khalakovo was accepted for publication. I’m not going to cover that ground again. Not that those folks don’t deserve another round of thanks. It’s just that I want to focus on another aspect of coming up, as it were.

    I’d like to give thanks to my peers, those who helped me in smaller ways, or perhaps in mutually beneficial ways, along my path toward publication. Who am I talking about here? Well, it’s no one group. It’s a variety of groups and people and individuals that were coming up themselves. Some were ahead of where I was, and some were not quite as far, but they all helped, and I hope that I helped them as well.

    I’ll start with Critters. I never gravitated toward meet-and-greet type writing groups where people met in person and critiqued, largely because when I first got into writing, I was traveling for work and it just wasn’t very feasible for me to make meetings. Another issue was that with larger, online groups, you have a greater chance of finding those that work well with you, and vice versa. You hopefully find people that challenge your writing, and hopefully you challenge theirs. Critters was this way for me, at least at first. I did eventually find the system a bit rigid and slow for my liking, but I certainly advanced in my craft during my time there. (more…)

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