Had to pull back to get the whole bottle in the shot. Also bought new ale glasses to drink it from! It’s easy to extol the virtues of a technically well-written book with a well-crafted story. A bit harder is to put into words one that’s all that and just plain, viscerally enjoyable to…
I know RJ likes taxidermy and antlers…I don’t have antlers but I have this bird skeleton and horn. RJ Barker’s entrancing fantasy-mystery Age of Assassins is a bit of an odd duck—there aren’t many actual assassinations in it, but it’s easy to forget that as the story of young apprentice assassin Girton unfolds. Apparently the age…
Update: Don’t look at these anymore, I’ve made much better ones using Wonderdraft. I’ve drawn several maps of the world of The Heron Kings in the past, all freehand and all terrible. Recently my wonderful agent Nathan asked me for a map in order to keep all the locations straight. When I went and dug…
There aren’t actually any pistols in this book, though there are cannons and grenades. Peter McLean has a brilliant ability to make the reader feel something for the characters, love or hate them. And I kinda hate Tomas Piety. Priest of Bones is a first-person low fantasy set in a world of vaguely Renaissance-level…
As an unabashed fan of the Dishonored series and a loser with way too much time on my hands, I’ve taken a few cracks at constructing props from the games. I think one of my favorite is this recreation of the Addermire Solution mana potion from D2. I used these concept sketches as a…
Pay no attention to that pretty sword and those conspicuously placed maps… Cameron Johnston’s debut novel The Traitor God is a flesh-rending fantasy where magic itself is the darkest villain, with a tone that will feel familiar to fans of Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora. No time is wasted orienting the reader…
To celebrate my novel manuscript finally going off to the editor, I ordered a custom seal stamp of the heron graphic on the website, and today it arrived. I was afraid the fine details would get lost and it’d be a horrible mess, but it looks great! For $20 you upload an image and…
I yanked a few images from Pinterest and added some of my own to make my first and likely only attempt at a #ThursdayAesthetic panel for my novel The Heron Kings on Twitter. The theme was “weather.” I think the girl in the middle’s a dead-ringer for Nandine.
Just sent the latest version of the manuscript of The Heron Kings off to my editor Don D’Auria at Flame Tree Press. I started writing this novel about this time back in 2014. A five-year struggle, and about one more to go before the thing’s finally released. Being my usual paranoid self, I won’t believe…
Blood Bound Books has revealed the cover art for their upcoming sci-fi / horror anthology Crash Code, which will include my story “Cold Calculation.” Looks awesome! I’ve been really fortunate with some of the cover art on my short fiction page–lots of vivid, contrasting colors that gives everything a lot of pop. This anthology is…
