Guest Post | "Coming to the End of a Trilogy" by Gareth L. Powell

You know how in horror movies you can sometimes summon the monster by simply saying his name? That’s how it happened for me.

When Solaris Books published my fifth novel Macaque Attack in January 2015, it marked the end of a bizarre and unexpected journey—a journey that began some time in 2006, when the words ‘Ack-Ack’ and ‘Macaque’ started rattling around in my head, and I scribbled them into my notebook. I didn’t look in a mirror and say ‘Candyman’ three times; I simply wrote down two words. ‘Ack-ack’ is wartime British slang for antiaircraft fire, and a ‘macaque’ is a type of monkey.

Ack-Ack Macaque.

It sounded like a name. There was something about the rhythm of the syllables. I wrote it down and said it aloud and, hey presto, there he was. He sauntered into my brain fully formed: a bad-tempered, cigar-chewing monkey pilot with an eye-patch and a pair of shiny Colts. He was part Lee Marvin, part Biggles, and part John Belushi in 1941—a cynical badass stick-jockey with an eye patch and a cigar.

At the time, I needed a fictional anime character for a short story I wanted to write. I wanted to say something about the commodification of culture, especially in movie adaptations of books and comics, and so I needed a cartoon character with rough edges. I put Ack-Ack into the story and he took it over. I even ended up naming the story after him.

‘Ack-Ack Macaque’ became my second short story sale to Interzone, the long-running British SF&F magazine. It appeared in issue #212 in September 2007, and Warren Ellis memorably described it as “the commercialisation of a web animation into some diseased Max Headroom as metaphor for the wreckage of a fucked-up relationship.” The story garnered some good reviews and went on to be voted the year’s favourite short story in the annual Interzone reader’s poll.

That’s where it should have ended; but monsters, once summoned, can be hard to dismiss.

In 2012, I set out to write a murder mystery set on a giant Zeppelin. I wanted to explore different notions of what it means to be human, so the characters included a woman who had half her brain rebuilt with artificial processors following an accident; the self-aware recording of her dead husband; and a man who finds out he’s a clone. They had all considered themselves human in the past, but now weren’t so sure. All I lacked was the viewpoint of a character that had never been human at all, but had been ‘uplifted’ to consciousness.

Ack-Ack was waiting for me, smoking a cigar in the dark recesses of my imagination.

“About time, too,” he said.

The novel, Ack-Ack Macaque, appeared from Solaris Books in January 2013 and went on to co-win (alongside Ann Leckie’s all-conquering Ancillary Justice) the BSFA Award for Best Novel.

Writing the main characters—who are all outsiders, alienated from the rest of humanity by the surgery that’s made them different—was a fascinating and challenging experience. To convincingly portray them as individuals, I had to try to put myself in their position. I had to imagine what it would be like to be a creature with the mind of a man and all the attitude and bad habits of a monkey, or a former journalist whose thoughts now ran on mostly artificial neurons. Luckily, I guess we all know what it feels like to be an outsider. We’ve all been in situations where everybody else seems to know what’s going on, and we’re left floundering; where something about us—our clothes, the music we like, our sexuality—sets us apart from the crowd; and I was able to draw on those feelings of insecurity and self-consciousness to bring the characters’ inner thoughts to life.

Meanwhile, Ack-Ack had been busily spilling out into other media.

To help launch the book, a five-page Ack-Ack Macaque prequel strip appeared in the December 2012 issue of the legendary British comic 2000 AD. I also set up a Twitter feed in the monkey’s name, and he started interacting with his readers, quickly gathering an army of loyal followers who bombarded him with funny monkey pictures, banana jokes, and marriage proposals!

The sequel, Hive Monkey, appeared in January 2014. At the time, it was the first novel-length sequel I’d attempted, and to start with, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull it off. What if it wasn’t as good as the first one? I needn’t have worried. Climbing back about the skyliner Tereshkova felt like coming home. I’m extremely fond of all the main characters, especially Ack-Ack and Victoria Valois, and found it immense fun to hang out with them a second time, even as I broadened the alternate universe setting to ask new questions about the nature of humanity and what it is that makes us unique.

Hive Monkey was my first sequel, and Macaque Attack marked the completion of my first trilogy.

Or did it?

I won’t say how or why, but Macaque Attack features appearances by characters from my 2011 Solaris novel, The Recollection [reviewed right here on TSS—Ed] which means this ‘trilogy’ is actually more of a ‘quartet,’ and the monkey’s adventures have been playing out against a background far more epic than he could possibly have suspected.

As well as examining questions about the nature of memory and what it means to be human, these four books also concern themselves with notions of friendship, family and belonging. Ack-Ack Macaque starts out alone and gradually accretes a kind of ersatz family group or, as he thinks of it, a troop. The cynical, embittered veteran finds himself beginning to care about those around him. He takes on adult responsibilities and, as a consequence, he grows up. At the end of book three, he is wiser and more human than he was at the opening of book one.

As, I hope, am I.

Writing these books has been a hell of a lot of fun, and I’ve learned a lot from the process. I’ve had a blast, but all good things must eventually come to an end. I’ve said what I wanted to say, and now it’s time to say goodbye. I will miss Ack-Ack and Victoria terribly, but their stories have been told and I know it’s now time to move on to other projects.

Ack-Ack Macaque may have left the building, but, if the stars align just right and the wind’s blowing in a favorable direction, then one day it’s just possible he might come back.

Maybe.

Until then, there’s Macaque Attack—his biggest, craziest adventure yet. As Ack-Ack himself might say:

“Buckle up, sweethearts. It’s going to be a hell of a ride.”

***

Gareth L. Powell is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author from Bristol whose books have been published in the UK, the USA, Germany and Japan. You can find him online at www.garethlpowell.com, and follow him on Twitter at @garethlpowell. Should you be brave enough, the aforementioned monkey tweets too, as @AckAckMacaque.

Guest Post | "Ghost Writer" by Joanna Briscoe

My novels are all haunted, but I was the last to know it. 

Luckily, others were more astute, and I was asked by Arrow to write a novella for their Hammer imprint—a collaboration between Hammer Films and Random House publishers that has resulted in some of the most interesting short novels of the last few years. I loved Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate and Helen Dunmore’s The Great Coat, but when I was commissioned to write a novel with a supernatural aspect, I hadn’t read them, or any other adult ghost novel apart from The Turn of the Screw.

Or I thought I hadn’t. When I stop to think about some of my favourite literature—AS Byatt’s Possession; Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Rebecca; Jane Eyre—they are all pursued by ghosts in one way or another. And even more strangely, when I think about my own work, it is deeply haunted... While I was imagining howling apparitions in sheets, hauntings of a more subtle nature were staring me in the face. 

So in my first novel, Mothers and Other Lovers—which was in so many senses a classic rights-of-passage, semi-autobiographical first novel—I had plenty of ghosts to lay to rest! I think I had needed to look at childhood and my relationship with my mother, and how that had impacted on somewhat disastrous love life choices of that time... This is probably strictly the least haunted of my novels, but it was definitely about dealing with my demons. Several of them. Of course, straightforward autobiography rarely works as fiction, so it was a story, an invention, but I could never deny the true-to-life tale that had to get out.

My second, Skin, is the most shocking and in many ways worrying of my novels. It features a woman who is a victim of her own beauty and keeps having surgery to hold the years back. As each layer of her face is peeled away, more of her past is revealed. She herself is utterly haunted by her lost youth, and by her longing for one man who ultimately leaves her.

It’s that longing that really makes my novels haunted, I realise. I tend to write about obsessive, often dark and destructive yet highly addictive romantic or sexual desire, the longing itself more potent than the actual flawed relationship. In Sleep With Me, which was adapted by Andrew Davies as an ITV drama, the interloper, the unfathomable Sylvie, is frequently described as a ghost. In fact, the first line, which was used in the underground and train adverts, was "The day our child was conceived, someone else arrived. She was there as the cells fused, like a ghost."

The indications that I should write something more paranormal were screaming at me but still I didn’t notice! Reviewers even frequently described that novel as sinister, creepy, full of suspense, eerie, mesmerising and chilling... yet sometimes it still takes an outside eye to see what it is we should be doing.

My fourth novel, You, was all about a haunting of a different nature, though it was set in a large, creaking, thatched Devon house. In it, Cecilia is driven almost mad by the mistake she has made in the past in giving up a child for adoption. So haunted is she by it, she can almost think herself back into that time. In the meantime, the past is actually catching up with her in the form of that child, who has become a ghostly figure in her head but is actually all too real.

But this all took me to Touched, which is a finally novel that is decidedly and quite openly haunted! My first thought was a bright, bright—almost eerily bright—village green, and on that I saw a girl who dresses herself in Victorian clothes: shabby, faded, and decidedly odd. That was the starting point. Then I wondered about her mother, Rowena. Then I looked to her grandmother, and so the haunting began. In the meantime, Rowena, absolutely pursued by guilt, is developing her own very earthly passion for her intriguing neighbour, Gregory Dangerfield. Real life humans cause as many problems as the presences that haunt poor Rowena, while Rowena’s daughters have their own problems chasing them. And what is that face at the window, caught only in a split second film still? 

To me, with Touched, it was the perfection of the pretty village in which this family lives that was potentially eerie. And when they begin to attack the wall of their cottage to make a larger house, there is something not quite right going on, a sense of protest, of suffering. As ever, my characters are haunted by desire, longing, terrible guilt, and their past mistakes. But while they’re focusing on their own loves, lusts and shuddering regrets, less tangible apparitions gather in the margins. The spooks and spectres of the more plodding Victorian ghost stories don’t interest me, though there are some fine hauntings among them. It’s the presences that play while characters are looking elsewhere that get me: the glimpsed, the sensed, the loved. 

I think my ghosts have finally made their way out of the closet, and I look forward to sending them into the world, fully unformed.

***

Joanna Briscoe is the author of Mothers and Other Lovers, Skin, You and the highly acclaimed Sleep With Me, which was published in eleven countries and adapted for ITV Drama by Andrew Davies. She spent her very early years in 'the village of the damned,' Letchmore Heath in Hertfordshire, the location for the celebrated 1960 film based on John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckooks—and the inspiration, too, for this Hammer novella.

You can find out more about Joanna on her website, www.joannabriscoe.com, or on Twitter @JoannaBriscoe. Stay tuned to The Speculative Scotsman to read my review of Touched as soon as is humanly.

Guest Post | "Haunted Homes" by Alison Littlewood

There are so many things that make haunted houses ideal for a good chilling tale. Home is where the heart is, they say; it’s also where family is, the things we love. It’s where we feel safe. Not so in the haunted house, where our refuge becomes a place of nightmare. Family, more likely than not, becomes a source of terror instead of love. Death walks the hallways and rattles at the doors, and we can become trapped by the very walls we build around ourselves.

In film, I’m a sucker for a good haunted house. All that sneaking around at night completely gets to me, possibly because it’s redolent of my own childhood fears of what might be hiding in the dark. And there are those cheap jump moments that are almost expected—the thing glimpsed in the mirror as the bathroom cabinet closes; the reflection in the window; and, of course, the dreaded cellar, that emblem of the subconscious, where who knows what might be lurking. Still, I’ll jump at all of them, in part precisely because I expect them.

In literature, it’s not really about the jump moment so much as a creeping sense of dread, of the things we don’t expect, the darkness lurking inside ourselves being reflected in the things around us. It’s about atmosphere, as evoked so beautifully in some of the classics of the genre—The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, James Herbert’s Haunted or Susan Hill’s Woman in Black.

The written word also has the facility to place us on the inside, sharing the character’s thoughts but also their flawed perceptions and understanding. One of my favourite haunted house novels of recent times has just such a flawed protagonist. The eponymous Audrey, of Audrey’s Door by Sarah Langan, is struggling to emerge from a broken relationship and an upbringing with a mentally ill mother. She moves into the Breviary, an apartment building constructed by proponents of a movement called chaotic naturalism. When we discover that her ridiculously cheap apartment was recently a crime scene, we can feel the walls closing in before anything supernatural happens. Audrey, an architect, soon finds herself obsessed with doors, adding them to plans where no doors should be. When she is compelled to build a door in the middle of her apartment—leading to what?—the fear ramps up. It’s tense, clever and genuinely scary.

Another favourite of mine is Dark Matter by Michelle Paver [Ooh! I liked that one too—Ed]. Often, haunted houses are isolated, removed from sources of help and the normalising effect of other people. Here is an Arctic outpost rather than a house, but for the main character, Jack, it becomes his only home and refuge in the midst of a wilderness. Poor and disillusioned, he is recruited for the expedition by a group of men he sees as being a ‘cut above’, but problems beset the others until only Jack remains. The outpost becomes his home, one surrounded by snowy wastes and the endless dark. As it begins to seem he isn’t quite alone after all, we begin to wonder whether the haunting is a ghost or the effects of extreme isolation on Jack’s personality. The novel is set in the 1940s and is told in Jack’s diary entries, and it is his idiosyncratic voice that is a great part of the novel’s strength.

Short stories can be ideal for evoking an atmosphere, for encapsulating a moment in time or a distilled emotion, and as such they lend themselves well to the haunted house theme. House of Fear, edited by Jonathan Oliver, is an anthology of contemporary ghostly tales by practitioners like Stephen Volk, Adam Nevill, Robert Shearman, Sarah Pinborough, Christopher Priest, Tim Lebbon and many more. It’s a showcase, not just of some very fine authors, but of the huge range of approaches that can result from the theme: some traditional, some distinctly modern, others more surreal, while others question the concept of what it is that constitutes a haunting at all. The creativity on offer shows how far the concept of a haunted house can be reinvented and given fresh life; certainly, the tried and tested idea seems to be in no danger of dying out.

***

Alison Littlewood is the author of A Cold Season, published by Jo Fletcher Books, an imprint of Quercus. The novel was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club, where it was described as “perfect reading for a dark winter’s night.” Her second novel, Path of Needles, is a dark blend of fairy tales and crime fiction, and her third, The Unquiet House, is a ghost story set in the Yorkshire countryside.

Alison’s short stories have been picked for The Best Horror of the Year and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror anthologies, as well as The Best British Fantasy 2013 and The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10. Other publication credits include the anthologies Terror Tales of the Cotswolds, Where Are We Going? and Never Again. Alison lives in Yorkshire with her partner Fergus. Visit her at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk.

Guest Post | "From Ceres to Saga: Research and Inspiration" by E. J. Swift

One of the nicest things about getting a writing career off the ground is the point where someone asks if you can contribute something to a project. There’s a warm fuzzy glow when this happens, and it’s almost impossible to resist, because however little time you have, it feels like a privilege to be asked. This is especially the case when the brief is as exciting as a project as The Lowest Heaven, a solar-system themed anthology which was published by Jurassic last summer.

By the time I came on board, most of the major planets had been snapped up, and my choices came down to Ceres and the Oort Cloud. Whilst the Oort Cloud got kudos for being generally weird and cool (with some wonderful theories expounded on Wikipedia and elsewhere), I wasn’t sure I could do it justice in the short time I had to write the story.

After some research into Ceres, though, there were a couple of things on the table that caught my attention:

• In mythology, Ceres is the goddess of agriculture, fertility and maternal relationships.
• Despite its lowly dwarf planet/large asteroid status, Ceres occupies a rather strategic point in the solar system, and has an icy mantle, the possibility of water below and the potential for mining.

Taking the motherly relationships angle, my original idea was to write something around an astronaut/explorer mother and her relationship with her daughter. The brief for the anthology was to take inspiration from the planets, rather than to locate the stories geographically within the solar system, but I was intrigued by the concept of the lengthy time and distances that would be involved in early space travel, and how that might impact on familial relationships. Initially I had the daughter character pegged at a child or teenage age, and thought the focus of the story would be on growing up with a mostly absent parent.

Then I stumbled across a story by the author Joe Dunthorne which was written in the first person plural, and something sparked in my head. I’ve always been a huge fan of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, a creepily atmospheric novel which sustains a first person plural voice throughout. But I’d never come across it used anywhere else, until now. What if I could try a collective voice with this?

After I’d pinned down the voice, the scope of the story broadened and suddenly I was writing something from the perspective of three adults looking back on their lives. For once, the title to the story was easy.

'Saga's Children' is available to read for free on Pornokitsch and an audio version is available in this episode of Starship Sofa.

***

E. J. Swift is the author of Osiris and Cataveiro, the first two volumes in The Osiris Project trilogy. Her short fiction has been published in Interzone magazine, and appears in anthologies including The Best British Fiction 2013 and Pandemonium: The Lowest Heaven. She is shortlisted for a 2013 BSFA Award in the short fiction category for her story Saga’s Children.

Guest Post | "Country Weird" by Steve Rasnic Tem

The gothic tends to thrive in less populated regions of the world, the lands where there are more trees, more stones, than people, environments which nourish both self-reflection and loneliness. And yet it also requires, I think, some sense of a history, evidence that human beings once walked there, that they studied and dreamed, and raised families who would someday mourn their departure, there, right where you’re standing, on the grave of another person’s life.

I first encountered the English ghost story in high school, thanks to some scattered volumes in my great grandfather’s library. The house containing that library, built on a distant southwest Virginia mountain ridge before America’s Civil War, was one of the better examples of ornate gingerbread in the region. My grandfather grew up there. There was a portrait of his sister in the parlor—she’d died a child in the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. I still own one of her schoolbooks.

I spent a number of summers in that house which murmured and talked though many a hot and humid night, hiding under the covers with a book and a flashlight. There were no streetlights, and the nearest house was some distance away. I never knew a darker place. It was in this setting where I first read those tales of English churchyards and ancient architecture, crumbling ruins and half-glimpsed presences in the curtains, under the sheets, in the shadows behind a door. Helpless victims were in abundance, as were sinister presences.

It all seemed terribly familiar, somehow. The settings weren’t that different from the rotting old houses and abandoned buildings (rarely torn down) nestled within the overgrown landscape of the American South. The characters were different—I knew very few scholars, or priests. But there was a similar sense of the impositions of history, of unforgivable racial sins committed in a distant past, and an obsessive interest in spiritual matters, resulting both from the anguish of loss and the sincere hope that there might be a better and richer life beyond. Southern religion, as I experienced it, was a scary thing. It encouraged desperate and eccentric (sometimes grotesque) behavior, and at times unhealthy relationships.

Readings in Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCullers bolstered this comparison, and my growing sense of the Southern Gothic. I also became aware that the particular sub-region of the South where I lived, Appalachia, had its own flavor of the gothic. It’s a land of hollows and high mountain walls, a limestone karst geology riddled with caves and sinkholes. The residents were even more isolated than in the rest of the South, more eccentric, more suspicious of outsiders.

My two most recent books stem from that time of early discovery. My latest story collection, Here With the Shadows (Swan River Press), is my attempt to emulate those early 20th century English ghost stories I loved so much. And Blood Kin (Solaris Books), alternating between Depression-era Appalachia and the same region in the present day, is full-on Southern Gothic ramping up into horror.

Guest Post | "The Perfect Blade for Every Battle" by Sebastien de Castell

It’s a dangerous world out there, and if you’re not careful you could soon find yourself on the wrong end of an opponent’s knife, a zombie’s tooth, or a werewolf’s claws. If you’re reading this, then I’m assuming three things: first, you’re in terrible danger. Second, you have, for some reason, kept a copy of this article in your pocket. Third, you’re standing outside the only 24-hour sword shop in town. Oh sure, you might think that these are ridiculous and statistically unlikely assumptions to make, but then why are you still reading this article? Really. Go away. That’s right—run off back home to your microwave dinner and Desperate Housewives marathon. The rest of us have blood to shed. 

Still here? Right, then, well done you. Now you need to get inside that 24-hour sword shop and quickly pick out the right weapon for the battle ahead. To maximize your chances of drinking to your enemy’s demise (and minimising the odds of your skull being used as a tankard when they drink to yours), follow the handy guide below to match your current duelling dilemma with the right weapon for the job. 

Scenario 1 - It’s the Zombie Apocalypse

I put this one first as, based on popular media, it's apparently the most likely danger you’ll face this year. Cheer up, though, last year’s edition would have required you to prepare to face off with hundred year-old emo vampires whose only weaknesses are sparkling prettily in sunlight and occasionally brooding to death. 

Right, back to the zombies. What we need here is a good cleaving weapon. You might think a nice double-bladed battle-axe is the way to go, but the truth is, they’re actually pretty hard to wield accurately. Also, if you miss, it’s hard to bring it back around in time for a second try before your ex-neighbour chomps into your face and infects you with the deadly zombie virus (not to mention some pretty serious halitosis.) This will severely curtail any hopes of attracting a member of the opposite sex. 

Now, some of you are probably hoping I’ll tell you that The Walking Dead has it all wrong (well, they do about the crossbow thing but that’s another story) but when it comes to zombie fighting, Michonne has this thing figured out: get yourself a good katana. 

The katana is a traditionally made Japanese sword and one of the finest bladed weapons ever devised. It’s designed for slicing and delivers devastatingly sharp cuts against flesh, sinew, and bone. Can it really decapitate a zombie in one blow? Absolutely. The Japanese used to test katanas by cutting through dead bodies (evidently practicing for the inevitable zombie apocalypse to come.) Regrettably, it’s useless against Godzilla, which makes me wonder if the Japanese were really all that prescient, after all. 

Bonus Tip: While you’re at the store, grab yourself a bokken. This wooden practice weapon is roughly the same size and shape as a katana, but if you sharpen the end just a bit you’ll be ready in case Edward Cullen ever loses his cool and comes for you with his fangs bared. In fact, if you see Edward or any other Twilight vampires you should probably stab them through the heart even if they don’t seem threatening. Just in case, you know? 

Scenario 2 - Road Warrior Dystopia

Zombies? What a preposterous idea. We all know the future belongs to roving bands of ex-punk rock bassists ravaging the countryside in search of... well, it’s not entirely clear what they’re in search of, but they’re planning to kick your ass. So grab a blade and start cleaving black leather biker gangs. 

Your weapon of choice? The European bastard sword. This classic Medieval and early Renaissance monster is the jack-of-all trades you need to deliver judicious quantities of mayhem to all kinds of maniacally grinning mohawk monsters. Some hyena-faced lackey smirking at you while flipping his switch-blade in the air? Good—you’ve got more than enough reach to take him out. Armoured skateboarder is coming at you with a baseball bat? The bastard sword has the strength to parry that blow before you smite the post-apocalyptic Tony Hawk wannabe into the ground. 

Oh, and in case you’re thinking that broadswords were too heavy, they historically weighed between 2.5-3 pounds which was very close to sixteenth century rapiers. Bastard swords could also be wielded with two hands, making them easier to handle. Also, you get to say bastard a lot. Bastard. 

Scenario 3 - Real Life Duel

I know what you’re thinking: what if undead creatures with no biologically explainable capacity for movement and brain-eating don’t spontaneously rise up in oddly convenient urban centres around the country? What if completely foreseeable oil depletion fails to result in a world where everyone paradoxically drives around in gas-guzzling trucks? Alright, then, let’s prepare for something believable: a duel to the death with a fellow human over a question of honour. 

Yes, the classic duel at dawn. The cause? Likely some unintentional slight caused by a poor choice of words that triggers a light slap with a soft white glove. Your options? A simple apology or a deadly and prolonged fight resulting in death for one of you, murder charges for the other, and misery for both your families.

Right, duel it is then. 

You might be thinking rapier here, and if you were living in the 15th or 16th century I would agree with you. But the rapier is still a fairly heavy weapon to handle and that affects its speed. What you want here is a small sword. Yes, I realize the name "small sword" doesn’t inspire you with testosterone-filled confidence, but the small sword was fast—crazy fast—and the point was sharper than any blade that came before it. The only one thing that matters in a real swordfight is putting the pointy end into the other guy first. That’s why, by the late 17th century, the small sword had all but eliminated the rapier as the duelling weapon of choice. It’s also light enough to carry with you at all times and is surprisingly convenient for cooking hotdogs around the campfire. 

Scenario 4 - Crime of Passion

Troubles at home? Starting to suspect your spouse may be stepping out on you with someone from the accounting department? Where others might pause and consider thoughtful dialogue with their significant other, you refuse to waste time with ego-crushing self-reflection and expensive couples counselling. Instead, you’ve decided to commit the sort of love crime usually reserved for melodramatic classics of the French cinema. 

If murderous revenge is on your mind, then there’s only one weapon that will do the job the way it needs to be done: the N-Force Vendetta Double Sword. Yes, the N-Force has it all: big and bold enough to compensate for any masculine insecurities you may be experiencing, and with two separate blades you can offer one to your nemesis as a chance to defend themselves, or, heck, why not use one blade for your enemy and one for your spouse? Best of all, if you do a little research online you’ll quickly learn why the N-Force Vendetta Double Sword is the perfect blade if it turns out you haven’t stumbled upon the love of your life cheating on you with your best friend but instead have discovered them planning a particularly thoughtful birthday party for you. 

Hopefully these handy tips will get you through your next night of bloody battle, but if your sword fighting needs go beyond these every-day scenarios—if, for example, your king has been murdered and it turns out that every noble is a tyrant and every knight a thug—can I respectfully suggest you get yourself a copy of Traitor’s Blade and let Falcio, Kest, and Brasti be your guides on negotiating life’s little challenges?

Guest Post | The 5 Guest Posts I’ll Never ($^#*&^@) Write by Kameron Hurley

God's War is a Very Good Book. I confess I'm yet to read the rest of the Bel Dame Apocrypha—in my defense, the series is only now being rolled out locally—but when the author approached me about composing a potential guest post for you folks, I don't mind admitting how warmly I welcomed the suggestion.

Immediately I started wondering what I could possibly talk her into. Kameron Hurley has written some incredibly progressive pieces in the past—like this essay for A Dribble of Ink, currently being mooted for a Hugo—but she also writes a lot of lists. And I... I don't love lists. 

But a list with a difference? A list about lists? The more I mulled what had begun as a joke over, the more I realised how interested I'd be in reading her response. And to Kameron's credit, as you'll see, she took my suggestion (almost) completely seriously.

***

So, it’s guest post season for me, with work, here, here, here, here, and here and... oh, you don’t even want to see my calendar for the rest of January.

Let’s get meta instead.

When you approach bloggers for guests posts (as I approached Niall), it’s often best to ask them if there’s a particular topic they’re interested in. It’s their house, after all, and it makes sense to pick a topic of interest to their readership. Funny enough, Niall sort of (flippantly, I think) asked me what five guest posts I wouldn't write if somebody asked... and that got me thinking. 

Because, dear reader, though I’ll happily talk about health crises, institutionalized racism, and critique the SFWA—there are some topics these days that I won’t touch.