Guest Post | "Short Fiction in the New Publishing Reality" by Gail Z. Martin

Not too long ago, people were quick to say that short fiction was dead. They pointed to the demise of several long-running, celebrated fiction magazines, and to lackluster sales for anthologies, and concluded that the long form had won.

As Mark Twain once said, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Whether you bless ebooks or curse them, one thing they have given us back is the viable short story and anthology. Authors discovered that writing short stories and selling them on Amazon and other online platforms was a good way to keep existing readers happy and bring in new readers with a low-risk opportunity to sample the wares. Anthologies do exceptionally well on Kickstarter because multiple authors each with his/her own fan base can quickly gin up support and boost the signal for the project.

Never has a corpse returned to the land of the living quite so quickly.

Ebooks and online bookselling has substantially altered the business of publishing and continues to send shockwaves through the industry. But by creating a viable and potentially profitable way for authors to bring short fiction to market, the incentive exists for authors to write short form. Whether they are contributing to a Kickstarter anthology or bringing their self-published short stories to market independently, authors are no longer limited by the number of paying venues for short fiction and the time-consuming effort of pitching a story, sometimes multiple times before finding it a home. Stories can also tackle timely issues more easily, since the time-to-market is decidedly shortened.

A funny thing happened when people began reading on smart phones and tablets. All of a sudden, they discovered that they liked reading a story they could finish in the car pool van or on the train in the way into work, instead of always being stuck at a good part and not being able to get back into a full book for hours. Mobile device readership is growing, especially in the under-30 demographic, and those readers enjoy bite-sized fiction, stoking a demand for more short stories.

Short stories have also become a promotional tool for novel writers, in addition to being an end in themselves. I’ve been part of four Kickstarter anthologies in the last year. Each of them featured one of my short stories as part of the anthology. In addition, backers received a three-pack of stories from my two short story series if the anthology reached specific dollar goals.

What this meant was that thousands of new readers got a sampler platter of my short stories based on my book series, introducing them to me and my worlds. Sites like Wattpad take this a step farther, enabling authors to reach millions of members with free short fiction to garner comments and build audience.

A year ago, I began writing two series of short stories related to my novels. The Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures are prequels to my Chronicles of the Necromancer series. That series is currently on hiatus as I write the Ascendant Kingdoms books, but loyal readers wanted more in the Winter Kingdoms world. By serialising what are essential three prequel books into stand-alone short stories with a larger plot arc, I’m able to give readers what they want without foreclosing future publishing opportunities, and earn a nice side income to boot.

Likewise, my Deadly Curiosities Adventures began as a universe I created specifically for anthology contributions. When Solaris Books liked “Buttons”, the story I contributed to Magic: The Esoteric and Arcane, and asked for a book series based on that story, the short stories continued in anthologies and direct to ebook on Kindle/Kobo/Nook. The short stories aren’t required reading to enjoy the books, but they do add additional details and background that fans of the series will find interesting. They take place before, after and in between the novels. I bring out a new short story in either my Jonmarc Vahanian or Deadly Curiosities series once a month. I’ve also written an original Deadly Curiosities novella and posted it free on Wattpad to reach a new, mobile device-intensive audience.

Thanks to ebooks and Kickstarter, short fiction has a promising future. From being a moribund format to becoming the hot new thing, short fiction has rebounded with vigour that would be the envy of any zombie master. Here’s to new opportunities.

***

Gail Z. Martin's Days of the Dead blog tour runs through October 31 with never-before-seen cover art, brand new excerpts from upcoming books and recent short stories, interviews, guest blog posts, giveaways and more. Each article comes complete with extra excerpt links for stories and books by author friends of hers, plus a special 50% off discount from Double-Dragon ebooks, but just like Trick or Treat, you’ve got to visit the participating sites to get the goodies! Hit up AscendantKingdoms.com for all the details.

In the interim, enjoy an excerpt from her short story 'Buttons,' a bonus bit from her contribution to the Kickstarter-funded Athena’s Daughters anthology, and—last but not least—an excerpt from Jean Rabe's novel The Cauldron, also by way of Wattpad.

Guest Post | "Many Worlds" by Tom Fletcher

I didn’t really think about genre when I started writing The Leaping, which was my first novel. I thought a lot about theme, about narrative voice, about character, about story. (Not necessarily in that order). I knew I wanted to write something about what it meant to be human, fear of death, about paranoia and paralysis in the face of a confusing and hostile world. About how late-stage capitalism insulates us from the consequences of our consumerist actions and choices. Nothing too ambitious, then.

In the end the book was about people objectifying and then frantically dismembering each other in some kind of desperate search for a soul, or meaning, and finding—this isn’t much of a spoiler—very little. I showed it to a friend and mentor, Nicholas Royle, who sent it to an editor, who made an offer for the book. I was delighted, obviously. They said they saw it as a horror novel. Well, I thought; yes. Perfect. It is a horror novel. I didn’t know much about horror fiction, having grown up mostly on fantasy, science-fiction and mainstream stuff, but The Leaping had a supernatural aspect—more than an aspect—and plenty of blood, so it made sense to me. And I was happy with that. 

Second and third novels followed—The Thing on the Shore and The Ravenglass Eye, respectively. Standalones, but set in the same collapsing universe as The Leaping. They were horror novels too, I think, though I was trying not to let any ideas about genre shape what I wrote. I tried to resist neat conclusions and anything approaching redemption or morality, but I didn’t know if this approach was making my books more horror, or less horror. What I wanted was a sense of nightmare, which—for me, then meant creating a sense of wrongness (though not badness) on every level. These books ended up quite cold, and jagged. I was committed to honesty, and that meant not shying away from themes or scenes that were unpleasant to contemplate, and it also meant writing instinctively—following a logic (a nightmarish logic) that operated at a deeper level than the plots, arcs and plans I’d spent a lot of time on.

These books, and a fourth horror novel called The Dead Fool, which is under contract but not yet published [ooh!—Ed], are—and I say this with pride—strange, bleak, and alienating. And they were strange, bleak, and alienating to write, too. After writing The Dead Fool, I was exhausted, and wanted a change. I wanted to write something expansive, and not intensely introspective. I wanted to write something a bit pacier, and a bit more structured. I wanted to write something a bit more fun.

Yes, I wanted to write something different. But this wasn’t a case of jumping one ship for another; abandoning horror for fantasy. I could have written a horror novel that was pacey, rigorously planned, and fun. And fantasy can be extremely disconcerting and uncomfortable. The truth is, I’d always wanted to write fantasy, as well as everything else. When I decided I wanted to be a writer—way, way back at secondary school—I was devouring writers like Pratchett, Peake, and Hobb, and I’d envisaged myself writing fantasy and sci-fi. When writing my first few novels, I was also noting down ideas for mainstream fiction, and writing SF shorts. Yes, my published novels were horror, but that didn’t mean I was a horror writer exclusively.

Pitching a fantasy trilogy to Jo Fletcher Books—of which Gleam is the first book—was the realisation of a long-held idea, and it coincided with my desire to try a different approach to writing for a while. And I’m having a blast. Creating a whole other world is a new challenge, but it’s incredibly liberating, as is working across the larger canvas of a trilogy. 

None of which is to say that Gleam is all sweetness and light, of course. It’s not all colourful moons and campfires and magic crystals. There are ruins, bandits, bloodletters, drugs, giant slugs, and other monsters. There’s darkness, and there’s despair, and there’s violence. But in Gleam, as opposed to in my horror novels, the characters are not completely overwhelmed by the threat, and so the narrative has room for humour and warmth. Wild Alan, Bloody Nora, The Mushroom Queen, Churr, Spider Kurt—they’re all equipped to cope with the world they inhabit, which my horror novel characters are not.

The worlds are very, very different. ButI fully intend to return to the brutal, nihilistic world of The Leaping et al in future, and I’ve got plans for another trilogy set in the weird, magical Factory of Gleam too. I’ve grown deeply attached to it (and I hope you’ll all grow as attached to it as I have). 

I can’t imagine working in only one genre for my entire career. I don’t know any writer who can. And yet you hear of ‘horror writers’ and ‘fantasy authors’. These are reductive terms. Books might (might) have genres; writers don’t.

***

Tom Fletcher was born in 1984 and lives in Manchester with his wife and son. He's published a number of short stories alongside three loosely connected horror novels, namely The Leaping, The Thing on the Shore and The Ravenglass Eye. His new book, Gleam, is the first part of The Factory Trilogy. Find out more about it and its author at The Endist.

Guest Post | "Interconnection and Telling Myths" by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

When Niall asked me to pick a blog topic and suggested, as one option, why I kept coming back to the mythological grounding of Scale-Bright and its related stories, I jumped at the chance: it seems like a perfect way to combine that particular subject and the more general one of writing interconnected short stories that share a world or characters.

I have it on good genre authority—mainly Rachel Swirsky and Niall Harrison—that interconnected short stories are far from uncommon; Aliette de Bodard is famous for it with her Xuya stories, which share a space opera universe best known for its sentient ship AIs and complex families, and the novella On a Red Station, Drifting in the same setting. We know Ann Leckie’s Radchaai mostly from Ancillary Justice, but there are also short stories like They Sink and Are Vanished Away’ and ‘Night’s Slow Poison’. Richard Parks has his Lord Yamada stories and the novel Yamada Monogatari. Lavie Tidhar has built up his Central Station over the years. E. Catherine Tobler has her Unreal Circus, Jason Sanford his Plague Birds while Mike Allen has phantasmagoria SF Hierophants stories and poetry. That’s just to name a handful! It seems to me that the drive to establish a sense of continuity is shared by many writers; sometimes we come up with a world, or a set of characters, we can’t entirely let go after just one story.

But another draw for me is that while reconfigurations of folktales and myths are plentiful, the type of what gets retold tends to be particular. Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and so on are the frequent choices. I wanted to pick a story outside that range. It’s far from obscure; the story of the archer Houyi and the legend of the White Snake are staples—but to some the fact that I gender-flipped Houyi can go entirely unnoticed! So it’s interesting to try this out, introducing tales that are new to some readers while being deeply familiar with others. I’ve observed that retellings tend to give sly nods to readers who know the original—through motif, iconic moments—and that’s part of the delight; I do it too, though I also like to think that I’ve drawn these stories in a manner that can be enjoyed by those unfamiliar with them as well. And once I did one part of this, the rest demanded their turn. ‘Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon’ came first, focusing on Chang’e and Houyi; it led me to research Xihe, the mother of the suns Houyi (somewhat inconsiderately) brings down, and then I wanted to give her a story too—one mostly of my own invention, taking elements from the original material and reconfiguring them to varying degrees. I couldn’t stop there though; at the time I wanted to do so much more with these characters, but ran into the issue that Houyi and Chang’e had already finished their arc, if you will. They’d overcome most of their obstacles, achieved narrative closure, and it’s time to relegate them to secondary roles.

I needed a new character, a new focus, and a new story. Bringing all of this to our time seemed like a fine way to do it, and making the main character a many-times removed grandniece of Chang’e’s gives them a crucial family connection. Then I lit on the concept of tying it into a different myth—which offers its own (relatively) young, hot-headed figure in the Green Snake as foil to the young, uncertain woman I’ve made the lead of Scale-Bright. Things ballooned and before I knew it, I had in my hand an entire novella. It couldn’t be squeezed back into a short story anymore.

It’s not all smooth as this is not my culture, but I hope that I’ve put in thought and research, though if concerns are raised I would be more than happy to attend to them. Part of my goal was relentless fidelity in specific aspects. I never include glossaries in my work, as it’s important to me that words are understood through their contexts organically. The characters speak more than one Chinese—readers who know will recognize the markers around that. There are terms in the novella I leave untranslated and undefined, and while that might make the reading experience challenging to some, in that regard I’m of the Junot Díaz school of thought: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao comes without a glossary, so I like to think I’m safe, or at least in good company!

And it’s satisfying, as well, to fulfill the obligation to characters who’ve taken root in your head. To make them complete, while simultaneously sharing something you love—a body of myth that resonates with me, recast slightly in a way I hope will resonate with others too. That, to me, is one of the best things of this business: sharing what you care about, what matters to you, and writing from a place of joy.

***

Benjanun Sriduangkaew is "a writer of SF, F, and other things in the between" whose fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, GigaNotoSaurus, Tor.com and a number of anthologies such as Solaris Rising 3, Phantasm Japan and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures. A 2014 Campbell Award finalist for Best New Writer, her debut novella Scale-Bright is out now from Immersion Press. Find out more about it and its author at A Bee Writes.

Guest Post | "Om-Nom-Omnigenre" by Tom Pollock

"Oh really, how cool, you wrote a book?"

"Yes. Well, a trilogy actually."

"Oh cool, what genre is it?"

"YA. YA Urban Fantasy. YA Urban Fantasy Dystopia. YA Urban Fantasy Dystopia Post-Apocalypse."

"YA Urban...?"

"YA Urban Fantasy Dystopia Post-Apocalypse?"

"More or less."

At that point the conversation usually dries up. My interlocutor necks the rest of their wine, and suddenly remembers they have somewhere else important to be, but I swear it’s true. The Skyscraper Throne trilogy, my series about a teenaged graffiti artist and her poet best friend pulled into a world of runaway train ghosts, living reflections and crane fingered demolition gods, really is of all these genres, and maybe more.

Genre, you see, is a taxonomy, a periodic table for literature, but the truth is, almost all books are compounds, not individual elements. But while which genres to file a particular story under is ultimately up to the reader, it’s the writer who gets to choose the tropes they’ll use to judge it.

But how to choose? Tropes are just story elements—all that marks them out as special is the frequency with which we use them. For me, the first element in any story is the theme. Theme is just a fancy word for ‘what the story’s about,’ and my themes... they kind of snowballed.

The first thing I knew about the trilogy, you see, was that I wanted to tell a story about growing up, so YA made sense. The City’s Son was about two girls pulled into a magical world hidden beneath the skin of everyday London. This is an Urban Fantasy trope so tropey that it barely even registers—it’s practically definitional of the genre—but it’s also as neat a metaphor for one’s first, faltering steps into adulthood as I can think of: a world at once strange and familiar, exciting and frightening, that you’ve lived in every day of your life but never really seen until now.

In the second novel—The Glass Republic—our scarred protagonist is pulled into an aesthetic dictatorship, a parallel city inside reflections where the full measure of your worth is judged by your face, and the standards of beauty are set by a proud and ruthless Mirrorstocracy. Again, the core idea of a repressive regime is hardly original, but the resonance of a teen testing themselves against the rules and limits of their new world, and deciding how much they will shape those limits and how far they’ll allow them to shape them... for me that was the perfect second act.

And the final apocalyptic act? Bringing the world-that-is-London to the brink of destruction by an urban plague: streets running at 1000 degree fevers, windows and doors vanishing to leave citizens sealed up in brick, solid roads turning in an instant to a liquid so thin you can’t swim in it, just sink and let it fill your nostrils? 

All that is because when you’ve grown up—really grown up—you can never go home again.

Maybe that’s why I think of being grown-up (past tense) as a synonym for death.

Anyway, that’s how one series gets to be in (at least) four sub genres. So I’ll throw it over to you, dear internet friend, what’s your favourite genre: horror? Police procedural? Romance? And much more importantly—what do those genres say to you?

***

Inventor of monsters and hugger of bears, Tom Pollock writes fantasy, and writes about fantasy. Say hey to him on twitter @tomhpollock or by way of his website.

Guest Post | "Why Read Sci-Fi and Fantasy?" by Anna Caltabiano

“I just don’t do fantasy.”

That is a sentence I’ve heard more than once in various libraries and bookstores. I understand that people have their preferences, but I never understood why some people are so quick to shun fantasy and sci-fi past the age of twelve. In my opinion, that’s when it really gets good, because we develop a better understanding of what we read.

For the same reason many adults (and a few very serious teenagers) don’t read fiction, many people find fantasy and sci-fi to be simply a distraction, and therefore not worth reading. As a writer, but also as a reader of all sorts of fiction—sci-fi and fantasy included—I find this to be heartbreaking. I find that these novels often aren’t given the credit they deserve. 

“Why read fantasy or sci-fi?” That’s a fair question. Some people read it because they’re looking for an escape from their everyday lives, but others, like me, read sci-fi fantasy to better examine the world they live in.

I find that some of the best sci-fi and fantasy books I’ve ever read take place in worlds that look almost exactly like ours, except with one major difference—a single change that effects and alters the fictional world and the way people interact with their world and each other. Parallel universes, time travel, immortality... these are all small changes that effect everything. These seemingly minute changes magnify certain elements in our world: parallel universes speak to our desire to make different choices and explore their consequences, time travel connects us to our past and future, and addresses the eternal question of “What if I could do it over again?”, while immortality speaks to our collective fear of death and the meaning that it gives to our lives.

Fantasy and sci-fi genres are vehicles for us to look at our own world in a different light. Nonfiction can be helpful, but it can’t allow us to live new experiences. Realistic fiction does many things, but rarely triggers our minds to question the daily assumptions through which we live our lives. Good sci-fi and fantasy frees us to float to other worlds and other times, and while seemingly being disconnected from our daily lives, bring us back inside ourselves, permitting a new found understanding of who we are and what we believe.

***

Having been born in British colonial Hong Kong and educated in Mandarin Chinese schools before moving to Palo Alto, California—the mecca of futurism—Anna Caltabiano is a child of the transnational cyber punk era. She's seventeen years old and already the author of two novels: All That is Red and The Seventh Miss Hatfield. You can find out more about her and her work on her website, or follow the author on Twitter @caltabiano_anna.

Guest Post | "Stranger Than Fiction" by Sarah Pinborough

I am not a natural researcher when it comes to writing fiction. I find it slows the act of storytelling down—I like to get into a flow with the words and pausing to check facts can be jarring. I love reading historical fiction but I vowed to myself I would never write it. Then I came across the Thames Torso murders, and having read Dan Simmons' The Terror [doesn't get better, does it? — Ed] I felt inspired to give writing a blend of fact and fiction ago. 

I took advice from several friends who've written historical fiction and their universal top tip—which I've since passed on—is not to get bogged down in trying to research everything before you start. You can get lost in it, and by the time you come to need a small piece of information, like for example, what a middle-class late-Victorian family might have for dinner, you've forgotten what your research told you. 

Also, you can get caught up in tiny details and miss big things. While writing Mayhem I very nearly missed the Dockers' Strike of 1889, and given that some of my action takes place in the wharves, that could have been disastrous. When planning Murder the first thing I did was a quick search on major events that happen during each year of the book. Although Murder is quite a claustrophobic story of paranoia, Queen Victoria's diamond Jubilee took place during one of the years of the story. It was a huge nationwide celebration and to not feature it would have damaged the authenticity of the narrative.

Writing a novel set in Victorian London can also be a double-edged sword in that we each have an image of the era in our heads from various film and television adaptations of famous novels. In some respects, that's great in that you don't have to set up the entire world for the reader, but the danger is that your description can become generic. Luckily, if you dig around on the internet (the saviour of the modern writer) you can find some great contemporary accounts of various parts of the city written by journalists and diarists of the time which help with small details and getting the atmosphere of the place right.

Newspaper archives are also great for understanding the feel of the era. I subscribe to the Times Archive (all the newspaper articles in both Mayhem and Murder are authentic), and I searched for murders that made the papers of the day and investigations that both Dr Thomas Bond and Henry Moore were involved in (other than the most famous, the Jack the Ripper case) to use as the backdrop to events in Murder.

When I'd found those I also read other sections of the newspapers to try and get into the mentality of the period—the social issues, the politics etc. in order to make my characters' behaviours more realistic. It's surprising how similar in many ways we are to those who lived at the turn of the twentieth century. We both exist in fast-changing times with huge divisions between the rich and poor and the problems that come with that.

Using real people and events from history creates its own problems when weaving a story around them but I've thoroughly enjoyed it. There's a magic in having written a book about people who you come to think of as 'your' characters and then searching old newspaper reports and learning more and more about their fascinating lives. I love writing fiction, but if there's one thing I've learned from writing these novels, it's that there is sometimes nothing stranger than fact.

Guest Post | "The Dawn of Autumn" by Dave Hutchinson

I said as much yesterday, but it bears repeating here: Europe in Autumn is awesome; a canny concoction of sci-fi and spies which took me entirely by surprise, largely because I wasn't familiar with its author beforehand.

In the weeks since reading it I have, however, gotten my grubby paws on The Push, and it was bloody good too. So it was with high hopes that I approached Dave Hutchinson about putting together a guest post for TSS, and sincere glee when he agreed.

As is my habit, I asked the author a selection of questions, with my fingers firmly crossed that he'd be able to come up with something fun in answer to one. What I didn't expect was for him to answer them all! Here, then, is an absorbing account of how Europe in Autumn came about which also takes in the relevance of short stories on the novel form, Dave's personal favourite pocket nation, and—last but not least—his ideas for a potential sequel.

***

Years ago, a friend of mine—oh, why not drop names? It was Stephen King’s Polish translator—told me that I was, at heart, a short story writer.

This was a little disappointing, as I’d just finished what would be my first published novel, The Villages. It had taken me over a year of very hard work and I was rather pleased with it. But then I had a think about what he’d said, and I realised he was right. Virtually everything I’d written since I began to write somewhere back in the mid-70s was short-form. Some of it was very short indeed.

The Villages itself grew out of a short story which I workshopped with some other writers. In the course of the workshop it was suggested that maybe the story could be the seed of a novel. When I expressed doubt about this—I think I actually said, "Are you out of your minds?"—someone suggested a simple way of doing it. “Just look at it as a novella and keep going.”

Of course, it wound up being more complicated than that. The story got rewritten and rewritten and sort of grew backwards and forwards and sideways until it was sitting buried, a little to one side of the heart of the book, like the grit in a pearl and only I could tell it was there.

After The Villages, I went back to writing short stories. And as time went on, the short stories got longer and longer. Where I had once been able to tell a story in a couple of thousand words, now my stuff felt uncomfortably rushed if it ran to less than about ten thousand. I don’t think I was getting more verbose in my old age, it’s just that the rhythm of the stories I wanted to tell needed space to breathe.

Europe in Autumn started out as a completely different novel, set in three similar but separate versions of Europe. In the first, a journalist investigating what seems to be a routine Drugs Squad raid gone wrong in London suddenly finds himself in a reality where he never existed. In the second, a worker on the Warsaw Metro gets involved with a shadowy crime boss and a Continent-wide conspiracy. And in the third there was Rudi the Coureur, bless his little cotton socks.

The idea was to write the book in alternating chapters from the point of view of each of the characters, until somewhere near the end all their stories connected up, but early on I found myself more interested in Rudi’s story than the other two. Okay, I’ll put my hands up; the Rudi chapters were easier and more fun to write. Eventually, I shelved the other two stories and concentrated on Rudi.

I wound up writing the book the way I did for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the Rudi chapters I’d already written were quite self-contained because I still wasn’t sure how they’d fit into the original book and I wanted to be able to swap them around if I had to.

Secondly, though—and more important, I think—by that time, I was reading a lot of Alan Furst. In case you’ve never read him, Furst writes these wonderful, atmospheric, almost impressionistic espionage novels set around the beginning of the Second World War—what someone once called "the midnight of the century." Many of his books tend to be structured as self-contained chapters within the larger narrative, the way each novel itself is just part of a huge mosaic picture of Europe on the brink of war. I liked that, and though I can’t pretend to be anything like as good as Furst, I thought I’d like to try and pull it off with Europe in Autumn. It’s a structure I find rather pleasing, and of course it keeps me in my comfort zone, writing a string of short stories and novellas which add up to a larger story.

Of the locations in the novel, I’ve only really been to London and Poland. I live in London, and I’ve visited Poland quite a lot. It’s a country I’m extremely fond of, but I didn’t want to prettify it. That’s for another book, maybe. A friend of mine says I "get" Poland and that’s really quite a compliment.

The other locations in the book really come mostly from research. I’ve never been to Prague or Estonia, for instance, although I really want to visit Tallinn one day. Again, though, I didn’t want to prettify any of these places. The central premise of the book, the engine that drives it, is fantastical enough; I wanted to balance that with as realistic and rational a picture of Rudi’s Europe as I could come up with.

Having said that, I was a bit cruel to Scotland. I have no idea—and I suspect no one else does, either—how Scottish Independence is going to shake out [you're scaring me, mate!—Ed.] but for the purposes of the book I needed it to happen in a certain way, a way in which I really hope it doesn’t happen. The bit about it being bankrolled by the Chinese was meant as satire, but since I finished the book there’s been news of Beijing investing heavily in the Manchester Airport redevelopment and the Prime Minister selling a large part of the nation’s supply of pig semen to them, so I have to wonder...

The Europe in Europe in Autumn is one of proliferating pocket nations, a place where U2 fans can set up their own little country, for instance. I’ve been asked a couple of times whether I’d like to set one up myself, and to be honest the idea never occurred to me while I was writing the book. I rather like the idea of a national park that’s a sovereign nation, though, so if I were to do it I think it would be splendid for the Peak District to declare independence and strike out on its own. No motor cars, no heavy industry. Just a big quiet place. I could do with living in a big quiet place.

At the moment, I’m working on a novel which is a sort of companion to Europe in Autumn. It’s not a sequel so much as something that happens in parallel to the action in the first book. Since I started plotting that out, I’ve begun to see possibilities for a direct sequel, picking up the action in Europe in Autumn maybe ten or fifteen years down the line. But we’ll see. That’s a way away yet.

The Scotsman Abroad | Smugglivus and the Future of Speculative Fiction

Today, it's my pleasure to point you all in the direction of a post I wrote recently that, in a turn up for the textbooks, wasn't for either The Speculative Scotsman or Tor.com.

We'll talk more about my plans for Top of the Scots 2013 in time, but rest assured that I have been devoting a lot of thought to the prospect of the blog going forward, not least how to handle our annual accounting of the best books and movies and video games of the previous year. 

Indeed, I've been thinking so seriously about these things that when I received an email from Ana and Thea about contributing for the third time in three years to their festive feature, I decided to do something a little different.

To wit, this morning on The Book Smugglers, an overview of the most exciting science fiction and fantasy forthcoming in 2014... according to me, at least:

Fantasy fans have Fall of Light to look forward to, the second volume of The Kharkanas Trilogy by Steven Erikson. The mighty mind behind Malazan also has another new novel on the cards — a spacefaring farce with the working title Willful Child — which brings us neatly to our next category: the science fiction of the future! 

The Echo by James Smythe will be the first such specimen to arrive. I’d had the pleasure of reading this one already, so I can say with certainty that it’s a fully realised sequel which takes what was great about The Explorer and makes it bigger, better, and still more momentous. Meanwhile a second Smythe is poised to be published in the UK in late May: No Harm Can Come to a Good Man is about something called ClearVista, a revolutionary new technology which purports to predict probabilities.

Please do pop on over to The Book Smugglers' blog to read the rest of the post, and if you like, let us know what you and yours are looking forward to reading next year.

And hey: hang around! Not just because Smugglivus is always a bunch of fun — though, you know, it is — but because this week alone there will be guest posts by some of the very finest of my fellow bloggers, including Jared of Pornokitsch, Stefan Raets of Far Beyond Reality, and Justin Landon of Staffer's Book Review. 

Good reading: guaranteed.

Guest Post | "Dreaming Up Dream London" by Tony Ballantyne

"Smart, stylish, and as alarming as it is indubitably alluring, Dream London deftly demonstrates that the weird still has a thing or two to prove," I concluded in my review of Tony Ballantyne's new novel — out now from the fine folks at Solaris.

If there was one thing that captivated me about the book — and there wasn't; there were many — it was its setting: an ever-shifting city populated by people who wake up a little different every day. To wit, today on The Speculative Scotsman, the author kindly took some time to explain how he dreamed up Dream London.

***

In Dream London the city changes a little every night and the people change a little every day.

Much of the book was inspired by my years living in London. During that time I filled notebooks with scenes and ideas for a novel based there, but somehow it never seemed to gel. Then one day a friend recounted an experience in India (the scene on the first page of the book, in fact) and the story fell into place, just like that.

I had the scenes, I had the story, London's narrow streets and eclectic range of styles provided the backdrop, all that was missing now was the atmosphere. I knew the feeling I was trying to convey, so I sat down and tried to put down on paper some of the things that had inspired that feeling within me.  

There were many things on the list: a furniture shop in Clitheroe, a children's theme park in North Yorkshire, Belle-Île, off the coast of Brittany, Judith II by Klimt...

Three things, however, stood out — one book, and two pieces of music.

The book first: The Enchanted Wood, by Enid Blyton. Partly because I read it when I was so young and everything is so magical then, but particularly because there is no logic to it. Magic there is magic, it's never explained, it's never consistent, it's always enchanting. I can half remember other stories; the Wishing Chair, green smoke coming from witches cauldrons... 

Then there's the music.

  

Despite featuring his 8th symphony in Capacity, I'm not actually that great a Mahler fan, but there is something very emotive about parts of his music, something that sends my mind wandering into other worlds. The second and third movements of Mahler's Seventh Symphony sound spooky and magical, but magical in an overperfumed, degenerate manner, I played these especially when I was writing the night scenes.  

And lastly there is Kate Bush. Years ago I taught sword fencing on a children's camp in America. I remember listening to Lionheart and Never Forever in the middle of forest in Connecticut whilst waiting for groups to arrive. Time seemed to extend there, the rest of the world seemed to recede, and I was left with the impression that the paths back to camp were lengthening and twisting all the while...

Those lengthening paths led me down to Dream London.

***

Thank you so much, Tony, for stopping by to describe how you came to create such an incredible place.

For more about the author, here's his blog — and I do believe he tweets, too.

Guest Post | "The Once and Future Dragon" by James Maxey

Last week, the Dragon Apocalypse trilogy by James Maxey — comprising Greatshadow, Hush and Witchbreaker — was released as a DRM-free download. Ever since, several Solaris sorts have been celebrating its long-awaited liberation over on When Gravity Falls by reflecting on their favourite dragons in film and literature.

I figured I'd go one further and ask the man himself how and why dragons came to fascinate him.

Take it away, James!

***

I’m a little obsessed with dragons. They’ve played major roles in seven of my novels to date, and should you ever visit my house, you’ll find dragons watching over the driveway, climbing on my shelves, and peeking out from among my books. Why do they fascinate me so?

There’s the mythic element, of course. Dragons are found in the legends and artwork of many cultures around the world. They often symbolize nature as the embodiment of storms, oceans, or forests. Even today, who can look at a volcano belching fire and smoke, shaking the earth  with powerful rumbles, and not imagine some great slumbering beast stirring to life?

Of course, in Christian mythology, volcanoes are forever tied to images of Hell, a landscape of flowing lava and unbearable heat, reeking of sulfur. Perhaps this is why Satan himself is portrayed in Revelations as “that old great dragon.” The mythical reptile becomes not just an efficient predator, but the eternal foe of God himself, the avatar of destruction waiting to wipe out all life and goodness.

I play a lot with these ideas in my books. In my dragon apocalypse series, Greatshadow is the living manifestation of all flame. His malignant intelligence spies upon mankind through every candle flame, watching for one moment of carelessness to leap out and devour entire villages. The Church of the Book has decided to rid mankind of Greatshadow’s menace, and assemble a team of twelve powerful warriors to slay the ancient beast once and for all. Among all the carnage that follows once the team begins their quest, I try to explore the larger question of whether the human desire to tame and control nature is always beneficial. Are there times when it’s best to learn to live in harmony with these dangerous forces?

While the symbolic nature of dragons is valuable to me as a writer, I still ponder the universal appeal of dragons. For this, I turn not to myth, but to science. Evolutionary biology has left us with relics of ancestors that have outlived their usefulness, like the goose bumps that rise on our skin when we’re frightened, attempting to bristle fur that we no longer possess. What if some of these relics exist within our brains? Our tiny, tree-dwelling, lemur-like forebears had good reason to be instinctively skittish of a whole range of predators. They had to watch out for large birds swooping down from above, beware of snakes slithering among the branches where they lived, and worry about large cats skulking in the shadows, ready to pounce. Early primates with an inborn fear of hawks, snakes, and tigers had a better chance of passing on their genes than primates without this fear. Is it so odd to think that, millions of years later, our fear of these primeval predators still lurks within us?

If you blend together the wings of an eagle, the scales of a serpent, and the claws and musculature of a lion, you get a creature looking very much like a dragon. They are the sum of our natural predators.

The possibility that dragons have their roots in biological realities raises interesting possibilities. Were there ever creatures that existed in nature that could pass for dragons? Archaeopteryx is a good candidate with its wings, long next, and toothy jaws. Of course, its fearsomeness is somewhat diminished by the fact it was little larger than a blue jay.  Still, there’s no reason to think that a winged creature big enough to qualify as a dragon couldn’t fly. Some fossils of Quetzalcoatlus show that it had a wingspan of fifty feet. Within the relatively short span of time that men have been upon the earth, there have still been birds with wingspans in the twenty feet range. I imagine it would be quite thrilling to look at an animal the size of a small plane soaring overhead, but, alas, large birds went the way of most megafauna, driven to extinction partly by the advance of mankind. But, if our ancestors proved ruthlessly effective at wiping out large animals, modern man is on the verge of bringing some of these lost species back via cloning. It’s not wild fantasy to dream that we’ll one day visit wildlife parks populated by wooly mammoths, Tasmanian tigers, or dodos. 

Some would argue that we shouldn’t play God in resurrecting dead species. But, giving our increasing proficiency at manipulating DNA, I would say the more intriguing question is whether  we should give birth to species that have never before existed. Would it really be so difficult to mix a little goat DNA with a horse and wind up with something very much like a unicorn? Would it be such a stretch to tinker with a turkey until it once more had teeth? The day will come when a kid sitting at a computer will be able to tweak and edit a strand of DNA into all sorts of fantastical creations. Biological printers will be able to assemble the double helix gene by gene. Mankind collectively has contributed to the mass extinction of millions of species. Once we perfect the technology, might we give birth to just as many new species? The days when knights ride out to test their mettle against dragons might not be a vision of our mythic past. It just may be what waits in our future.

(If I may slip in one last shameless plug, the idea that men may one day be the ancestors of dragons is the foundational premise of my Dragon Age fantasy series. The first book, Bitterwood, is now available a free download on Smashwords, Kobo, Amazon, and many other fine ebook outlets. Bitterwood was also recently released in audio format, available from Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.)

***

Thank you, James, for stopping off at The Speculative Scotsman to talk a bit about your continuing fascination with dragons. I'm entirely glad I asked.

Now why don't you all go read Greatshadow? It's bloody good fun, AND it has dragons.

Dead and Buried or Alive and Kicking | David Bryher on the Mummy

We do love our undead, don’t we? If it’s not seductive vampires, it’s ravenous zombies gathered in their hordes of various speeds. While the former have cornered the sparkly ‘paranormal romance’ market, the latter are a grumbling, mumbling presence in tons of media from books to films to computer games as wildly varied as Minecraft, Skyrim and Dead Rising (and and and).

There was a time — just ask Universal — when we liked our undead a lot more simple: Dracula was out for our blood and the zombies were out for our brains. It was a simpler time, before folk started to throw around pesky metaphors, before we tried to empathise with the undead, before we got things like True Blood or BBC3’s In The Flesh. And all this stuff is well and good — but whence shamble the mummies? 

We demand more of our monsters nowadays. Vampires have come to represent tortured love, while zombie stories talk of war and social exclusion and a rapacious global society. These, of course, are problems for the living — but mummies... mummies are made of nothing but death.

Some years ago, I stayed in Luxor in Egypt, in a hotel overlooking the Nile. Every night, I would watch the sun set on the other side of the river, behind the low, lumpy mountains surrounding the Valley of the Kings. After it sank below the horizon, said the myths, the sun travelled into the land of the dead — and that was why the tombs of the Egyptian kings were dug into the heels of those bone-white mountains. It wasn’t much of a stretch to see the imaginative leaps required to build this belief: if you set out from the temple-cluttered ancient capital of Thebes, following the red sun as it slides out of sight, you’d find nothing but dry, chalky ground — an absence of life so close to the green marshes surrounding the Nile. When the sun went, it took life with it — so where better to dig to find the gates to the afterlife?

This valley was a gateway into the beyond: and while that beyond may have included an eternal life of gold and bounty and cocaine and hookers, Death was still its gatekeeper, and its gate was one-way. The tombs in the Valley of the Kings, the pyramids, those richly painted sarcophagi on display at museums around the world — all that colour, pomp and splendour, all brought to life by death.

So, while vampires and zombies have come to cast their light on our lives, the mummy still casts a long, sunset shadow over our existence, reminding us of the naked truth that Everything Dies. And even though we might be remembered, it’s a gamble: we can only ever be remembered if we’re dead and gone and there’s a chance we’ll be forgotten too. 

There are all sorts of ways of looking at the Egyptian fascination with their dear departed and the method of their departure. Few cultures have built such obvious or long-lasting tributes to their dead and it’s easy, if you’re looking for a hook to hang a story on, to read this behaviour as uncomfortably clingy. And it wasn’t just the Egyptians that were into embalming and clinginess...

In 13th Century Scotland [Comes highly recommended! — Ed.], Lady Dervourguilla of Galloway founded an abbey, known as New Abbey, near Dumfries. In 1269, her beloved husband, John Balliol (of the Oxford college fame), died and, refusing to be parted from her love, Dervorguilla had his heart embalmed and placed in a casket of ivory and silver. She carried this casket around with her for the rest of her life until, finally, she was laid to rest in the grounds of New Abbey, next to the slightly hollowed-out body of her husband. In honour of this, er, ‘touching’ tale, the abbey was renamed ‘Sweetheart Abbey'. 

(I think the monks were taking the piss.)

Even though there’s only a tiny shred of mumminess in this story, I still think it shows us just how much sway death, and the belief that people should be remembered in such stark and bold ways, holds over us. I used the tale of Dervorguilla as the basis for my story in The Book of the Dead, using it to look at how we hang on to things we should have shucked off and forgotten long ago.

So maybe that’s what mummies teach us about our lives: not everything is worth remembering; not everything about life is so precious that we should worry about leaving it in the dusty desert, buried with the setting sun. The curse of the pharaohs may actually be there to protect us. And sometimes, maybe it really is better for the dead to stay dead.

***

David Bryher’s new short story, 'The Dedication of Sweetheart Abbey,' appears in The Book of the Dead. His other recent work includes storylining and additional writing on The Walk (the new game from the makers of I), a preview of a 1964 Doctor Who story (you read that right), and the sci-fi audio drama A Lift in Time for Big Finish Productions.

For more about the author, follow @davidbryher on Twitter and check out his blog.

Dead and Buried or Alive and Kicking | Jonathan Green on the Mummy

“Anck-es-en-Amon, my love has lasted longer than the temples of our gods. No man ever suffered as I did for you.”

So declares Boris Karloff’s reanimated ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep, in Universal Studios’ 1932 chiller The Mummy. But just what is it about mummies (the ones that look like they’re wrapped in loo roll, as opposed to the ones who actually buy the loo roll) that makes them so appealing to movie makers and writers of fiction with a fascination for the fantastical and macabre?

The undead — those restless revenants that rise from the grave at the slightest excuse — have always held a fascination for writers who are, by nature, preoccupied with the really weighty issues life throws at us — love, life itself, and possibly the biggest one there is: what happens to us after we die?

It’s all a question of faith. When very few can honestly claim to know what happens to our immortal souls after death takes us, the revenant — no matter how vile and decomposed a thing it might be — at least implies by its very existence that death is not the end. And when it comes to the undead, the mummy got there first.

Legends of mummies predate central European vampire myths as well as Roman ghost stories concerning werewolves. Zombies are positively modern by comparison, emerging out of Haiti (as well as their tombs) in the early 20th century.

If vampires represent the potential killer in us all, or the desire to remain eternally young (fuelled by today’s obsession with image), and the werewolf is the beast in us all (the bad boy that metrosexual man is supposed to suppress, that also reminds us just how close to base animals we still are beneath our skin of so-called civilised humanity), while the zombie personifies the very real fear of death chasing after us, what does the mummy represent to our modern sensibilities?

Quite simply, the mummy is the antidote to all these other monstrous mythic archetypes. The mummy has it all. It is immune to death, freed from the need to sustain its physical form. It is no ravening beast but a civilised creature, and not just any creature, but a highborn, noble ruler.

In our materialistic society, one that is driven by the need to accumulate wealth whilst also being trapped within a seemingly endless cycle of boom and bust that has lasted for the best part of a hundred years (if not longer), the mummy lets us defeat the old adage. The mummy says you can take it with you when you die.

And for those of us motivated by things other than the accumulation of wealth, the mummy has a message of hope for us too. For the mummy shows us what it is to be human. As Imhotep attests, even when every other capacity has left us, we are still capable of love. 

Years after we have gone into the ground, those we leave behind will still feel our love for them as a very real presence inside their hearts, and we will receive their love in return. For love is ultimately what makes us human. And more than that, it is love that makes us immortal.

***

Jonathan Green has more than thirty-five books to his name. Well known for his contributions to the Fighting Fantasy range of adventure gamebooks, and numerous Black Library publications, he has also written fiction for such diverse properties as Doctor Who, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Sonic the Hedgehog and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Jonathan is the creator of the Pax Britannia series for Abaddon Books. He is currently writing the eighth novel in an ongoing series set within this alternative steampunk universe and featuring the debonair dandy adventurer Ulysses Quicksilver.

For more about the author, follow @jonathangreen on Twitter and check out his blog.

Dead and Buried or Alive and Kicking | Maria Dahvana Headley on the Mummy

This little piece started out being mummy fluff, and turned into a political rant, so you’ll have to forgive me. I didn’t realize, until I started writing it, that I actually did have some pretty precise feelings about mummy narratives, and indeed about the notion of the walking dead, which is, of course, the category mummy stories usually fall into. I thought, tra-la, mummy fun and games, and then, well, you’ll see. That is, of course, the joy of writing fiction – it can be both written and read on a variety of levels. Here, mummy stories are both fun & games, AND speak to some of our most ancient cultural maladies.

***

So, in truth, I didn’t believe the mummy was still alive and kicking in fiction. This is somewhat ironic, given that I think I’m one of the few writers in this anthology who had already written something mummy-centric. In my mind, mummies were basically overdressed zombies, and in Queen of Kings, my novel, there’s only a little bit of mummy, because by the time Cleopatra was ruling and dying, mummies were basically out-of-date. I did however, in the research for that book, discover a bit about Alexander the Great, whose body was transported in a vat of honey (yes: after he died) and whose mummified nose was ultimately broken off by Octavian/Augustus, maybe by accident, maybe, um, not. Little souvenir of the powerful dead to keep on the Emperor’s desk. Given that that sort of thing existed, it was ultimately little surprise that there were lots of highly-specific and highly-peculiar mummy facts lurking out there in the inter-ether.

Mummies and mummy-bits have been eaten as medicine up to and throughout the Elizabethan era, ground up and made into ink until 1963 (!), their bandages scavenged (possibly) to make into paper in the 1850’s, stolen from pyramids for centuries, sold as pulverized spell-ingredients in a witchcraft-supply store in NYC as late as the 1970’s — or so the research for my story, 'Bit-U-Men,' revealed... and all the while, they’ve managed to retain their romance. 

That’s not nothing, when what we’re talking about is a category of zombie trope. Zombies are basically unromantic to the maximum, what with their rotting and their flesh cravings. Mummies in fiction are also generally walking dead, but they manage to be... cool. 

Now for a little class analysis. Got to do it. It’s why we’re still obsessed.

Mummies are our genre-fictional royal families, and we have the same complicated feelings about them that we have about the living royals, whether they be Prince William and Kate, or the Kennedy clan: obsession, revulsion, intrigue, envy, curiosity, wrath...

In fiction, after all, mummies tend to be dead Kings and Queens, wrapped in their finest, with their legions of servants, and their treasures. The middle-class mummy is not a trope we’re used to seeing, nor is the mummy at the bottom of the social order. (Animal mummies are slight exceptions, but animal mummies also exist in a largely royal context. Those sacred cats are not your typical street feline mousers.) Mummies come with curses, but also with power, because hello: the mummies we’re talking about when we’re telling stories tend to be mummies made of the people who were in charge. Even dead, they tend to come with a lot of certainty. They ask for, and take what they want, and victims of fictional mummy curses are seduced by the pretty, the shiny, the possible rewards that come from getting involved in bad business.

In reality, of course, powerless mummies would be the norm. There are a hell of a lot more poor people in any culture than there are Kings. In even more stark reality, hello, we’re talking about the dead, who are inherently pretty damn powerless. Any power we culturally invest them with is our own nervousness about dying. We do not want to die and lose our influence. We would, thus, much, MUCH rather be mummies than zombies, because mummies rule beyond the grave, whereas poor zombies get yanked up from their deadness, all messy and clueless, and their only reward is hard labor and hunger for flesh. Fiction’s mummies, on the other hand, get buried with feasts. When they walk through our narratives, they tend to be equipped with the craft and capacity that come of satiation rather than starvation’s bewilderment and emaciated collapse.

Fictional mummies are often villainously power-hungry — even if they’re powerful, dying has crimped their style — and thus, in these narratives, the satisfaction of our heroes destroying a mummy is the same satisfaction as that of overthrowing a king. Mummy stories can frequently be seen as stories about the overthrow of the ruling class, even if the ruling class in these cases is way dead. They’re stories about killing kings, and re-killing kings, about taking power from those who shouldn’t have it any more.

The thought that the dead might retain their agency is, I think, both tempting — we’re all, after all, going to die — and terrifying. What if the dead want things we don’t want to give them? What if the dead want things they shouldn’t want?

Enter zombies, genre-fiction’s poverty-equivalent. Zombies come at you with all the tropes of right wing poverty rhetoric: the poor are stupid, greedy (that would be the terminology, rather than hungry), and without understanding of the Real Things. It’s both fascinating and unsurprising that there’s been a recent surge of zombie narrative popularity. Global financial collapse always leads societies to collective fear of both poverty and of the poor — even if the poor are us. These stories are manufactured as a way, usually, to sell the myth of the evil of the poor to the poor themselves. Zombie stories are essentially stories of the starving and desperate trying to regain stability.

In real-world terms: there’s long been an attempt to sell the mythos that starving people are not actually human, and that starvation is the fault of the starved rather than of the fed. In zombie stories, a narrative in which the poor overthrow the not-as-poor, the overthrowing poor are portrayed as being unable to run any kind of society. Zombie society, after all, is cannibal, flesh collapse, and lack of reason.

So, yes, these are bummer tropes. I bring them up for a reason though — I would, it turns out, like to see more mummy overthrows, rather than more post-apocalypse zombie battles. I would like to see a world in which bad power is collectively fought against, rather than a world in which we try to destroy the weak, the hungry, and the poor.

Here’s why:

The recent space of incredibly upsetting and wildly inaccurate headlines about Roma in Europe — and the hideous New York Times headline last week: “Are the Roma primitive, or just poor?” — have had me thinking a lot about the things writers, as influencers of larger culture, are putting out into the world in story form. When I was a kid, my grandmother had a racist terror of the people she referred to as “the Gypsies: they’ll steal your children.” To her mind, that wasn’t a wrong thing to say. It was, in her opinion, truth. In the world media at present, the rhetoric seems to be very similar. (The New York Times, for god’s sake!! How does that headline get a pass? How are heads not rolling?) My grandmother’s terror of the Roma people came into being during the Great Depression. She came from a family stricken, as very many were, by complete poverty, and they crossed from Nebraska farmland to Idaho in a Model T. Who caused America’s poverty in that moment? Certainly not the Roma. What got sold to the poor — to protect the ruling class from uprisings?

Dear Poor People, 

There are people poorer than you, and they (not we) are the villains. They will steal your children, your money, your security. Blame them. Hate them. 

Thanks,

The Mess-Makers

So, what is being sold to the masses right now? Exactly the same toxic ingredients: there are people poorer than you, and they will steal your children, your money, your security. Don’t fight the powerful, fight the weak.

This, folks, is a real-world example of a zombie narrative being sold as truth. It sucks. It’s a prime example of the poor being politically and purposefully imbued with the traits of classic monsters, in order to distract attention from actual criminals.

So, let’s talk about why mummy narratives are relevant now, in that context? If, as I’m saying, the classic mummy trope is Royal Mummy, then the mummies really are the ones we should be fighting. I’m talking royal not necessarily in terms of kings and queens, but in terms of Power.

Structurally, then, mummy stories are a better model. I’m not talking that of total violent uprising, though sometimes that’s very necessary, and we’ve definitely seen that in many complicated iterations in the last few years. I’m talking, when I talk about The Mummy Narrative, about intelligent heroes and heroines (and that’s usually what you get, classically — the people fighting the mummies tend to be clever, often scholars, archeologists, academics) fighting abuses of power.

In a fun way? Can I get back to the fun of Mummy Stories? Maybe I can’t from here. This kind of fiction can be totally fun to write and read, but I think its longevity comes from deeper things. Like everything worth reading, maybe, mummy stories hinge on societal rules and rebellion against the wrong-headed ones.

That’s a good model for moving forward, and a very good reason mummy stories are still relevant, even now.

(And, FYI, my story in The Book of the Dead? Well... I managed to write something which has exactly nothing to do with all this. The mummy I wrote is a middle-class mummy, or at least, it’s a mummy that’s got nothing but itself, and the story isn’t of villainy but of love... and it’s full of sex and candy. What can I tell you? There are, apparently, lots of kinds of mummy stories — and in the book, I’m sure there definitely are. This essay was just me considering one kind — the classic kind.)

***

Maria Dahvana Headley is the Nebula-nominated author of the dark fantasy/alt-history novel Queen of Kings as well as the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Subterranean, Glitter and Mayhem, The Lowest Heaven and more, as well as the 2013 editions of The Year's Best Fantasy & Science Fiction and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. Most recently, with Neil Gaiman, she co-edited the young adult monster anthology Unnatural Creatures. 

For more about the author, follow @MARIADAHVANA on Twitter and check out her website.

Guest Post | Gail Z. Martin Explains "Days of the Dead"

Today on The Speculative Scotsman, it's my pleasure to make warm and welcome the one and only Gail Z. Martin, author of any number of novels, not least two complete series, namely The Chronicles of the Necromancer and The Fallen Kings Cycle. She's also at work currently on two very different texts: Reign of Ash — the sequel to Ice Forged, which began The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga — and Deadly Curiosity, an urban fantasy novel based, as Gail explains below, on the bones of the short story she wrote for Solaris' Magic anthology.

She is, in short, an abominably busy sort, which is why it's such a treat for me to be participating in her annual Days of the Dead blog tour. Here, in fact, are a few words from the author on what has become a Halloween habit:

I’ve always thought this week is the best time of the year. Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween, Dia De Los Muertos all in one week — what’s not to love? And since I write epic fantasy and urban fantasy with lots of supernatural happenings, ghosts, and magic, it just seemed like a good week to come out to play.  

This is the biggest year ever, with over 40 participating sites. I’m on blogs all over the world as a guest on a variety of topics, at least six sites are doing give-aways of several of my books, there are plenty of excerpts of my books and short stories as well as excerpts from some of my author friends. It’s all here.

That wasn't all she wrote, either. Gail also answered a couple of questions for me, about her work past, present and future, too.

***

Tell us a little about how you came to write Ice Forged.

I’d been playing with the idea of what if magic broke (as it nearly did in the Chronicles books), and what if we had a post-apocalyptic medieval world, and what if a world sent its convicts to the northern rim (instead of, in our world, Georgia or Australia)... and I had an idea of where I wanted to go.

I like stories that test the mettle of a character and reveal what he/she is made of. In Ice Forged, the main characters have lost everything when they were disgraced and sentenced to a harsh prison colony. When the magic dies and the Continent is destroyed in the war and the resulting apocalypse, the life they’ve made for themselves as colonists is jeopardized. The discovery that Blaine is the only one who can restore the magic set him and his friends on a dangerous journey that will pit them against powerful immortal enemies. The fate of their world rests in the hands of a group of convicts. Succeed, and they win not only their freedom, but the ability to shape the future of the world. Fail, and face the wrath of the gods knowing you have condemned your world to darkness.

What inspires you to write?

There are stories I want to read that no one else has written, which means it’s my job to tell them. That’s my strongest inspiration. I want to get to read the stories once I’m done!

Tell us a little about your upcoming books.

Here’s the recap for Reign of Ash, the second book in The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga and the sequel to Ice Forged (coming in April, 2014 from Orbit):

Disgraced lord Blaine McFadden returned from exile to restore magic after a mage war devastated his homeland of Donderath. The king is dead, the army is scattered, and the once-powerful kingdom has been reduced to chaos and rubble.  Blaine may be the only one who can bring back the magic, so it’s up to Blaine and his small group of ex-convicts to save the kingdom, but the price might be their lives.

Deadly Curiosities is something a little different for me. It’s an urban fantasy set in modern-day Charleston, South Carolina. Cassidy Kincaide is the proprietor of Trifles and Folly, an antique shop with a difference that continues a family tradition begun in 1670 — acquiring and neutralizing dangerous supernatural items. It’s the perfect job for Cassidy, whose psychic gift lets her touch an object and know its history. Together with her business partner Sorren, a 500 year-old vampire and former jewel thief, Cassidy makes it her business to get infernal objects off the market.The novel arose out of a short story I wrote for Solaris Books’ Magic anthology. I had created the world of the stories for several anthologies I’d been asked to participate in, and I also write new short stories for ebook with those characters. Solaris like the short story so much, they asked for a full novel!

***

Thanks, Gail, for stopping off at The Speculative Scotsman.

And the fun is far from done, because tomorrow, I'll be publishing the first in a series of exclusive excerpts taken from the author's next novel, Reign of Ash. Keep your peepers peeled, readers!