Rick Riordan and other Reviews
There was a time I ruthlessly tracked down and linked to every shred of opinion about my books I could find anywhere on the internet. This was inevitable, but I’m not sure entirely helpful for anyone involved. These days it takes something of particular interest to stir me, and I cannot help but notice an opinion […]
Lamb, Shy, and Essential Fantasy
Thought I’d post a few little things which came my way via twitter. First off, a brilliant piece of what you might call done-for-the-joy-of-it Red Country art from British Comic Book Artist Gary Frank: It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted any reviews, as well, but there’s a particularly insightful (not to mention complimentary) […]
Speculative Fiction 2012
Two of my favourite sci-fi and fantasy bloggers, Justin Landon and Jared Shurin, have collected together some of last year’s best essays and reviews from around the blogosphere into a single volume, including Joe Abercrombie’s review of Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself (I liked it, on the whole): “Speculative Fiction 2012 collects over fifty articles […]
Further Gritty Washback
I set out on a righteous quest to sweep the blogosphere with navel-gazing on the subject of grit, and I kind of succeeded, although it mutated into grimdark along the way. But then mutations are unpredictable and stick according to the prevailing conditions and the mechanism of natural selection. Who am I to argue with […]
Lots of Reviews
No sane writer takes individual amazon reviews too seriously. After all, you do get some strange ones. Of course, most writers are far from entirely sane. But the general pattern is often interesting, even to the mostly rational, and there’s an interesting pattern to amazon reviews of Red Country both in the US and the […]
New UK Covers
Few people know better than I how incredibly jumpy people get about covers, so before I say anything else let me reassure the public that mass-market paperbacks of the First Law and its standalone sequels in the original parchmenty style (B-Format, or slightly larger mass market paperbacks about 7.75 inches high) will continue to be […]
Best Fan Mail Ever, and Mail Policy
Got one of the best fan mails I’ve ever had this morning. I’m not sure what the form is on posting private correspondence to the public sphere but, hey, I haven’t been told to keep it secret, I’ll keep the identity of the sender confidential, and I think it deserves a wider airing. I quote […]
2012 in Review
Worst. Christmas. Ever. I was hit with a stomach bug late Christmas Eve and only got out of bed all day to haunt the bathroom saying, ‘oh god, oh god, oh god.’ In total, I ate four shreddies. Only member of the household to escape was my wife, and in a sense hers was the […]
Ask me Anything
I’m participating once again in an Ask Me Anything over on Reddit’s fantasy sub-forum. I’ll be answering questions live there from 11pm GMT tonight for a couple of hours (I think that’s 5pm central), and will try to pop back a couple of times during the following day to pick up on any further questions […]
Reactions
Reviews of Red Country continue to roll in. Not satisfied with one, Locus have reviewed it twice. Graham Sleight said, among other things: “It’s commonplace to say that what’s changed most in fantasy over the last few decades is diction, but it’s still a shock to run into a book like Red Country. It’s not […]
