My favourite mention of The Fallen Blade so far calls it, ‘Two books occupying the same page space.’ And describes those as, ‘An adventure fantasy with a smidgeon of romance, great hordes of vampires and werewolves and, of course, plenty of swordplay.’ Mixed with, ‘A fantastic evocation of Renaissance Venice… the beauty of the culture it gave birth to and the merciless, brutally violent and Machiavellian politics that ran alongside it.’ [Guardian, UK]

My favourite, simply because that’s *precisely* what I was aiming to do.

When a reader commented on Facebook that the only thing the review missed was the, ‘Shakespeare casserole… delicious, and not too filling,’ it was time to crack open a cold beer. Because riffing off the first half of Othello was part of the fun. And I’m already enjoying myself riffing off the second half (and the first half of Hamlet) in the second book, which I’m now editing.

When I told my brother-in-law I was going to set my next book in Venice he looked at me and said, ‘My, that’s original.’ (Management consultants like stating the obvious). And, obviously, Venice has been the setting for so many novels and poems and plays and films it seem impossible that anyone could find anything new to say. But the point is, everyone who goes sees a different city.

Venice is what you bring to it.

It mirrors back at us what we’re interested in.
(more…)

The Fallen Blade came out of a single image in my head of an impossibly-beautiful boy chained naked in darkness to the bulkhead of a ship. He snapped awake to reveal amber-flecked and inhuman eyes. The ship was in the Venetian lagoon and I realised the boy knew no more about himself than I did.

That gave me Tycho, although I didn’t then know what species of inhuman he was or what origin story lead him to being the first Vampire into Europe and the survivor of the last Viking outpost in North America.

After ten SF novels I realised I was about to write fantasy!

Venetian first, Christian second…The Venetians had no hesitation living up to that maxim. They transported Crusaders to the Middle East, but called ahead to protect their Middle Eastern trade deals by telling those living there that the western armies were coming. Half of Venice is built from bits looted from elsewhere. The Duke’s palace and cathedral alone use pillars stolen from mosques, synagogues and other churches. As a people the Venetians were treacherous, avaricious and two-faced and proud of it! You don’t get to build a thousand year empire and become the richest trading power in the Mediterranean by playing nice.

It’s cliché to say Venice is a fantasy in itself and there’s something unworldly about its atmosphere, that it’s a city of sex and death hiding its darkness under all that glitz and glitter, but it really is. The damn thing’s been standing in that lagoon for centuries and dying and fighting a watery death for every one of them. And I defy anyone to go there and not feel ghosts are watching.

How could I resist it as a location for a fantasy novel? (more…)

People have asked over the years how I write and I’ve replied with everything from 200 word bullet-point heavy ‘This-Is-How-I-Do-Its’, to 5000 words academic walk throughs covering initial inspiration to delivered script.

Every writer is different. A friend of mine writes 500 perfect words a day and never revises or goes back. No idea how he does it and wouldn’t want to try. Another friend is cross because she can’t get her output up from two novels a year to three. (I work seven day weeks to manage one).

Basically:

All my books come out of a single image. In The Fallen Blade it was Tycho chained naked to the bulkhead of a ship. He opened his eyes and proved he wasn’t human. After that, it was a simply a case of working back to see where he’d come from and working forward to see where he was going. When writing I see the places in my head and hear the words spoken. Without that I couldn’t do it. (more…)

I’ve been writing and publishing novels for a while. In some ways, I approach the ups and downs of my writing career with a weary resignation, knowing that a great writing day can as easily be followed by a terrible writing day as by another good one, that a gushingly positive review may spark a new reader to pick up the book only to dislike it, that I may struggle with doubt one week and be sure everything is going well the next. I still get a thrill when I first see the new cover for a soon-to-be published novel, and I never get bored of coming up with new ideas, characters, and landscapes.

Yet here is a first for me, one that left me speechless with surprise and glee but mostly because I was too busy eating and savoring to talk:

A fabulous reader who loves to bake sent me a box of home-made cookies as a thank you for my book Cold Magic. One batch was scrumptious double chocolate chip cookies.

But just to make the entire experience even more full of squee, the other batch was a cookie she invented herself in honor of Cold Magic.

That’s right. There is now a Cold Magic cookie, created by Raina Storer.

With Raina’s permission, I am sharing the recipe and photo with you, just in time for the winter baking season. It is a refrigerator sugar cookie, rolled with chocolate mint filling, and glazed with a white piped frosting and icy blue sprinkles, and it is unbelievably tasty as well as beautiful. (more…)

Managing Death is released in a day or so, and I thought I’d just get something off my chest. My characters are a bit of a mess, but there’s a reason.

I’ve taught creative writing courses for a couple of years now, and one of the things that I come across quite a bit is the “perfect” character, a flawless force or presence that reacts effortlessly (and often without reflection) to the world around them. They’re usually an assassin, or a PI or a robot warrior PI Assassin. What they usually aren’t is interesting.

I like my characters to be, well … I like them flawed and messy. I like them troubled. I like them to worry about all the sort of stuff that I worry about or their equivalent: the everyday things that assault as thoroughly as any supernatural force. A good hero or heroine has to* be “human” first. When you’re writing fantasy, in which everything is heightened and weighted with myth and grandeur it’s easy to forget that it’s heightened reality (of a sort). (more…)