As with The Merchant of Dreams, I briefed my editor Marc on what I wanted to see on the cover and he passed it along to Larry Rostant, who interpreted our instructions beautifully. The lightning bolts weren’t in my original brief but I have to admit they give it an extra pizazz that leaves you in no doubt that some serious magic is going on here!

To go with the cover I have an updated description as well:

Elizabethan spy Mal Catlyn has everything he ever wanted—his twin brother Sandy restored to health, his family estate reclaimed and a son to inherit it—but his work is far from over. The renegade skraylings, the guisers, are still plotting; their leader Jathekkil has reincarnated as the young Henry Tudor. But with the prince still a child, Mal has a slim chance of destroying his enemies while they are at their weakest.

With Sandy’s help Mal learns to harness his own magic in the fight against the guisers, but it may be too late to save England. Schemes set in motion decades ago are at last coming to fruition, and the barrier between the dreamlands and the waking world is wearing thin…

I’m really looking forward to unleashing the book on the world come October – the fact that I shall be waving goodbye to Mal, Coby, Ned and friends hasn’t really sunk in yet…

So what next, you might ask? Well, I’ve been jotting down notes in-between drafts of The Prince of Lies so that I could hit the ground running once that book was complete. However I couldn’t really allow myself to commit to it until now because I don’t have time in my busy schedule for distractions and side projects. Now I can, I’m sooo excited to be launching into something new!

Shiny new Moleskines, just waiting to be filled with awesomeness!

It’s rather daunting to be starting again from scratch, as I haven’t written anything outside the Night’s Masque universe (apart from a couple of short stories) since at least 2006. Golly! Fortunately I have my recent jottings, plus a pile of worldbuilding from projects that never got beyond a few opening chapters, so I have plenty of raw material to draw upon. Plus, after seven years of working with the same universe and set of characters, my Muse is having a real blast coming up with cool new stuff.

You’re probably dying to know what I have planned, but as I mentioned in a post two months ago it’s still very in the early stages: no real plot yet, just some character sketches and a rough idea of the setting. What I can say is that it will be secondary-world fantasy (i.e. set in an invented world not a fantasy version of the past) but with a similar flavour to Night’s Masque: mainly urban settings, full of action and intrigue and a dash of romance. This time, though, I want to be bigger and bolder with my character and setting than I was able to do for the Elizabethan books (at least, not without straying into parody or pastiche). With an invented world I can really let my imagination run riot!

Another reason for writing secondary-world is that I began to find historical European culture confining. I managed to squeeze female and gay characters into my story of Elizabethan intrigue by putting them on the fringes of society and, in the case of Coby, in disguise, but now I want to write about somewhere different. Somewhere that has its own flaws, sure, but not all the tiresome prejudices we struggle with even today.

Although I won’t be able to reveal much about this new series until it’s sold, I’ll be posting what news I can about my progress and also blogging about worldbuilding over the next few months, since it’s very much on my mind at the moment. And of course there’s lots more about The Prince of Lies coming this year, starting with a cover reveal – expect that very soon!

Warning: here be spoilers! Because it’s otherwise hard to say what I liked (and didn’t like) about the book. And hell, it’s six years old, so I reckon many of my visitors will have read it already anyway.

I’d been putting off reading this book for ages, mainly because a particularly gruesome torture scene in The Lies of Locke Lamora gave me nightmares! I’m glad I didn’t let it stop me, though, as Red Seas is somewhat less violent (or at least not so horrible as that one scene from LoLL) and generally a lot more fun. It has pirates! And kittens! Pirates with kittens! (Yes, really.)

It also has an awesome new character: Zamira Drakasha, a pirate captain who’s also a black, middle-aged widowed mother. Because as Lynch says in a devastating put-down of a bigot who found her implausible, “why shouldn’t middle-aged mothers get a wish-fulfillment character?”. Now, I’m not one of those readers who’s actively looking for female characters, especially mothers —I read fantasy to get away from the more humdrum aspects of my everyday life—but I applaud Lynch for creating one and doing a damned good job of it. In fact one gets the impression that the crew of the Poison Orchid is about as mixed in terms of gender, race and sexuality as the population of a real-world country such as the US.

And whilst there’s plenty of the usual Crooked Warden shenanigans and wildly imaginative world-building we’ve come to expect from Lynch, Red Seas also puts Locke and Jean through the emotional wringer, which adds depth to what could otherwise be a lighthearted romp in the vein of Pirates of the Caribbean. Locke begins the story in deep depression and mourning for his lost comrades (told in flashback to avoid slowing down the narrative), and Jean ends it in equally deep mourning for a new one. I confess I saw Ezri’s death coming a mile off, because Red Seas is basically a buddy movie and her survival would break up their operation, but to Lynch’s credit the incident is so well written that it still comes as punch to the gut and you want to hug the grieving Jean and weep with him.

If I have one complaint, it’s the cliffhanger-teaser at the beginning of the book. That scene is awesome and made me unable to put the book down until I’d found out how it ended – but when I finally got there (many pages later, since it’s towards the end), the pay-off didn’t quite deliver. I don’t know if the teaser was Lynch’s decision or his editor’s, but whilst it made a damned good hook it ultimately spoiled the novel a bit for me.

Overall, an excellent second installment to the series, and I can’t wait for Republic of Thieves to come out in October! Which reminds me – I also need to buy a paperback copy of Red Seas Under Red Skies (I read it in ebook) for Scott to sign at World Fantasy

Cover art for “Shadow’s Master” by Jon Sprunk

OK, before we get going, yes I know that sub-genres are artificial and that you shouldn’t try to shoehorn your work into one of them, but once you have a book – or three – written, and you start to look at what market you’re going to be aiming at, it can be helpful to have a label so that everyone knows what you’re talking about. Except – are they really talking about the same thing?

The discussion that sparked this was about the ideal length for a debut epic fantasy, which varies from agent to agent, but certainly somewhere in the 100-150k ballpark as a rule. For other kinds of fantasy, as well as SF, the suggested length is more like 90-120k.

The thing is, what do agents mean by “epic fantasy”? I suspect that for some in the business it’s a synonym for secondary world fantasy, or indeed anything that isn’t very clearly either steampunk or urban fantasy. Because it’s like Tolkien and George R R Martin, right?  And in one respect they’re right – all non-contemporary fantasy has broadly the same audience, and it’s distinct from (though it may sometimes overlap with) urban fantasy/paranormal romance.

The thing is, a lot of the secondary-world fantasy that I read isn’t what I’d call epic. There are no continent-spanning wars or treks through sweeping landscapes, no wide-eyed young heroes venturing out of their comfy hobbit-holes and being swept along on An Adventure. Typically they’re based in one city (just like urban fantasy), with a cast of characters who are far from innocent: thieves, spies, assassins and the like. You know, those Hooded Men who’ve been gracing the covers of our favourite books for the past decade…

(As an aside, if you google “hooded man” images, the cover art for The Alchemist of Souls comes up quite high in the results. Which is ironic, since there’s not a hood in sight!)

This sub-genre used to be known as swords’n'sorcery, and it was typified by Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar stories. Lots of swashbuckling swordplay, but also lots of monsters and evil wizards and the like. The thing is, modern-day S&S is typically quite low in magic and often the characters are all human, so the label doesn’t really fit any more. Nor does the newer label “grimdark” really help, as it’s a tone, not a subgenre as such. Both GRRM and Joe Abercrombie have been described as writing grimdark, but their books are also epic fantasy.

I raised this on Twitter, suggesting “cloak’n'dagger” as an alternative. I got some great (not always serious) alternative suggestions:

• The Streets of Darkness
• Hooded Figure Fantasy
• Poignards’n'privies (very apt in my case!)
• Mock-Tudorpunk
• Grime’n'punishment
• Alchemical romance (by analogy with Wells’ “scientific romance”)

What do you think? Do we need a new label for non-epic, non-contemporary fantasy?

Story Skeleton is an iPhone app that allows you create and export outlines in a variety of formats, including as a Scrivener .scriv project. It’s this that first interested me, and I used it for an initial outline of The Prince of Lies.

Overall it’s quite a nice little app. The design is a bit fussy in some respects – on a small screen, I prefer the controls to adhere more closely to Apple conventions – but not difficult to get the hang of. You can display cards fullscreen and swipe between them, or list them as thumbnails (see screenshot, right) and scroll up and down.

There’s no hierarchical structure, however. If you want to assign scenes to chapters or acts, a workaround is to set up “card types” (a customisable list of categories), but then of course you have to recategorise cards when you move them. It’s also iPhone-only – you can use it on an iPad but the whole interface gets resized to fit the large screen and is therefore rather blurry.

Another point against it from my point of view is that whilst it has import and export capabilities, it doesn’t actually sync with Scrivener as such – you can only import outlines previously created in StorySkeleton and exported in its custom format (e.g. as backup). As a result, I found it useful for quick’n'dirty outlining at the beginning of a project, but the limitations of both synchronisation and screen real-estate mean that it doesn’t really fit well into my workflow.

StorySkeleton is available from the iTunes App Store, currently priced at $2.99.

I’d handed in the first draft of The Prince of Lies to my editor and was taking a few days off to decompress. I didn’t want to get too engrossed in a new project, as I knew I’d have to dive back into revisions pretty soon, so I decided to tidy the drawers of my desk and bureau, which had descended into chaos over the previous few months. So, I emptied them out, put all my “work-in-progress” notebooks, index cards and so on into my desk drawer, and all my unused notebooks into the top drawer of my bureau. The latter filled the entire drawer.

My notebook drawer. Problem, what problem?

Now admittedly it isn’t a big drawer, and I also store spare loose-leaf pads and unopened packs of index cards in there, but still…! I have numerous Moleskines in different colours, sizes and paper types, including two specifically for use with EverNote and two special editions (Lego and Star Wars); a bunch of LiveScribe notebooks, also in several sizes, for use with my Echo smartpen; and a few other miscellaneous notebooks from Paperchase, WHS, Rymans etc. I even have a gorgeous leather-bound journal that I bought in Florence, which I will probably never use because it’s far too beautiful to sully with my scribblings…

Europa Major notepads – fat enough to plan a Big Fat Fantasy!

And then there’s my “archive” drawer of used notebooks. I have had obsessions with different brands before Moleskine; for a while it was Bur-O-Class Aurora exercise books, in which I wrote my earliest longhand drafts, then more recently it was the Europa Major spiral-bound reporter’s notebook, with 300 pages between richly-coloured cardboard covers, in which I brainstormed the plots and characters for my Night’s Masque trilogy.

Rationally, I know I do not need all these notebooks, because I do a lot of my work electronically. And yet I’m addicted to the damned things! When I was in California in February, I bought two Moleskines in a bookstore solely because they were in colours (green and purple) seldom seen in UK shops.

It’s a common foible of writers, judging by my friends’ reactions, and I think it comes down to a combination of traits:

1. A love of books and paper. There’s something very sensuous and satisfying about a high-quality notebook: the handsome cover, the way your pen glides across the thick creamy surface of the paper, the snap of the elastic fastener, the slither of the silky placeholder ribbon… You just can’t get these pleasures from an app, no matter how cool it might be in other ways.

2. Romanticism. We imagine the great authors of the 19th and 20th centuries scribbling golden prose into their pocket notebooks, and we think that if only we could do the same, our books would be just as wonderful.

3. The OCD impulses of the typical writer. Allied to the above, we believe that if we have just the right notebook, fresh and crisp and virginal, we too can be brilliant. We start a notebook with dewy-eyed optimism, which often devolves into despair at our terrible handwriting, multiple crossings-out and rambling prose. So, we abandon it for a fresh notebook. Once the habit becomes entrenched, we make sure we always have a good supply of shiny new ones to hand, because the next one is going to be perfect…

I think, though, that the seeds were sown in school. All those separate exercise books for each subject, often with a different colour per subject as well. And—this being a provincial girls’ grammar school with pretensions of grandeur—we had to write our homework in fountain pen (biros were for “rough” only). That kind of thing is liable to make a girl just a little obsessive!

How about you? Do you have a weakness for a particular brand or style of notebook? Or do you eschew paper for a purely digital writing experience?

This was my third Eastercon, and whilst last year’s was memorable for very personal reasons, this year was pretty good too. I’d been a bit doubtful about the location, as the convention venue was mainly a conference centre and had few bedrooms, meaning most people had to stay in city centre hotels about two miles away, but a constant flow of free minibuses meant that this was only a minor inconvenience. A bigger problem, as with Birmingham, was the lack of good places to eat within easy walking distance; the conference centre provided a relatively inexpensive buffet at lunchtime and in the evening, but the food was about the quality you expect from cheap mass catering. Fortunately we found a US-style diner over the road, where the food was excellent (though the service was very slow). However, enough about logistics – what about the convention itself?

There was a good selection of panels and of course the traditional Saturday evening live screening of the latest Doctor Who episode, complete with bags of jelly-babies (and a few technical glitches, so I’ll probably watch it again on catchup TV). A great new addition to the programme was the “genre get-togethers”, which were a series of informal book-signing-and-mingling-with-the-authors sessions. This was also an opportunity for authors (or their publishers) to give away books to interested readers, rather than putting them into goodie-bags at random only to be thrown away. Angry Robot kindly supplied me with a box of The Alchemist of Souls, so I was able to give some away at the get-together and the rest soon disappeared from the “free books” table on Sunday!

I was on three panels, the best of which was probably “The Changing Portrayal of Gender and Sexuality in SFF”, which moderator Penny Hill turned into a cozier discussion format than the usual “five people behind a table” panel, with lots of contributions from the audience. I also went to a couple of other panels: one on non-Western SFF, and a flash fiction contest featuring my friend and fellow Angry Roboteer Emma Newman (below).

Cory Doctorow, Roz Kaveney, Emma Newman and Paul Cornell being introduced by Lee Harris

Emma won the contest, and my side of the room won the quiz that Lee had put together to keep the audience entertained during the writing, so our plan for world domination continues apace. Also, it appears that I know more Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang lyrics than the average SF geek, which is maybe not something to boast about!

The non-Western SFF panel also gave me an excuse to talk to Stephane Marsan from Bragelonne, a French SFF publishing house, and we ended up having a long chat in the bar about Asterix, European children’s TV in the 70s (remember the Czech Mole cartoon?), and Kenneth Branagh’s Othello (filmed in Italy, with French actress Irene Jacob as Desdemona). It wasn’t all networking, though; mostly I just hung out with old friends from previous conventions (Sarah Newton, Emma Newman, Mike Shevdon, Adrian Faulkner, et al) and made new ones, or at least met people I already knew online (e.g. Brian Turner from SFF Chronicles). It was a lot of fun as always, if exhausting, and I’m now I’m really looking forward to the rest of my conventions this year, especially World Fantasy in Brighton.

Now, I really must go and sign up for Eastercon 2014…

Friday, 7pm: Genre Get-Together – Fantasy (seems to be a big informal signing event)

Friday, 9pm: Panel – Underground London

Sunday, 2pm: Panel – The Changing Portrayal of Gender and Sexuality in SF & Fantasy

Monday, 11am: Panel – Selling Space

I have no idea what I’m going to say on that last one, as I know little about the space industry – I think I got involved because I do know a bit about “big science and the commercial sector”

You can see the whole schedule online at 8squared2013.sched.org (there’s also a web app you can use on an iPhone, Android or Blackberry).

Just as important as talking to one another, if not more so, is communicating with readers – but as new authors, how do we get our voices heard? When a bunch of us were invited onto Reddit last year for a very successful AMA (Ask Me Anything), we decided we didn’t want the fun to stop. So, we began exchanging emails, and what came out of that was a plan for a joint blog (and accompanying social media presence) where we could engage with fans in a bigger way than on our individual blogs.

And so without further ado, may I announce BookSworn! We’re doing a fantastic giveaway contest – 16 signed fantasy books! – to celebrate the launch, so do check the site out. You can also follow us on Twitter @BookSworn.

(The name is my fault, by the way. Two of our members, Mazarkis Williams and Douglas Hulick, have new books with the word “sworn” in the title – I thus suggested “Book Sworn” as a joke, and the name stuck. Sorry!)

At the time of the original post (summer 2011) I was four months into a contract that would see my trilogy being published at 8-10 month intervals during 2012 and 2013, so I was totally focused on those books. As of February this year, however, I handed in the final book in the trilogy and found myself with no deadlines for the first time since late 2010! This was an intoxicating feeling, but I knew it wouldn’t last for long because I still had to do one final revision pass on The Prince of Lies. Still, it marked the beginning of a transition period, when I was able—even obliged—to begin dividing my attention between the outgoing project and my plans for the next book.

A writer can never have too many notebooks! (Photo: Mhairi Simpson)

Fortunately, as per my blog post, I had already started a notebook in which I jotted down my initial ideas. It was all very vague: based on my experience of writing the Night’s Masque trilogy, I knew I wanted to continue writing urban-based fantasy with a historical flavour (though not necessarily in a real-world setting), but I didn’t want to commit to anything beyond that. So, I simply jotted down ideas for characters, setting and plot as they came to me, without making any decisions as to which one was best.

I did this throughout February and accumulated a bunch of new ideas, as well as digging through trunk novels and their associated worldbuilding to see what I could reuse. At first I was worried that I wouldn’t come up with anything, because I’d been so focused on the Elizabethan stuff for the past five years, but that concern was misplaced. Once I let my Muse out of her cage, she really went for it, spewing out character backstories and plot ideas as if a dam had been burst (apologies for the mixed metaphors). Most importantly, the “gestation” period imposes a kind of “survival of the fittest” selection pressure on my ideas. If my Muse keeps gnawing on an idea even though my conscious mind has tried to discard it, that’s probably a clue that I ought to pursue it!

This month I’m back into editing mode on The Prince of Lies, which means that I have to put this new project on the backburner for a few weeks. After that, though, it’s all over for Night’s Masque bar the usual round of publicity when it comes out. That’s when I find out if my lengthy brewing of ideas has produced a firm basis for a new fantasy series. I’m pretty sure it has – and I’m looking forward to applying all the experience I gained in the past five years to the creation of new novels. I’m also looking forward to sharing it with you guys, but that’s going to take a lot longer, since I have to write—and sell—the damned thing first!