Welcome to my blog. Come in, have a seat, get comfortable. I sincerely hope you enjoy the visit.
Within these fine pages, I will be providing not only news, but my perspective on writing related topics and other things which may interest my readers. I intend to post new articles roughly every month, but please forgive me if I go wild and post the occasional off-cycle article.
Oh, and a word from my legal team… All opinions are my own and are not intended to insult or injure anyone. I plan to keep this light, family-oriented, and I promise not to be too grumpy. If I happen to cause offense, then it is completely accidental. (And if you think I have a legal team, then you don’t realize just how little writers make!)
Speaking of writing, I have a new short story which will be appearing in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress #34 in the November timeframe. This will be my ninth story in the Sword and Sorceress volumes and is titled “Trouble Follows Her”. It is a sort of prequel to my new novel series, Thief of Curses which is planned for late 2019. If you’re interested, you can check out some of my more recent works appearing the Sword and Sorceress volumes on Amazon.
Elisabeth Waters and Deborah J. Ross always do an excellent job of editing the volumes. As the Sword and Sorceress title implies, the general theme in all these volumes are strong women characters in a fantasy setting. Check out the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) for a history of the volumes. Many of them are still in print on Amazon.
Back when the first volume came out in 1984, most fantasy stories centered around men slaying dragons, flashing their swords and flexing their biceps, while the women stood off the side wearing something less than naked and watched in awe at the display of masculine power.
It was around that time that several female authors were also producing fantasy works and they showed us that women were much more than a pretty face. And I feel the world has become better for it. (Who knows, I might even do a future article on this very topic.) Marion Zimmer Bradley was one of those authors, and the Sword and Sorceress volumes encouraged other new writers to enter the field. At least it did for me.
When I first started attempting to write stories for Sword and Sorceress, I made a bunch of mistakes and not just the grammar ones. All of which got me promptly rejected. As a male writer, I had consumed a bunch of the male-oriented fiction and had several misconceptions. (What you do mean ancient women didn’t wear a metal bra and loincloth!!!) I had to really step back and do my research. Sure, this is fantasy, but the best fantasy has a firm grounding in reality. That was when I went through my great re-learning which continues even to this day.
Not that I dislike male-oriented fiction, there is some good stuff out there. However, I just prefer the females in my fiction to be presented in a little more realistic fashion. And for as long as I write, I plan to keep it that way!