Long ago when glass was still new, deep in the woods there lived a poor man with six daughters. The oldest was Gerjet, a Shaper who thought herself stronger than even Sol Himself even though just a little girl. But when her father tried to reprimand her for her blasphemies, Gerjet would don her Armor and chase him from his own home. A willful girl, Gerjet refused to do any work, even filling the weightless luz jar from the nearby nodus. Instead she wandered the woods all day. But one day she returned to her home to find her father and five sisters gone to her grandmother’s without her. They left her only a bit of food and the luz jar she refused to fill to wait out the night until their retu

I’m detouring a bit here in that usually these Odes are about more obscure books/ movies that were seminal in my development as an author, which is to say things I encountered when I was young that left their imprint upon me. The Prestige came out in 2006, which meant I was already an adult (physically at least) and living in NYC. However, The Prestige’s influence should never be overlooked because it is what I always aspire to in my writing. Because this is one of the best movies ever made. Seriously. Christopher Nolan (and brother Jonathan, who is his writing partner and wrote the short story that their breakout Memento was based upon) may be best known for Memento, The Dark Knight, Incept

With my third book in the bag and just finishing up the first phase of editing, I thought I should probably address this stage in writing a bit here. I’ve alluded before as to my old process, but thought I’d reexamine it now that I don’t adhere to that anymore. One might even say I’ve edited my process somewhat. I should also probably point out that prose has always been a great worry of mine. As I stated in my very first blog , it scares the crap out of me since I figure that’s what people are always judging the book by. And while I know intellectually readers care more about the characters/ plot/ world than the prose (at least readers of fantasy do), my prose still feels like my soft under

Over the last weekend I was lucky enough to take part in two podcasts, The Nerd Book Review and the upcoming Fantasy Unleashed, and in both discussions the topic of Flintlock Fantasy and how guns are incorporated into the Fantasy genre came up. Being an opinionated (and lazy) individual, I thought this vaguely Baader Meinhof-ish phenomenon inspiration enough to warrant a blog post on Flintlock/ Gunpowder Fantasy. Firstly, I think we should probably agree on some terms. The Gunpowder Fantasy subgenre, if the name itself doesn’t give it away, consists of fantasy tales incorporating the use of gunpowder as a major plot point. So while two characters might use gunpowder in, say, Rob Hayes’ pirat