My Favorite Bit

Today we have a middle reader for your consideration, The Sword of Six Worlds, by Matt Mikalatos. Here’s how the book is described. Validus Smith has three goals. Stay alive. Save the world. Finish her homework. For centuries the paladins protected the Earth from a creeping darkness known as the Blight. That all changed when a […]

For full disclosure, Brent is a friend of mine and I beta-read The Blinding Knife. I liked it so much that I’m re-reading the published version. This, my friends, is what epic fantasy can be when a writer is on. You’ve heard me geek about The Black Prism which was book 1. It has a moment that

Today we have Chuck Wendig with his new horror novel Mockingbird from Angry Robot. From page one, he gives you vivid dialogue and a view into someone who is deeply unhappy. She can, after all, see when and how someone is going to die if she touches them. Being a horror novel, her life goes downhill

This week, we have Gwenda Bond talking about her YA novel, Blackwood. It’s a September 2012 launch title for Strange Chemistry, the brand-new YA imprint from Angry Robot Books. On Roanoke Island, the legend of the 114 people who mysteriously vanished from the Lost Colony hundreds of years ago is just an outdoor drama for the

I had the pleasure of meeting Adam Christopher at WorldCon this week, where we were on a panel about Alternate Histories. He’s smart and funny, and also flexible about weirdness. The room we were supposed to have the panel in was locked, so we wound up having the panel in the hall. In a way,

Today we have Morgan Keyes, who is doing a givewaway of her new YA novel to commenters on my blog. DARKBEAST is the story of Keara, an eleven-year-old girl facing the biggest decision of her life.  In Keara’s world, every child has a darkbeast—a creature that takes dark deeds and emotions like anger, pride, and

 Rachel Swirsky is one of the best short story writers working in speculative fiction. At least, that’s my feeling about her. Her work has a beautiful use of language and is thought-provoking. I’m very happy that she’s joining us today to talk about her novelette “Portrait of Lisane da Patagnia,” which is available on Tor.com So

For full disclosure, Shanna Germain is one of my best friends. This is, in part, because she is a writer who thinks deeply about her craft and can articulate what it is that she does. In fact, we just had her on a live recording of Writing Excuses at Gencon, so you can look forward

The Grass King’s Concubine caught me on the first page with the language. Kari Sperring has managed to create this… epic fantasy is not right. It’s a mythic fantasy, in that it feels like I was reading a story much, much older than it was, but it’s all original. It’s a novel that is very

In the interests of full disclosure, I love Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series that when I heard she was working on a new one I begged to be one of her beta readers. I love the series, in part, because Kat never repeats a trick. Harper Blaine, her protagonist, is constantly growing as are the characters she

Jim is one of those very smart people who not only writes good books, but also understands how the industry works. He looks at the larger picture around him and that shows up in his fiction, too. I should tell you that I basically read Libriomancer in one sitting and came away with feeling three things.

This week’s book is vN: The First Machine Dynasty  by Madeleine Ashby. Amy Peterson is a self-replicating humanoid robot known as a VonNeumann. For the past five years, she has been grown slowly as part of a mixed organic/synthetic family. She knows very little about her android mother’s past, so when her grandmother arrives and

I’m going to get out of the way on this one and give you the publisher blurb because it does a better job of setting up the latest Nightrunner book, Casket of Souls, than I can. The Nightrunners are back in this gripping novel full of Lynn Flewelling’s trademark action, intrigue, and richly imagined characters. More than

I’m very happy to have my first guest in to speak about a short story.  I often feel that short story writers don’t have enough opportunities to talk about their craft. So the My Favorite Bit feature is a place where they can. My first guest is Gregory Frost. He writes both short fiction and

What happens when you take your urban fantasty and hand it to a registered nurse? You get a secret ward at the local hospital which caters to vampires, were-things, and zombies. Cassie Alexander’s debut novel follows the newest nurse on the ward, Edie Spence, as she tries to treat with the world of the paranormal