The Fictional Ian Irvine

500 BOOKS IN 300 DAYS – WEEK 39

2012-02-07T14:35:00.002+11:00

I've been running this weekly competition on my Facebook fan page since January 1, 2011, and it'll run into 2012. Most weeks all year I've been giving away three of my trilogies and quartets, signed, except for breaks where I've given away two iPad 2s.

Stay tuned: there could be another iPad comp in 2012.

Total number of my books won so far: 406 + 29 (people who've earned 3 Hon Mentions) = 435.

WEEK 39 QUESTION – If you had a cameo role in an Ian Irvine book, what role would you play and how would Ian kill you off, torment you or use you to make the main characters suffer? The cleverest, funniest, most moving or wittiest entries win. No knowledge of my books needed.     

  First Prize – The Song of the Tears trilogy, signed.

Second Prize – The Grim and Grimmer quartet, signed.

3rd Prize – Vengeance, signed.

There were 24 entries this week.

Winners
1^st, Tony Mansfield, 2^nd, PatrickChaffin, 3^rd, Dave Dray.

Honourable Mentions (get 3 HMs and you also win).
Anna Tipton, Danny Charles Daines, RickyHenderson.

The complete list of winners for 2011– 2012 can be found here: http://www.ian-irvine.com/winners.html

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing:http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author
To follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ianirvineauthor
My blog about the business of writing: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com

500 BOOKS IN 300 DAYS – WEEK 38

2012-01-15T13:10:00.000+11:00

I've been running this weekly competition on my Facebook fan page all year, and it'll run into 2012. Most weeks all year I've been giving away three of my trilogies and quartets, signed, except for breaks where I've given away two iPad 2s.

Stay tuned: there could be another iPad comp in 2012.

Total number of my books won so far: 397

To enter this week’s comp, go here, http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author, Like my page (unless you already have) then enter from the Promos tab.

WEEK 38 QUESTION – What should Nish's New Years resolutions be (or if you prefer, Frodo, Llian or Harry Potter)? The cleverest, funniest, most moving or wittiest entries win. No knowledge of my books needed.     

  First Prize – The Vengeance audiobook on CD, signed.

Second Prize – The View from the Mirror quartet, signed.

3rd Prize – The Well of Echoes quartet, signed.

There were 40 entries this week.

Winners
1^st, Karl Mersh, 2^nd, Tony Mansfield, 3^rd,Sue Knight.

Honourable Mentions (get 3 HMs and you also win).
Duncan Anderson, Michael Davis, Dave Dray, ToniLouise Clark, Alistair Geddes, Grey Dw .

The complete list of winners for 2011 can be found here: http://www.ian-irvine.com/winners.html

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing:http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author
To follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ianirvineauthor
My blog about the business of writing: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com

500 BOOKS IN 300 DAYS – WEEK 37

2012-01-03T21:08:00.001+11:00

Total number of my books won so far: 388

To enter this week’s comp, go here, http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author, Like my page (unless you already have) then enter from the Promos tab.

WEEK 37 QUESTION – What would you give Jal-Nish Hlar for Christmas (or any other arch villain, if you prefer)? The cleverest, funniest, most moving or wittiest entries win. No knowledge of my books needed.     

  First Prize – The Vengeance audiobook on CD, signed.

Second Prize – The Runcible Jones quartet, signed.

3rd Prize – Mystery, Magic, Voodoo and the Holy Grail, signed.

There were 45 entries this week.

Winners
1^st, Danny Charles Daines, 2^nd,Michael Davis, 3^rd, Tony Mansfield.

Honourable Mentions (get 3 HMs and you also win).
Charmaine Telford, Sam Clifton, Dave Dray,Mitchell Fitzsummons, Bateman McBride.

The complete list of winners for 2011 can be found here: http://www.ian-irvine.com/winners.html

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing:http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author
To follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ianirvineauthor
My blog about the business of writing: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com

500 BOOKS IN 300 DAYS – WEEK 36

2011-12-21T22:24:00.000+11:00

Total number of my books won so far: 382

To enter this week’s comp, go here, http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author, Like my page (unless you already have) then enter from the Promos tab.

WEEK 36 QUESTION – Your favourite author has let you down. How would you see him or her punished? The cleverest, funniest, most moving or wittiest entries win. No knowledge of my books needed.     

  First Prize – The View from the Mirror quartet, signed.

Second Prize – The Well of Echoes quartet, signed.

3rd Prize – The Song of the Tears trilogy, signed.

There were 25 entries this week.

Winners
1^st Charmaine Cree, 2^nd Dave Dray, 3^rd Danny Charles Daines.

Honourable Mentions (get 3 HMs and you also win).
Courtney ‘Toffee’ Rohde, Duncan Anderson, KellyBroadbent, Edward Bennett-Williams. 

The complete list of winners for 2011 can be found here: http://www.ian-irvine.com/winners.html

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing:http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author
To follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ianirvineauthor
My blog about the business of writing: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com

Goodreads Giveaway Winners

2011-12-21T08:28:00.000+11:00

The winners of my December book giveaway on Goodreads are:

Mary Preston

Maria Komninos

Lauredhel Lauredhel

Winners are chosen randomly by Goodreads. Each winner wins a signed copy of Vengeance.

I'll be running more giveaways on Goodreads early in 2012. To find out more, or to check, rate or review any of my books, go to http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/153703.Ian_Irvine

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing:http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author
To follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ianirvineauthor
My blog about the business of writing: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com

500 BOOKS IN 300 DAYS – WEEK 35

2011-12-18T22:33:00.000+11:00

Total number of my books won so far: 371

To enter this week’s comp, go here, http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author, Like my page then enter from the Promos tab.

WEEK 35 QUESTION – You can build your dream castle anywhere in fantasyland. Where do you build it? The cleverest, funniest, most moving or wittiest entries win. No knowledge of my books needed.     

  First Prize – The View from the Mirror audiobooks on CD, all 91 hours.

Second Prize – The Grim and Grimmer quartet, signed.

3rd Prize – a signed copy of Vengeance.

There were 36 entries this week.

Winners
1^st,Carolina Maria Ostmark, 2^nd, Sarah Blundell, 3^rd, EstherWalls.

Honourable Mentions (get 3 HMs and you also win).
Courtney ‘Toffee” Rohde, Mitchell Fitzsummons, Danny Charles Daines. . 

The complete list of winners for 2011 can be found here: http://www.ian-irvine.com/winners.html

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing:http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author
To follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ianirvineauthor
My blog about the business of writing: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com

Kim Wilkins' Writing Tips

2011-12-10T10:39:00.001+11:00

In the past 15 years Kim Wilkins has written 21 novels, including supernatural thrillers, horror, fantasy, books for young adults, books for children and, in recent years, contemporary epic romances. Her books are published in a dozen countries. She teaches at the University of Queensland in the postgraduate writing program, and at the Queensland Writer's Centre, and also mentors emerging writers, some of whom have gone on to brilliant success.

Kim has also won a shelf full of awards including multiple Aurealis Awards for her speculative fiction, a Romantic Book of the Year award, plus awards for Teaching Excellence, Research Excellence, and Criticism/Review. Topping it off, Kim's latest book, Wildflower Hill, recently made the USA Today bestseller list, so when she talks about writing, it's a good idea to listen.

These are my top quick writing tips of all time that I think every writer should know. They represent, of course, my opinions, but I think you'll find I'm always right. ;)

Look to your verbs. If you read a page back and it seems lifeless and flabby, find every verb on the page and see if you can improve it. Make a point of collecting great verbs every time you read or watch a movie or have a conversation. Verbs like gasp, surge, quiver, and drench work so hard. Verbs are the muscle of a sentence, and can punch up dull writing in a moment.

Chillax on chapter one. Easily the most common writing problem I see is the writer trying far too hard to impress in the first few pages of a story. Many stories warm up and get fantastic after page five, but by then the publisher has already put you on the "reject" pile. Often your first chapter is so overworked that it's uncomfortable to read. My advice is to finish the book, then scrap the first chapter all together and write it again without looking at the original.

Don't write all your fun scenes first. Write in order. If you give a child her custard first, she's probably not going to be all that interested in her Brussels sprouts.

Be in a viewpoint, always. At the start of every scene make sure you know exactly whose viewpoint you are going to be in, and write the scene from inside their head. A story details a relationship between characters and events. The most impact is always achieved from describing that relationship from the inside.

Plan your story in advance, even if it's only loosely. It will save you so much time and heartache and, contrary to popular belief, it's actually MORE fun to do it this way. When you know that an exciting turning point is approaching, the scene and the ones around it can play out in your mind over and over as you think them through, becoming richer the more you anticipate it.

Most important of all: keep going. This is a tough craft, and it's an even tougher business. Dream big if you want, but your dreams can't sustain you on a day-to-day basis. The only thing that can sustain you is the work. Do it because you love it; because not to write hurts. Do it because you are mad about your story and obsessed with your characters. Don't make it another chore to fit into your busy day: make it the special place you go when your day has been rubbish. Keep going and keep going, and then keep going some more.

Thanks very much, Kim. I've made a note to work on my own flabby and under-exercised verbs.

Kim's pictorial guide to editing: http://fantasticthoughts.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/how-to-edit-a-pictorial-guide/. Kim's main website is here, http://fantasticthoughts.wordpress.com/. And the Kimberley Freeman site, for Kim's epic romances, here: http://kimberleyfreeman.com/

For a chance to win one of 3 copies of my latest book, Vengeance, on Goodreads, http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/17741-vengeance.
For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing:http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author
My blog about the business of writing: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/

Robyn Wardlaw on Running a Fan Site

2011-12-07T15:30:00.001+11:00

Robyn Wardlaw set up the fan site, Triune, way back in 2002, when she was 16 – well before I had my own site up and running! She has been running Triune ever since. Who could be better qualified to talk about the challenges, the troubles and the rewards of running a fan site.

Robyn is 25 years oldand runs the Ian Irvine fan site Triune from her home in Scotland. She has adegree in Maths along with a vast array of skills and talents that people arecurrently refusing to pay her for.

Imagine you open up your inboxone day to find an email from one of your favourite authors. Imagine thatyou're not entirely surprised by this because you have, after all, been runninga website about this author for over nine years – wait what, nine? – and you'vehad semi-regular contact with the author throughout that. Then imagine theemail is a very polite invitation asking if you'd be interested in doing aguest-post on the author's own newly started blog.

…

If you're anything like meyour response to this would be an incoherent garble of keyboard mashesfollowed, some very long time later, by a quiet “Yes please.”

This is not something I couldhave imagined happening nine years ago - come on, seriously, nine? Istarted my site for one reason and one reason only: because nowhere on the vastinternet could I find another site devoted to Ian Irvine. I had been using theinternet pretty heavily for about three years at that point, and had some useof it for a couple of years before that. Being a teenager with somewhat geekishtendencies I used it mainly as a source of information and to socialise withother geeks. A friend of mine that I met on one such discussion forum hadrecommended a series of books to me and I had hunted them down, devoured them,and desperately desired more. I took to Google (at least I think I was usingGoogle at the time) and searched high and low for information on these newbooks.

Other than online book storesselling the books, I found all of three pages. They were all interviews thathad been conducted with Ian about the time of the initial releases of the Viewfrom the Mirror books, on various book news/reviews sites. They had a complete lack of useful bits of information – more books were planned, three whole differentseries even – but nothing particularly recent.

This was somewhat aggravating.The internet had never before failed me in such a catastrophic manner. Icouldn't believe there was not one single website out there devoted solely tothe works of Ian Irvine.

I decided to do somethingabout it.

Aside from my heroic attemptsto rescue the internet from this dire lack-of-author-website predicament, mydesire to make the site also probably had something to do with the fact thatI'd been wanting to make a site for ages but never found a good subject matter.Finally getting to put these new found HTML skills to use, I began constructingthe layout for the site. But then came the next problem – content. I didn'treally know how to go about finding out the information that I wanted to put onmy site. My experience of finding out information mostly consisted of Googlingit, and that just got me right back where I started.

So I opened the book again,and I re-read the “About the Author” page, which I recalled had an emailaddress in it. Scrounging up some courage I sent an email telling Ian I wasmaking a website about the View from the Mirror series and asking for someinformation on his forthcoming books. Although I probably didn't use the word'forthcoming' – I tried to check, but apparently Hotmail has taken to deletingemails from accounts that are largely inactive. [Ian: The date of that fateful email was August 17, 2002, and you're right, Robyn, you didn't. You said 'new']

To my great surprise Ireceived a response within about a day. It had never occurred to me that Iwould hear back from him so soon, him being a busy famous author and all, butthere it was, in my inbox, Ian telling me he'd be delighted to give me whateverinformation I wanted for the website. Awesome.

The first site that went uplooked atrocious. I can barely remember it but I know that much. That said, ithad the most up to date information of any version since then, so its keydesired outcome was a success. It didn't take me long to revamp it intosomething less offensive to the eye, and it was at the point that I added somethingelse: a forum. A horrible, freely hosted by someone else piece of discussionboard software, but a forum all the same.

That particular version of theboard probably had in total about ten registered members, and maybe about fiveof them posted regularly, but it was the start of a real community. I alwaysfelt we were limited by the board software and I wanted to host my own forums,but that would involve actually paying for my own web host, and I was anunemployed teenager living off of pocket money. It was almost a year before Igot a job and could convince my parents to loan me the use of their credit card(since that's the only payment method the hosting companies took).

With the move to a new host, Iwas going all-out. No longer would this be some childishly-designed,Geocities-hosted, unprofessional array of large buttons. This thing would haveits own domain name, and that's a coming of age for a website. It got a newname, it got a new look, and – yes – it got its own forums.

So was born Triune. Theoriginal layout of the site is what I would consider the alpha version of thecurrent look (it's still essentially the same layout and colour scheme, justwith some added functionality as I picked up one or two more bits of web designknowledge). The improvements from theprevious site were tremendous, and the forums provided the ideal place for thenewly formed community of Ian Irvine fans to grow.

I learned something then thatI've recently re-learned in Real World work: communities are hard. They requirea lot of time and effort to keep them going. Mostly they have one or two keyindividuals that put in this time and effort, and when sufficient time andeffort are put in the whole thing just looks effortless. But as soon as your lifestarts getting a bit busier – the very moment that you decide you just can't bebothered for a while – you come back and find it's gone.

The Triune Forums have alwaysbeen like that. There are periods of high activity – usually surrounding therelease of new books, but not always – and there are times when you'll be luckyto see a tumbleweed. Occasional events such as The Great Web Host Screw Upof 2008, which included three months ofsite-wide downtime and precipitated a change of hosts, not to mention domainnames, haven't exactly help such matters.

Or alternatively the What TheHell Has Happened To My Database of 2011 (Ongoing), an issue I had hoped tohave resolved before sending this off (and in fact delayed its writing somewhat– sorry Ian!). I am almost at the point where I don't know if it can be fixed,and I'm wondering if I should just start fresh. At the same time, I'm not sureexactly how much discussion forums fit in to the Ian Irvine fan community thesedays. He's gotten much better at it himself recently – his website is updatedfrequently (far more frequently than mine), he blogs often, and he's evengotten on-board with this newfangled Facebook concept.

Robyn and Ian at Worldcon, Glasgow, 2005

During the bad days it's easyto start thinking about packing it all in, letting someone else take over,maybe just shutting it down altogether. Not too long ago, after spending almostan entire day trying countless fixes for my current problems, I thought tomyself “Why am I doing this?” But then you remember the good days. Making friends.Meeting Ian at WorldCon. Silly word association games. Marriage proposals basedon internet-rare good grammar (and refused because that's no reason to getmarried). Invitations to post on Ian's blog. Yes, today is a very good day.

Imagine that all this happenedto you, then go and check your emails. Maybe tomorrow will be a good day for you.

In 05, Robyn travelled right across Scotland to meet me at Worldcon in Glasgow, and kindly came to my exclusive 'reading for one' there – the most focused audience I've ever had. Thank you for that, Robyn, and for the past 9+ years of Triune.

Triune can be found at http://triunelives.co.uk/index.html.

For a chance to win one of 3 copies of my latest book, Vengeance, on Goodreads, http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/17741-vengeance.
For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing:http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author
My blog about the business of writing: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/

Trent Jamieson on World-Building Hell

2011-12-05T10:13:00.001+11:00

Today Trent Jamieson, who in his own write is a sombre, contemplative fellow with just a hint of edge, is talking about how he created the world of his marvellous Death Works trilogy.

World-Building as an Obsession - a Not Particularly Helpful Guide

Sometimes worlds are built through assiduous research, and other times they're just part of what you are.

If you're a writer, particularly if you're a fantasy writer, you like to build worlds - actually build in this case is too weak a verb, you like to inhabit them. And, like anything you inhabit, it starts to inhabit you a bit, too. You close your eyes and you're suddenly standing beneath the great creaking branches of a giant Moreton Bay Fig Tree (otherwise known as the One Tree), its root buttresses the size of hills. A dead soul, glowing slightly blue, bumps you, you turn to apologise but it's already marching towards the base of the tree.

Well, that's how it is for me. And the world of the Death Works is one that I've inhabited for a long time.

I grew up fascinated by the afterlife, and stories about the Underworld. The first time I heard the story of Eurydice and Orpheus shivers ran down my spine. The first time I looked at Brueghel's Triumph of Death - with all those crazy skeletons - I knew I had found a kindred spirit. It seemed inevitable that I would go to those places in my writing.

The world of the Death Works books isn't the only place I hang out in, of course, but it's the only one that is so closely focused on the Underworld, it's also the only one that has Brisbane as a setting. Which is appropriate, because Brisbane is my home, and these are some of the most personal stories I've ever written. Mixing my home with a fantasy land version of Hell didn't just seem appropriate, it was vital - I needed both to ground the other, any hesitancy and the books would just feel unbalanced.

When you're writing about Psychopomps and Stirrers and scone eating deities and belligerent talking tattoos you need to ground it in a place that's familiar, that has great coffee, pubs, and a lot of bridges (death and bridges go hand in hand, you see).

My Underworld is a mixture of mythologies and folk law. Everything from Norse to African, Sumerian, Greek and French is in there. Which made sense to me because I imagined all of these mythologies would hold a piece of truth in my world. But I also wanted to throw in my own bits and pieces, the Hungry Death, Wal the talking cherub, the nature of Mog, Death's Scythe, and the way Regional Deaths are promoted.

The One Tree is in part Norse, but it also borrows from European Folklore that looks at the journey of a soul as being of three parts, one of which is a journey to a tree - the World Axis - where the souls live in the branches. There was also the idea of reincarnation as a tree common to a lot of different cultures and fairytales, see the Grimm's "Juniper Tree" - which also uses birds in an interesting way (birds feature quite prominently in my books as well).

But it wasn't just folklore that I used. The books are loaded with references to other books that concern themselves with the underworld, too, I couldn't help myself - Mr D's bicycle and Steve's surname come from the book the Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. The blue glow of the dead comes from The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. There's even touches of Ursula Le Guin's Underworld in the Earthsea books. And that's not even mentioning Fritz Leiber's Death or Neil Gaiman's or Terry Pratchett's or the dozens of other novelists that I can't think of now, all of which have left their mark on the novels.

Which brings me back to the beginning, these Death Works books chart my reading of fantasy, the world is built on a lifetime's obsession. Sometimes that's all the research you need.

Thanks very much for those insights, Trent. A revelation – my worlds have a complete lack of scone-eating deities and I now realise what a flaw that is. Trent's next book is Roil –

I've read The Business of Death, and loved it. For more info on Trent, The Business of Death and his other writing, where else would you go but the Trentonomicon, http://www.trentjamieson.com/

For a chance to win one of 3 copies of my latest book, Vengeance, on Goodreads, http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/17741-vengeance.
For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing:http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author
My blog about the business of writing: http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/

Vengeance Giveaway

2011-12-03T14:13:00.001+11:00

I'm giving away 3 copies of Vengeance on Goodreads between now and December 20: http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/17741-vengeance.

To rate any or all of my books on Goodreads, go here:http://www.goodreads.com/author/list/153703.Ian_Irvine.

500 BOOKS IN 300 DAYS – WEEK 34

2011-12-03T11:49:00.001+11:00

Total number of my books won so far: 362.

To enter this week’s comp, go here, http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author, Like my page then enter from the Promos tab.

Lately I've been giving away 3 copies of the Aussie trade paperback edition of my brand new book, Vengeance, each week.

WEEK 34 QUESTION – You’ve just become an evil overlord. What do you do first? The cleverest, funniest, most moving or wittiest entries win. No knowledge of my books needed.     

THERE ARE THREE FIRST PRIZES – each a copy of my latest book, Vengeance, signed.

There were 77 entries this week.

Winners
1st, Jason Stevens, 2nd, Sue Knight, 3rd, Patrick Chaffin.

Honourable Mentions (get 3 HMs and you also win).
Victoria Proctor, Nick Fisher, Esther Walls, Jon O’Mara Yuen Harrison, Danny Charles Daines. 

Here's the winning entry, with Jason's permission. Thanks, Jason.

Well, I suppose that would largely depend on HOW I became an evil overlord, the last option of which would be the most dramatic.

If I had supplanted a prior overlord, my first act would be to examine whatever security the previous ruler had in place and test the loyalty of his or her remaining minions. Once I'd identified weaknesses, then I would set to work resolving those and putting additional measures in place (after all, if I caused their downfall, someone could do the same to me if I didn't change the security at all).

If, however, there had been no previous evil ruler, then the METHOD by which I became the overlord would matter. If it was through political maneuvering and the simple assassination of a benevolent ruler, then I would need to act quickly. Thankfully in that situation I would have been planning my coup in advance so I would know exactly what I would need in order to ensure the populace would have little chance of resisting me. I'd create a number of magical wards for my main fortress and also for myself any time I might be exposed, then set to work creating an army of vicious and cruel hybrid creatures immune to all known types of magic with a cunning intellect and a hard-coded 'religion' that kept them loyal. (Being an evil overlord, I would essentially have to create the means for my own demise, albeit unwittingly).

The other scenario in which I could become an evil overlord would be one in which there is either no political maneuvering to do, or I lacked the requisite connections to do so. In that scenario, I would have hunted down a legendary magical artifact and in activating it created a worldwide cataclysm that eliminated a very large portion of the world's inhabitants and made very few regions hospitable for life, thereby leaving survival as the primary focus in their lives as opposed to resistance. My first act in this scenario would be more open, as I would have a considerable amount of time to solidify my control of the world as people would be focused on rebuilding and surviving. My first step in this last scenario, would be to send my minions that I had selected to survive with me in chamber of activation out to the most populous cities of the world with instructions to advise of their new ruler, each having the authorization to make an example of any residents that resist. This example making would be a very public torture, consisting of physical, mental, and magical elements. The magical element of the torture would be twofold: one to heal the physical wounds inflicted so as to avoid the death of the subject, and the second would be a form of torture that manipulated the innate magical essence of the subject, definitely causing pain and very likely mutations of multiple kinds as well. Sufficiently cowed by this first act and looking to survive, I would then have plenty of time to establish a base and lay down the foundation for an unbreakable empire.

The complete list of winners for 2011 can be found here: http://www.ian-irvine.com/winners.html

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing: http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author
To follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ianirvineauthor
My blog about the novels I write, and the writing life: http://ian-irvine.blogspot.com/

Ian Irvine is Grilled by Fans

2011-11-30T13:05:00.001+11:00

I was going to interview myself today, but my Facebook fans asked such good questions that I've given them full rein.

Ian Irvine: This may seem a bit of a lol, but I'm doing an interview with Ian Irvine for my blog and I need some really curly questions, because I've heard he's a slippery customer. Tricky questions would be much appreciated; I really want to put the scoundrel on the spot.

Ami: Have you developed multiple personalities or something???

Ian: Ha ha, yes I have, says Ian. No I haven't, says Ian. I don't understand the question, says Ian. Are we there yet? says Ian. Need we go on, Ami? chorus the Ians, sweetly.

Alison: Who would you ask to finish your novels if you ever (heaven forbid) died before they were completed (e.g. Brandon Sanderson for Robert Jordan).

Ian: I have no idea, Alison. I don't know of any fantasy novelists who write the way I do, or about the kinds of things I write about. But maybe someone else does. I might have to throw that one back to my Facebook page and see if anyone comes up. In the meantime, i'll try hard not to die.

John: Or would you actually want someone else finishing them off in that situation?

Ian: To be honest, John, I don't think I'd want anyone finishing off a series of mine. Perhaps I'm a control freak. But I think the story would end up very differently to the way I'd imagined it. But then, since I've been so inconsiderate as to die in the middle of a series, instead of waiting until the story is completely wrapped up, I guess I can't complain. I'd certainly want to see it finished rather than just left hanging ...

John: Who is your favourite (or favourites if you can't choose one) of the characters you've created?

Ian: It changes all the time. At the moment I'd say it's Tali, the slave girl from Vengeance who, when just a little girl, saw her mother murdered and some mysterious object taken from her. Now she's 18, she's full of a burning rage and an utter determination to see justice done to the killers. I've spent a long time inside her head and really like her. I also like Tobry, from that story, because he's scarred, reckless, thinks the whole universe is a joke, yet is utterly loyal to his friends. But at other times it can be any of my heroes or heroines, even the alien Ryll from the Three Worlds, or Useless Ike from Grim and Grimmer.

Renee: If there was one thing you had to change about your favourite character what would it be?

Ian: Depends on the character, Renee. If Tali, I think I'd make her a little bit less nice (not that she's completely nice; she has her flaws) and a lot more conflicted about every aspect of her life. Make everything she does, and every choice she makes, a struggle between incompatibles. She can have one or the other, but not both, and she HAS to choose.

Dusty: What character do you associate yourself with the most??

Ian: Dusty, I suspect that would be Llian from The View from the Mirror. There's a lot of me in most of my characters (especially the evil ones, glee, glee! says the bad Ian) because I'm the only person I know, or can know, from the inside. But I think in Llian, because he was one of my first characters, it's closer to the surface. Pity he's such an idiot at times.

Deborah: Why did Ian decide to write fantasy, other than any other genre? What does family think of his novels? Does he envisage that he will still be writing them when he is in 70s? Does Ian believe that the dark side of his personality is expressed in his evil characters?..... (will stop for now,......)

Ian: Why fantasy, Deborah? Because that's what I most enjoyed reading back in the far-off days when I began writing. And though I read far less fantasy these days, I still love it, and especially love writing it.

What does my family think? See my sister Kathy's reply, below. I come from a large family, and so does my wife, and most of the people in our families love books and reading. They're very supportive, and constantly talking about my books to others, and rearranging them in bookshops so they face out, etc.

Kathy: Yes Deborah, family think he is awesome, totally talented, amazingly intuitive, and sensitive to the needs of his characters. Appreciate that he can poke fun at himself and has remained level headed throughout. Love his wicked sense of humour and his imagination. I also hope he will be writing for many years to come. :-)
Ian: And I blush easily, and often.

When will I stop writing? I certainly hope to be still writing in my 70s, and even in my 80s should I live that long. Most of the people in my family live to ripe and reasonably healthy old age, so if I have that good fortune I'll keep writing.

The dark side of my personality? What are you talking about? What dark side? All 27 of my personalities are glowing with light – 'Hey, what about me?' says evil Ian. 'Glmph!' He's bound, gagged and thrust under the table out of sight. 'Now, where was i ...?'

Traci: Who would Ian turn gay for? (Weeeelll, you did ask for tricky questions & there was no specifications on the questions being 'work' related).

Ian: Apart from Bridget Jones, and Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. But wait, that wouldn't be turning gay, would it? I guess no one.

Sue: Ian, can you ask Ian for me... does he believe in in life forms beyond earth and how did life on earth begin? Thanks Ians.

Ians: Well, Sue, there are a few hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe, and each galaxy could have hundreds of billions of stars, and most of those stars could have planets. And of course, there could be billions of universes apart from our own. So the chances of there not being life out there somewhere seem implausibly remote to me. Yes, i do believe there's life out there. Intelligent life is another matter; i don't think it evolves very often and perhaps doesn't last long when it does, but even so, I reckon it exists somewhere.

How did life on Earth begin? Probably in the rich soup of the primordial oceans. It's possible that it could have evolved elsewhere and Earth been seeded with primitive life forms which then evolved here, but that doesn't seem nearly as likely to me. Space is a hostile place for life compared to a protected ocean.

Brian: Do you think the world will end in 2012, if so, are you a believer in he zombie apocalypse or just the plain old destruction of the planet?

Ian: No, I don't, Brian. I can't say I'm a great fan of zombies, though a zombie apocalypse does have a certain ikky charm. I don't think the planet is going to be destroyed any time soon, unless there's a nearby supernova. Earth is pretty resilient. Of course, that doesn't mean we can't make it unsuitable for a vast range of advanced life, including ourselves.

Marta: Why do some writers use a pseudonym to write different books. Is there a particular reason for that because sometimes it can get confusing if your favourite author writes under a pseudonym and you don't know about it. You miss out on reading those books unless you accidentally come across it.

Ian: Marta, if an author is well known for a certain kind of books (say, fantasy) but wants to write something completely different, say, crime or thrillers or romance, they often use a pseudonym to avoid confusing readers and booksellers (otherwise booksellers will often shelve their books in the wrong place). But also, if an author's first book or two have gone really badly, bookshops aren't going to order many of the next book, because they always order based on sales of the last book by that author. It may not be possible to get published at all unless the author changes their name, which wipes the slate.

Danny: Would you ever consider taking on a protege... What would your code names be?

Ian: Do you mean a co-writer, Danny? No, I don't think so. I just want to write my own books in my own way.

Cassandra: Would you change anything about any of your books? If so which ones?

Ian: That's a continent-sized question, Cassandra. If I really needed to update any of my books, I imagine I'd change many things, and I'd certain cut out a lot of verbal flab, as I did when I for the revised editions of the 3 Human Rites eco-thrillers. I cut about 10 K words out of the first, 14 K from the second and 20 K from the third book. But if I'm rewriting old books, I'm not writing new ones, so it's not the best use of my time.

Mitchell: Have you ever had a thought like this? About how strange things happen, when your going around the twist?

Ian: If I thought I was going round the twist, Mitchell, do you really think I'd post it on the internet? [Sidles off, twitching and laughing maniacally]

Thanks very much, Guys, great questions, as always.

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/

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My blog about the novels I write, and the writing life: http://ian-irvine.blogspot.com/

Ian's Lime Liqueur Recipe

2011-11-29T08:36:00.001+11:00

I firmly believe that an essential part of a writer's education is the creation of at least one drink recipe. So here, in celebration of the magnificent life of my lime tree, and mourning for its sudden, tragic death last week, is the recipe for my glorious lime liqueur.

1. Take about 30FRESHLY PICKED limes when they're just ripe (ie, before the skin has started toyellow) and at their most aromatic. If they're not aromatic (or worse, they're supermarket limes) it doesn't work well. Test them by scratching the skin with a fingernail and sniffing. If they don't smell wonderful, don't bother – this is an all or nothing recipe.

2. Rinse the limes and remove any blemishes. With a potatopeeler, carefully shave the green zest off, trying to avoid the white pith (it will make the liqueur bitter).

3. Put the zestin a large jar with about 250 g of sugar (more or less according to how sweetyou like the liqueur).

4. Pour in alitre of good quality vodka, cap and shake until sugar is dissolved.

5. You can givethe liqueur a bit more colour and fragrance by adding a few freshly picked limeleaves to the jar, if the leaves are really aromatic.

6. Cap the jarand leave in a cool dry place for a minimum of six weeks (3 months is better; longer than that doesn't make any difference).

6. Strain offthe zest, bottle the pale green-gold liqueur and allow it to age for a couple of months, or longer. It lasts for years but is best drunk within a year or two.

7. Before use, put the bottle in the freezer for several hours (it won't freeze due to the alcohol content). Drink icecold, preferably from a chilled brandy balloon, in good company. Or listening to HayleyWestenra sing Amazing Grace, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOrlCYp8TgU.

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/

To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing: http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author

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My blog about the novels I write, and the writing life: http://ian-irvine.blogspot.com/

Josephine Pennicott on Obstacles and Inspirations

2011-11-28T16:01:00.001+11:00

Josephine Pennicott is a multi-award winning crime writer who has won the Scarlet Stiletto and (twice) the wonderfully named Kerry Greenwood Domestic Malice Prize. Jo has also written a dark fantasy trilogy, Circle of Nine. Today she reflects on writing obstacles and inspirations.

Thank you Ian, for inviting me to submit to your Blog. Those of us lucky enough to know Ian personally, know that he’s a gentleman who is incredibly generous with his support for other writers. Being part of an online writing community of fellow Selwa Anthony authors, I’ve read and gleaned a lot from Ian’s experience and wisdom over the years. So, of course I couldn’t refuse his invitation to be a part of his online project to help others.

My first novels were Dark Fantasy, published by Simon and Schuster (Earthlight imprint) - Circle of Nine (2001),Bride of the Stone (2002) and A Fire in the Shell (2004). They were the result of years studying painting at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney. They evolved from my own artwork, my interest in Surrealism, fairy tales, mythology and comparative religions, in particular Paganism. Circle of Nine was selected by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow as one of the top ten debut books for their prestigious 2001 anthology, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. They will soon be republished by Pan Macmillan as e-books.

Afterwards I spent three years – a very difficult time with all sorts of obstacles in the way of my writing - working on what I shall jokingly refer to as my ‘masterpiece.’ You know when you read authors saying they wrote a list of all the things they loved, put all those elements in their book, and it became a bestseller? Well, that’s what I was after! I began writing a historical, supernatural murder mystery called The Witches of Paris. I submitted the proposal to Selwa, who was very keen. Sophia Coppola was rumoured to be directing a movie based on Marie Antoinette; my book was set in a similar location and so it seemed like a timely idea.

But in 2007, when The Witches of Paris was still not quite done, I went on holiday with my family to Stanley on the North-West Coast of Tasmania and fell in love with a white house by the sea. A house that became incredibly important to my writing career. It gave me an idea for a new book, Poet’s Cottage, which Selwa encouraged me to start while I was waiting for an editor’s report on The Witches Of Paris.

The more I worked on Poet’s Cottage, the more the characters came to me. I had been to India in my early twenties and stayed at a well-known spiritual Guru’s ashram who had a saying, ‘Take one step towards me and I’ll take a thousand towards you.’ This book was exactly like that. My characters literally dragged me into the story. They were waiting for me every morning and the process became very exciting.

I forgot my previous project for the time being as I began to lose myself in the mystery of who killed Pearl Tatlow, bohemian children’s writer, in her dark and eerie cellar on a foggy day in Pencubitt, Tasmania in July 1936. Was she really murdered by ‘the Tasmanian devil that Mummy kept in the cellar to threaten us with when she was writing?’ as her daughter Thomasina, who witnessed the murder, claimed. Or, did something far more sinister cross the threshold of Poet’s Cottage? A stranger to the town, as the local people kept insisting – or someone Pearl knew and trusted?

As I mentioned, I was on holiday with my family when I first spotted the house that ignited the spark that became the book Poet’s Cottage.

In my Sydney life, I live with my daughter and my writer husband, David Levell, in a small, historic brick house in the inner-west. It’s like a tiny doll’s house and my husband is used to me falling in love with houses on all my trips. I’m a very proud fifth generation Tasmanian - and often homesick for my home state.

This particular house ticked all my boxes – it was a white Georgian-style home that looked like something the Bronte sisters would have lived in. It overlooked the sea, in a picturesque, Tasmanian sea-fishing village. A village that was a combination of wild gothic, isolated coastline contrasted with a very Cornish looking, cosy village that could have come straight from an Enid Blyton or Daphne du Maurier novel!

I felt that this house had a story to tell me. There didn’t appear to be anybody living there and so my imagination was free to conjure up a myriad of scenarios. I spent a lot of time standing outside the gates, listening for the secrets and stories that I felt sure the house was trying to whisper to me.

There was a friendly gentleman who said hello to me in the street every day. On one of our meetings, I confided I’d fallen in love with the house, and he beamed, ‘That’s Poet’s Cottage! And I’m the poet who used to live there!’ This friendly local was Lin Eldridge – when he discovered I was a writer - he introduced me to his 90-something year old wife, whose name is Marguerite Eldridge. Marguerite and Lin live in Gull Cottage; my Birdie Pinkerton lives in Seagull Cottage in the novel. I had no idea when first meeting this charming, pretty and twinkly eyed lady that she was actually quite a well-known identity in Tasmania. Marguerite, who has never left her fishing village (and I can easily understand why) has self-published several books on life in Stanley. She has been instrumental in her town for starting creative ventures. In January 2011, she was awarded an Australia Day Award, for her service to the creative arts and her community.

They were a most welcoming couple, just as Birdie does in Poet’s Cottage, Marguerite urged me to ‘help yourself to my Daphne’ and they tolerated with good spirits my small daughter running amuck in Gull Cottage. Marguerite helped to inspire my character of Birdie Pinkerton - as did another elderly lady that I knew and visited in my high school years in Tasmania. But Birdie Pinkerton is not Marguerite - despite sharing several things in common.

Over the years I was always fascinated by the story of Enid Blyton’s two daughters, Gillian and Imogen, having opposing views of their mother. I remember one story in the UK Telegraph, Was Enid Blyton the Mother from Hell? I’ve seen in my own family how different members could all have totally variant views of an incident- and how sometimes it was impossible to fathom what was truth.

I’m also addicted to the UK TV show Midsomer Murders, with its surreal but quite realistic juxtaposition of pretty English villages and murder most foul. Daphne du Maurier and Agatha Christie are both writers I love. I’ve won quite a few awards over the years for my crime writing short stories, which were always very dark. I love reading cosy, English-style mysteries and I wanted to set myself the challenge of writing an English style mystery but with an Australian setting. All these elements came together at Stanley. Tasmania was a perfect place to set the book as it’s so English looking!

I used elements of two Tasmanian towns for my imaginary town of Pencubitt for Poet’s Cottage, Stanley in the North-West and also Oatlands, which is the very pretty midlands Georgian village where I spent my high school years. My early years were spent in Papua New Guinea. Generations of Pennicotts have settled in Oatlands and the name seems to belong to the town and area.

It was a joy to escape into my imaginary fishing village of Pencubitt every day from my garden writing shed in Sydney with planes flying overhead and heavy traffic outside the front door of our brick house. I based the character of Sadie (in the present day thread of the book) and her daughter, Betty on a lot of mothers I saw around me in Sydney’s inner-west. A majority were older mothers and trying to parent in a different way to their mother’s generation. They weren’t trying to be friends so much with their children but there was a difference in the dynamic that I was trying to capture. Sadie also helped to partially satisfy my own longing for a sea-change.

Pearl Tatlow in the 30s thread evolved from years of watching crime dramas set in the 1930s. And also a little of Enid Blyton and Jerry Hall, the Texan model went into my boho Pearl. I once saw Jerry Hall strut her stuff down a Sydney street and never forgot the impact her beauty and sassy attitude had on the gawping crowd of normally too-cool-for-school city folk.

Birdie Pinkerton was inspired by the two older ladies mentioned above. She was always very strong and quite stern with me when I wasn’t capturing some aspect of her character.

Maxwell was inspired by a gentlemanly, kind and caring Uncle of mine. I always enjoyed Maxwell’s sweet and considerate manners when I was working.

Thomasina just came striding in to the writing shed, with her beanie on her head, filled with a terrible memory and some really fun scenes for me to write for her. She was always strong, always unpredictable and very touching to connect with. I grew to care for all my characters very deeply over the three years it took to writePoet’s Cottage.

Looking back, I’m thrilled with how things worked out. The Witches of Paris was a love letter to France and I still hope to see it published one day. Poet’s Cottage is a love letter to Tasmania, my home state. My father, who had always been one of my most staunch believers of my writing from when I was a little girl, has been battling a very aggressive cancer for five years. I realised towards the end of writing Poet’s Cottage – the cancer reached his liver just as I finished the copy edit - that Poet’s Cottage itself had become not just another historic house I had fallen in love with - but rather it represented something a lot more personal. It was a dwelling between the worlds where my ancestors resided and represented all the secrets, dramas, misunderstanding, passions and mysteries (not to mention the enormous family love) that we all have hidden in our respective family cupboards.

If you’re in need of some inspiration to get you out of any pity-tea party you may be enjoying when it comes to your writing, I hope you can find it in my post. I was determined, focused and able to walk away from three years of working on a dream and start again for another three years with a different book. If I can do it –so can you. Sometimes whether we realise it or not - and however it may seem at the time – everything does work for our greater good. If you get rejected and your ‘masterpiece’ is knocked back – then write another. If it takes you years as it did me – that’ s fine. Your ego will live with it if you’re following your spirit’s path.

We’re all conditioned to believe all the success stories on writers the media broadcast but the reality is much grimmer for working writers that I know. They may get a few books published and then they have to go back to the drawing board. It’s a touch business, it can crack your heart open - and you do have to be tough as old boots to cope with it at times.

Looking back, I can see how all the characters in my writing career played their parts perfectly. I’m forever grateful that Poet’s Cottage beat The Witches of Paris to publication because it meant so much to my father to see me finally get taken seriously with a book set in Tasmania. And, I do plan on returning to my Parisian witches with all the new skills I’ve learnt over the last seven years. But first I have another mystery novel to complete for Pan Macmillan.

Writing can be a tough, bitchy, hard, isolating, heart-breaking profession at times. And that’s the good days. But I’m very honoured to be a Tale Peddler and to experience the joyful bliss of characters flowing, manifesting and telling their story. So give thanks for it all. The good fortune, the set-backs, the rejections and the awards. Don’t believe books and your career have to follow a set path. Keep open to your own personal timing and rhythm. No matter how things may appear at the time – use the experience. Both the so-called ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ can honour a higher purpose - and if you are patient and diligent enough – and believe in a little bit of pixie and glittery wishing dust - the seeds you scatter will be harvested.

Thanks very much, Jo, that's a lovely and inspiring story. Poet’s Cottage will be published by Pan Macmillan in May 2012.

Josephine Pennicott's site is here: http://www.josephinepennicott.com/

You can find Josephine on her blog Tale Peddler, http://talepeddler.blogspot.com/

and on Twitter, Facebook or Good Reads.

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/

To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing: http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author

To follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ianirvineauthor

My blog about the novels I write, and the writing life: http://ian-irvine.blogspot.com/

Jason Nahrung on Writing Joys and Frustrations

2011-11-24T15:31:00.001+11:00

Jason Nahrung has been a newspaper journalist for more than two decades. He's also a fiction editor, judge of speculative fiction, and writer of darkly themed tales including the supernatural thriller, The Darkness Within. Today, Jason muses on the joys and frustrations of being a writer.

It’s not you, it’s us.

It has been an ... interesting past couple of months. My wife, Kirstyn, has been devoting every spare moment to her novel – by coincidence, her publisher’s deadline coincides with our departure for a wee break. And I’ve had a self-imposed deadline, knowing it will be good for my morale to be able to go away and leave my agent with the latest iteration of the novel I’ve been trying to get right for more than 10 years. This time, please Writing Gods, may it all make sense...

All of which means we’ve been fairly anti-social. I’ve stayed in partly out of sympathy, not wanting my wife to feel like some kind of pariah while I’m off gallivanting around the country. Plus, it’s a great excuse for me to stay home and be indulgent: a short story here, that pesky novel mostly there.

So why the guilt?

Why the compulsion to explain in rigorous details about publishers and deadlines and day jobs and available time and word counts? Why the compulsion to apologise?

After all, if I said we weren’t attending some soiree or event because I had to train for the grand final, there’d be nothing but words of encouragement. If I said I was pulling serious over-time because the office was understaffed, there’d be nods of knowing understanding. But not doing something because you’re writing? In my case, without even a deadline? Without even the certainty of a pay packet at the end of it?

What sort of alien must I be?

Writing is, after all, at my level of the vocation, something to be fitted in around the day job. Around life. You pay the bills, you catch up with the people you care about, you be entertained ... and then you write.

I hate that I am so used to the arts not mattering that I automatically become defensive when explaining how I’ve made my art, if I may be high-falutin’ for a moment and call what I do art (hm, is that that defensiveness coming in? It’s a nice story, dahlink, but is it art?), a priority. How, like sport, it needs to be practised and trained for; how, like a day job, it needs regular attention and commitment. How, sometimes, especially towards the end of a project, it can require a degree of sacrifice. No telly. No cinema. No gigs (no gigs!).

You can take it too far, just as you can with sport and your career. You can sacrifice the enjoyment of life, the company of friends and family, for a supposedly loftier goal, and therein lies the risk of a pyrrhic victory. But sometimes, you have to give in order to get – sometimes, the enjoyment of life means having to give something up – even if those around you might not understand.

Fortunately, most of our friends and family do. Without that acceptance, it’d make the job that much harder. It’s important, I think, if you’re going to snub someone, that they understand exactly why; that they know that the job’s important – not more important, just, at this moment, important enough to skip lunch.

I have to take my hat off to Kirstyn. I don’t know how she can work her day job and then switch over for a six-hour writing stint, night after night. By knock-off time, my eyes are dripping out of my skull, the keyboard is an arcane thing, but there she sits, crafting, crafting, crafting. Occasionally fending off the cat, who hasn’t had lap time for, like, forever.

I’m looking forward to going out once more. I’m looking forward to our holiday. I’m looking forward to seeing Kirstyn’s book upon the shelf, and maybe mine, too (please Writing Gods, this time...?). Bear with us, gentle friends; we will return to the scheduled program, right after these messages... but I’m trying not to apologise for the interruption. I’m sure you’ll understand.

Jason Nahrung's only novel, The Darkness Within, can be difficult to find these days (you can try the Book Depository UK), but he's got a bunch of short stories out this year in various Australian anthologies, and a couple due out next year, too. Track him down atwww.jasonnahrung.com. Kirstyn McDermott's debut novel, Madigan Mine, came out last year. She's almost finished her second novel, working title Perfections. Almost. You'll hear the shout of joy first at www.kirstynmcdermott.com.

Thanks, Jason. A timely reminder that (believe it or not) we writers are people like everyone else. Well, except that we can go to work in our underwear and have afternoon naps by the fire, ha! Beat that, commuting work slaves!

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/

To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing: http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author

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My blog about the novels I write, and the writing life: http://ian-irvine.blogspot.com/

500 BOOKS IN 300 DAYS – WEEK 33 WINNERS

2011-11-22T13:45:00.001+11:00

I've been running this weekly competition on my Facebook fan page all year, and it'll run into 2012. Each week all year I've been giving away three of my trilogies and quartets, signed, except for breaks where I've given away two iPad 2s.

Total number of books won so far: 359.

To enter, go here, http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author, Like my page then enter from the Promos tab.

For the next few weeks I'll be giving away 3 copies of my brand new book,Vengeance, each week.

WEEK 33 QUESTION – Do you prefer heroes or villains? Why? The cleverest, funniest, most moving or wittiest entries win. No knowledge of my books needed.     THERE ARE THREE FIRST PRIZES – each a copy of my latest book, VENGEANCE, signed.

Week 33 (44 entries).

Winners

1^st, Stephanie Elizabeth Kirsch, 2^nd, Scott Mooney, 3^rd, Amber Charlene Craddock.

Honourable Mentions (get 3 HMs and you also win).

Lisa Leigh, Julie Strahan, Sue Knight, Thijs Roeloffs.

The complete list of winners for 2011 can be found here: http://www.ian-irvine.com/winners.html

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/

To say Hi or talk to me about books and writing: http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author

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My blog about the novels I write, and the writing life: http://ian-irvine.blogspot.com/

Katherine Howell – Story is King

2011-11-17T09:10:00.001+11:00

Suspense is everything.

Katherine Howell was once told that her manuscript lacked suspense. She promptly studied the subject for her Masters degree, and now rereads her thesis when she starts each new book, to remind herself of the techniques of developing suspense in fiction. Katherine was a paramedic in the ambulance service for 15 years. She writes high-adrenaline tales of murder and intrigue, has twice won the Davitt Award for best novel, and her novels are published in many countries and languages.

Today, she's talking about finding the right protagonist.

My first novel, Frantic, was published in Australia in 2007 and features police detective Ella Marconi alongside paramedics. It’s since been followed by three more novels, with the fifth in the series, Silent Fear, due for release in February. Each continues the angle of using paramedics as protagonists, something that not only provides a point of difference for the books but also draws on my experience of doing that job for fifteen years.

I’m often asked about the process of turning that real-life experience into fiction and I always answer that it wasn’t easy. I initially resisted the idea completely, and instead wrote bottom-drawer manuscripts about - variously - cults, forensic science students, and cops chasing a killer while being assisted by a ghost. When I did start to recognise the drama and inherent story value in the world I worked in, my first attempts to put any of it on paper overflowed with my grief and anger about the situations I faced daily and the people I tried to save. It took counselling and my eventual resignation to manage these emotions, and even then it was months before they disappeared completely from my writing. Once that happened, however, I was faced with the next problem: how to use these paramedic stories in the procedural crime series I was determined to write.

I’d wanted to have a paramedic as my protagonist, but I couldn’t see how to have her plausibly solving crime, and I had no clue what could then happen in the next book. I came to realise that I needed a police detective; a scary thought at first, because my reason for using the ghost in that earlier ms was because of the difficulty in learning the details of how exactly police solve a particular crime. Even when I started researching, I felt a huge gap in my knowledge—I knew the paramedic’s world so well, it seemed wrong to not have the same understanding of the detective’s. I wanted to be true to these jobs, and to not know it all made me think I couldn’t do it justice. I saw, however, how many crime novels are written by non-cops (ie, most of them), and decided I had to at least give it a try, being as true along the way as I could.

This then brought up another problem: to me, being true to the job of paramedic meant putting in every moment of a case, every question and answer, every action, every step of treatment. But as my manuscript grew longer, with scenes rolling on interminably for pages, I realised this wouldn’t work. I reread some of my favourite crime novels, analysed how the authors delivered information, and saw that I needed verisimilitude rather than total adherence to the facts. The real-life details were like a garnish, to be sprinkled in here and there to add flavour and impact. Too much of it overwhelmed the most important element of all, the reason people pick up a book: story.

I went back to the start of the manuscript and changed how I incorporated my experiences, and finally saw the work come alive. Months of hard work later, and a year after I quit that job, the ms sold as part of a two book deal to Pan Macmillan, and as I write now I keep the ideas of ‘detail is garnish’ and ‘story is king’ foremost in my mind.

Thanks, Katherine – I guess the right protagonist isn't necessarily the one you know inside out. Katherine's site: http://www.katherinehowell.com/

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/

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Conjuring Nonsense by Sam Bowring

2011-11-15T10:54:00.001+11:00

Sam Bowring is a writer and standup comedian living in Sydney. He has written for TV, including Rove and The Comedy Channel, as well as stage plays, books for children, and fantasy. Sam's fantasy series, The Broken Well Trilogy, is published by Orbit. Today, Sam is channelling loose thoughts on fantasy names.

For me, one of the hardest parts of writing a fantasy story is thinking up names - for characters, places, magical swords and such - that do not sound completely cringe-worthy. I’m sure I’m not the only one who, upon inspecting the blurb of a potential read, has flung it back on the bookshelf in disgust because it said something about a hero called ‘Nynmn’dryhl of the Xyl’turym’. Can I buy a vowel, please?

That said, appreciation of fantasy names is a personal thing, about as subjective as it gets. How can anyone guess what collection of randomly spliced letters will prove pleasing to the ear of another? One person’s ‘Nynmn’dryhl’ might be another’s ‘Bilbo Baggins’. It would be arrogant to stand here (sometimes I write standing up) and tell you what does or does not make a good fantasy name. Especially when I myself have created names that look like I tossed the alphabet against the wall, and whatever stuck to the peanut butter was what I went with. It’s very hard to get these things right by everyone. One of my good friends, for instance, never lets me forgot that I named a place ‘Whisperwood’.

‘Whisperwood,’ he will say, years later, out of the blue, shaking his head in dismay.

What I can give are tips on approaches, if not results. The best way to decide results, I find, is to simply ask people you trust, ‘does this name work for you, or does it make you want to jump out of your skin into an acid bath?’

One approach, which I imagine is a common starting point for many authors, is to simply diddle around with syllables, putting them together in various ways, saying the words aloud until striking upon a pleasing combination. I do not own the patent for this, and drugs are optional.

Another approach is to be derivative in some way. For example, in my book Prophecy’s Ruin, there is a nasty little talking bird who revels in lies and manipulation, and generally screwing things up for everyone. His name is Iassia, which is very much inspired by that classic silver-tongued Shakespearean villain, Iago. Such derivation need not be based on another character, of course, but may take as its basis a descriptive word for the character’s persona. My character ‘Malevot’, for example, is taken from ‘malicious’, ‘malevolent’, and possibly, ‘Malcolm’ (see next point).

A third approach I use is to take a real-world name, and simply change a letter or two. I find this especially useful when it comes to small-time characters, and means I wind up with a lot of farmers called things like Borry.

Incidentally, I find small-time characters the most difficult to name. The reason is, it still takes time to come up with something good, and when I finally do, I don’t want to waste it on some two-line nobody. Thus I am forever transplanting good names from incidentals to mains, leaving all guards-who-are-about-to-get-killed with necessarily dubious monikers that I have no fear of becoming attached to.

On the subject of real-world names, one thing I always find jarring in fantasy is when a real name is mixed in with the made-up ones. Amongst the Nynmn’dryhls and Dakurs, why, here’s Mary everyone. ‘Let me introduce you to Mary, Nynmn’dryhl!’ Whether this incongruity reeks of laziness, or the author just liked the name Mary a lot, I’m never really sure ... but I just don’t buy Zeddicus Zul Zorander having a grandson called Dick.

Something rarely seen in fantasy is two characters sharing the same name. In the real world we have plenty of Johns and Susans. If you can believe it, we even have plenty of Schapelles and Mercedes. In fantasy, however, you just don’t get such realistic repetition.

‘I am Zarrakvah, Lord of Darkness.’

‘Hello there, my lord. I’m Zarrakvah too, shearer of sheep.’

‘Ah. Well, that seems to undermine my mystique a little, does it not?’

‘Aye, sorry lord. I was named after my uncle Zarrakvah, actually.’

You never get this scene in fantasy, maybe at a cocktail party:

‘Greetings.’

‘Oh, greetings to you … er … sorry, was it Teremond?’

‘Actually it’s Deridas.’

‘Sorry, of course. That was going to be my next guess.’

Parents of fantasy book characters are like the worst of movie stars, forever trying to bestow their spawn with unique and original names, to signify their amazing individuality. Did they go through the approaches I have previously described? Two high elves sitting by the cradle, thuggishly ramming letters together in ways their makers never intended, until all that’s left to decide is where to flick the arbitrary apostrophe? ‘Well,’ they gush later to their friends, ‘we just thought, you know, shelooks like a Gwyn’talamodrin!’

It’s something I have pondered at length (I need to get out more), and I can appreciate why this one-off naming system exists. It would be confusing, of course, to have two Gwyn’talamodrins running about in any given universe, especially if they rent from the same video store.

I recently decided to buck this trend, however (though no one in particular was challenging me to), and am proud to announce that in my upcoming books, there are not one, not two, but three characters who share the same name. Which is Hanry, by the way. So good on me, eh?

EH?

At least, when all is said and done, no matter what names you have come up with, be assured that any given reader probably won’t pronounce them in the way that you intended. The way someone reads a name the first time is how they will remember it for life - even if they’ve subconsciously added extra letters, recklessly ignoring all laws of phonetic pronunciation. It’s kind of an inbuilt safety mechanism for the author, as readers superimpose their own preferences over the utter nonsense you have dished up to them, to make it more personally palatable.

It even happens with seemingly innocuous names. I have a friend who pronounces Fazel as ‘Fah-zel’, as opposed to ‘Fay-zel’ and do you think I ever once cleared my throat to inform her, in haughty tones, that she isn’t saying it right?

Ho ho, no. I’d rather she say it how she wants, and think me cleverer than I am, at coming up with names she likes.

Finally, the best way to know that you have gotten a name right - or, at least, are happy with it yourself - is when you finally add it to your spellchecker as a real word. This way your word processor is not constantly underlining it red, as if to ask, ‘Are you sure about this? Really? Are you sure?’

I have not yet done this with Nynmn’dryhl.

Also, I do not really write standing up.

One of the most frequent FAQs is how fantasy authors come up with names. Thanks for answering it for me, Sam. And for the laughs.

Sam's website is http://sambowring.com/

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/

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George Ivanoff on Setting Novels in Virtual Worlds

2011-11-14T07:54:00.001+11:00

George Ivanoff has written more than 50 books for children and teenagers, both fiction and non-fiction, novels, short stories (including a Doctor Who story), articles and school readers. He also moonlights as an actor and has been in numerous productions including Neighbours. His teen SF novel, Gamer's Quest, won a 2010 Chronos award. Today he's talking about writing novels set inside a computer game. Thanks, George.

It all started with a documentary about online gaming. Watching it reminded me of how much I loved computer games as a kid and teen — how I loved blasting aliens inSpace Invaders and dodging large chunks of space-rock in Asteroids. I was obsessed! But it was more than the actual games. I loved the concept of playing on or with a computer. Consequently, I also loved any sort of fiction that used computer games as part of its narrative. Gillian Rubinstein’s novel Space Demons was a favourite. I also loved films like TRON and The Last Starfighter.

After watching the documentary, I decided that I wanted to recapture my childhood excitement about computer games. I wanted to write some fiction that used games as an integral part of its narrative. And so I came to write a short story called “Game Plan” (published in Trust Me!, Ford Street Publishing, 2008), which I then expanded into a novel called Gamers’ Quest, followed by a sequel, Gamers’ Challenge.

Both novels follow the adventures of two teenage thieves, Tark and Zyra, who live in a computer game world. In Gamers’ Quest, they don’t realise that they are characters within a computer game. To them, their world is very real; their adventures a matter of life and death. By the beginning of Gamers’ Challenge, they know they are inside a game… and they want out!

Setting novels inside a computer game allowed me a great deal of freedom. I was able to play with the clichés of various genres and introduce some rather over-the-top characters — warrior monks, homicidal computer viruses, mages young and old, and some really evil villains.

I was also able to indulge my childhood interests. Thinking back to when I was a teenager, I dug out from my memory all those things that I enjoyed in books and films and games, and then put them all into these novels. And so, we have magic swords, powerful mages, killer cyborgs, zombies, dragons, various mythical creatures, a giant robot spider, an invading army of Roman Centurions, and a climactic video game battle.

Perhaps the most interesting part of writing these novels, has been the challenge of structuring them in the way of a computer game. Part of that is the pace — the story progresses at break-neck speed, the characters moving from one challenge to the next, with short chapters and quick scene changes. Then there is the matter of time — specifically the passage of time. As Gamers’ Quest begins, and Tark and Zyra set off on their adventures, I deliberately made sure to exclude any sense of night and day passing. They never stop to eat or sleep. Their only concern is the quest and the challenges they face along the way. Just like a computer game, the novel progress from one level of challenge to the next. They never have to worry about getting older or dealing with the problems of teenage-hood. They are perpetually perfect 16-years-olds, devoid of acne and angst, their only concern, the rules of game and the challenge of their quest.

Gamers’ Challenge allowed me to play with this concept a little more. Because Tark and Zyra now know they are in a game, they are able to observe the peculiarities of their environment (and I was able to make observations about gaming). They now notice that night never falls, unless it is required for the game narrative; they get tired and feel the after-effects of a fight; they get hungry and need to search for food; pimples now become an issue and hair does not remain in perfect place without product; and they begin to age. So even though they are still within the environs of the game, they are no longer bound by its rules — they are within the game, but now living more ‘real’ lives.

As a writer I am bound by the rules of a very different game — the publishing game! Although I have a third book planned, it won’t get written unless book two sells enough for my publisher to warrant the publishing of another. I’m desperately hoping that I do get to write it because it will allow me to play even further with the concept of computer games. In the third installment, Tark and Zyra will get out of the game and step into the ‘real world’. Readers will find out who controls the game, why it was made and what its sinister purpose is.

I look forward to stepping out of the virtual world and presenting a very different view of computer games in this novel.

Thanks, George. I must be the only person in the world who's never played a computer game, so the world you're writing about is alien, but fascinating.

George's website is here: http://georgeivanoff.com.au/

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500 BOOKS TO BE WON IN 300 DAYS - WEEK 32 WINNERS

2011-11-10T09:36:00.000+11:00

Total number of books won so far: 356.

To enter, go here, http://www.facebook.com/ianirvine.author, Like my page then enter from the Promos tab.

For the next few weeks I'll be giving away 3 copies of my brand new book,Vengeance, each week.

WEEK 32 QUESTION – What do you hope to discover in Vengeance? The cleverest, funniest, most moving or wittiest entries win. No knowledge of my books needed.     THERE ARE THREE FIRST PRIZES – each a copy of my latest book, VENGEANCE, signed.

Week 32 (63 entries). There are equal third places again this week, so in fact there are 4 winners.

Winners

First, Courtney 'Toffee' Rohde, Second, Rebecca Cairns, Equal Third, Rebecca J Fleming and Vivian Mercadal.

Honourable Mentions (get 3 HMs and you also win).

Jane Domagala, Martin Ellis and Marc Burdon.Congratulations, everyone.

The complete list of winners for 2011 can be found here: http://www.ian-irvine.com/winners.html

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
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On Reading Like a Writer – Claire Corbett

2011-11-09T07:40:00.001+11:00

Claire Corbett has worked as a government policy adviser on water, genetically modified organisms and child and family health. She has had essays and stories broadcast on Radio National and published in Cinema Papers, Picador New Writing and The Sydney Morning Herald, among others. She completed the MA Writing (UTS) in 1997 and a Varuna Mentorship in 2000. When We Have Wings, her first novel, was published by Allen & Unwin in July 2011 to rave reviews. Today Claire is talking about reading like a writer.

Every writer, on being asked to give advice for emerging writers, will emphasise the importance of reading widely.

There is something to be said about the kind of reader you become once you start writing seriously, though, especially once you start to feel surer of your own style. At first it seems hard enough to write a decent sentence; then there are struggles with tense, point of view, and structuring a plot.

As I began to become more confident with some of the technical challenges of writing narrative fiction I noticed to my surprise that the way I read began to change. If a story impressed me, instead of just surrendering to it, I began to look more closely, to take it apart to see how it worked. Visual artists do this all the time, perhaps more consciously than many writers. An integral part of art training is (was?) to copy old masters until their tricks and techniques were known, understood and could be incorporated into the student artist’s repertoire.

I had already been through this process with film; I studied film-making during my Communications degree and went on to crew on feature films. I was fascinated by the technical difficulties of film-making, devouring issues of American Cinematographer and books written by directors. I learned deep respect for craft as I studied film stocks, lighting, processing, sound effects, mixing soundtracks and so on. I could watch a film, analysing the skills with which it was made while still enjoying the story and artistry.

Oddly, it took years before it occurred to me to do this with reading. I was so enthralled by writers I admired that I was swept away every time. I was aware that some writers I’d read and re-read obsessively had influenced my very sentence structures by osmosis, and I thought this was the only way to learn to write. I still think this is true of the way a writer’s deepest self is formed – through childhood reading. This is the way your ‘ear’ is trained for the sound and rhythm of the English language. Clearly that training can occur in other languages as some writers whose first language is not English, such as Conrad and Nabokov, are among our finest.

I remember the first time I wondered about the skill in a particular technique and considered whether I might teach myself how to do it. I was reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and marvelling at how readers know only what Ishiguro’s narrator, the butler Stevens, tells us and yet we have a completely different view of events and of Stevens’ actions than he does. The writer never speaks to us directly, all we have are Stevens’ words, and yet we have at least two views of the events in the novel, the butler’s and our own (or possibly Ishiguro’s).

Most writers would probably try to give us a different view through the perspective of another character but somehow Ishiguro manages to give us at least two views through only the one lens. The subtlety of the technique is breathtaking and Stevens is proof you don’t have to find a character ‘likable’ to empathise with him. Stevens would refuse the reader’s sympathy. Yet still, you feel. No wonder that novel won a Booker prize.

Another writer whose technique I tried to unravel is possibly the world’s greatest short story writer, Alice Munro. Her stories end with a punch to the heart but she rarely relies on the ‘twist’ so beloved of short story writers. It took me many re-readings to pin down exactly how she does it and in the process I worked out why her style and her emotional power depends so heavily on the stories being shorter, why what she does would not work in novels. Ah, I hear you say. And how does she do it? I can do no better than point you in the direction of collections such asRunaway or The Love of A Good Woman or The Progress of Love.

A technique I had to consciously teach myself – painfully at first but I like to think I mastered it – was free indirect speech. Critic James Wood lays out how free indirect speech works brilliantly in his discussion of Jane Austen in his book of essays The Broken Estate. In When We Have Wings I have two narrators, the young flier Peri and the private investigator searching for her, Zeke. Zeke had to speak in first person because he is the reader’s guide through the new, strange world of the winged.

I felt I needed to write Peri’s part of the story in third person but in early drafts she was too remote, lacking in feeling, and the word choice was more mine than hers as the character. Using free indirect speech, where the third person can occasionally slip in and out of first person, brought Peri closer and allowed her to express her thoughts directly. This technique takes practice to make it supple but may have erased that distance so well that readers barely seem to notice that one strand of the book is in first person and one in third.

So my message is: read widely, read at least some work that is difficult, not because it’s badly done but because it’s trying to do difficult things, and most importantly read beyond whatever genres you like and want to write in, including literary fiction. I can’t stress this enough. Just reading young adult won’t give you anything new to bring to young adult fiction, you might get an amazing idea for a fantasy tale from a business book (this seems to be the secret to much of Terry Pratchett’s comedy!) and if you read something you love, experiment with trying to make that technique your own. I don’t read much crime fiction and yet a crime novel gave me one of the most thorough master classes in style I’ve ever had. It’s a lesson I’ll never forget.

Thank you, Claire. I definitely need more practice in reading like a writer.

Claire's website is here: http://www.clairecorbett.com/

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
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My Tortuous Road to Publication

2011-11-08T11:43:00.001+11:00

I’m not sure exactly when I had the idea of writing a fantasy novel, though it must have been sometime after July 1977, because that’s when I bought and read Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara.

It wasn’t the story that inspired me, though. I’d read a huge amount of fantasy by then and found the plot to be too close to The Lord of the Rings. My inspiration was the map – but not in a good way.

The map in The Sword of Shannara so irritated me (because it seemed so clichéd, and so wrong) that I sat down on the spot and began to create my own, based on what I believed a real fantasy world should look like. Here’s a small, early version, done in 1978.

This soon became an obsession. At a time when I was supposed to be writing my thesis, I redrew the maps in greater and greater detail, until they were the size of house doors, then began to work out 10,000 years of history (as one does), the politics and economies of some of the countries therein, the peoples and ecosystems.

And then, snatches of characters, many of whom would appear in The View from the Mirror a decade later – Mendark, Shuthdar and the Golden Flute, Yggur, Faelamor, Kandor (who became Rulke), Kyllian the bard, who became Llian the master chronicler, Karan, my favourite character, and Yfanna, who became Maigraith.

Finally, on June 25, 1979, on a train in Finland, I wrote the first snatch of the story – Kyllian leaving Chanthed for the mountain inn at Tullin. Not very good, is it? But at the time it wasn't intended as part of a novel. It was just a moment that occurred to me.

What with finishing my thesis, taking a demanding consulting job, looking after little children and renovating a lovely but decrepit Victorian house in Sydney, 8 years went by before I had the time to formally begin writing – in longhand. It was September 1987 and I figured if I wrote 3 pages a day, I’d have a first draft done by Christmas.

By the time I was halfway through the story, then called The Mirror of Aachan, I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing stories. I finished the first draft 5 days early but, to my astonishment, the story ended on a cliff-hanger with possibilities exploding out in all directions.

A month later I’d worked out that there would be four books to the story, now called The View from the Mirror, their titles and, in some detail, what would happen in each book. I did several more drafts of the first book then, in 1989, looked around for a publisher.

At the time, no Australian publishers were publishing science fiction or fantasy for the adult market – see my post on the Golden Age of Aussie Publishing,http://ianirvine.blogspot.com/2011/10/golden-age-of-publishing.html.

But I probably wouldn’t have sent it there anyway – I’d decided to try Unwin Hyman, in London, publishers of The Lord of the Rings and a number of other great fantasy novels. They knocked it back, but very kindly, saying that they’d be happy to see a revised version, or anything else I cared to send them. However when I sent a much revised version, months later, they had just been taken over by Harper Collins, who had closed their list.

Various other disappointments followed from the UK and US, sometimes after agonisingly long times – one NY publisher took 13 months to respond. I never sent the same manuscript out twice – I always revised it several more times, and kept working on the other three volumes of the story.

In the early 90s, Australian publishers, particularly Pan Macmillan, began publishing speculative fiction. By this time my story was complete – I’d done about 18 tough drafts of A Shadow on the Glass and even 4 or 5 of the final book, The Way Between the Worlds.

Unfortunately, by the time my manuscript of A Shadow on the Glass arrived, Pan had been burned by a number of failures and were pulling back. They wrote me a nice but painful rejection letter, to the effect that, ‘We agonised about whether to publish your book, but decided not to.’

However they also did me a favour by suggesting I commission Dr Van Ikin, the long-time speculative fiction reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald, to assess the manuscript and provide suggestions for improvement. I did so, followed Van’s many suggestions to the letter and when he looked at the revised version he said, 'You've got it! Send it out.'

By this time (January 1996) Harper Collins had had a big success with Sara Douglass’s Battleaxe, so I sent the mss to them, along with a copy of Van Ikin’s effusive letter. They rejected it, saying they’d be willing to consider a revised version. They also included comments from an unnamed external reviewer who thoroughly disagreed with Van’s assessment, and made a series of what I considered to be ill-informed critical comments about the book.

I didn’t bother to send them a revised version; instead I looked for another publisher. My father-in-law, John Rummery, a former English lecturer who had enjoyed the story, contacted a friend and colleague, John Cohen. John Cohen has an encyclopaedic knowledge of fantasy and for many years had been the editor of Reading Time, the book review journal of the Children’s Book Council of Australia (and he still is).

John loved the book and contacted Nancy Mortimer, then the education publisher at Penguin Australia, who asked to see it. In May 1996 I sent her the huge manuscripts of the first two books – a cardboard box full of paper. After looking the manuscripts over, Nancy agreed and gave them to Kay Ronai, a vastly experienced editor who had also edited some fantasy authors, asking for a book report. Kay loved the story and recommended that Penguin publish it. However she didn’t think they would, because Penguin hadn’t published fantasy for the adult market before, and they would have to commit to 4 very large books.

Kay’s report went to Erica Irving, then the publisher for the Children and Young Adults Department at Penguin. Erica wasn’t sure, and asked Isobelle Carmody, one of their star authors who wrote fantasy for younger readers, to take a look. Isobelle read the first book and said, ‘If you don’t publish this, someone else will.’

That’s how I came to be published.

I signed a contract with Penguin in October 1996 and the four books were published between February 1998 and September 1999. Only 11 years after I started writing, and 9 years after I began sending manuscripts.

The View from the Mirror is still in print in Australia 13 years later, incidentally. And in the UK.

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
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Supanova Brisbane

2011-11-05T10:23:00.002+11:00

I'm off to Supanova shortly and looking forward to it very much, http://www.supanova.com.au/. For those who don't know about Supanova, it's an Aussie popular culture expo where the guests are either:

Stars from various SF and fantasy movies and TV shows. This time they include Val Kilmer (Batman), Christopher Lloyd (Doc from Back to the Future), Colin Morgan (Merlin from the TV series), Billy Boyd (Pippin from Lord of the Rings, pictured) and Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter).
Lots of comic book and graphic artists such as Colin Wilson (Judge Dredd, Star Wars Invasion etc).
Humble authors like myself, plus Marianne de Pierres, Rowena Cory Daniells, Isobelle Carmody (who's launching Vengeance in the Wrestling Ring on Sunday at 1 o'clock), Traci O'Hara and Kylie Chan.

Supanova is a vast, crowded gathering – the last one I went to, in Brisbane last April, had 23,000 visitors in two days.

What will I be doing there? Not much apart from signing books and going to Isobelle's own launch on Saturday afternoon. I'll be on the Dymocks signing table most of the two days, along with my fellow authors. It's a good place to sit and talk, between signings. Since I live in the country, I don't see other authors very often – sometimes I wouldn't talk to another author in person in six months.

It's also a great place to meet fans of my books and sign their books. If you've got a shelf full, bring along as many as you can carry and I'll sign the lot.

Apart from the Vengeance launch, I'll be talking at 2.20 pm on Sunday in the Seminar Room. See you there!

UPDATE, SATURDAY NIGHT, LATE – a very good day, must have been 10 -12,000 people there. Great crowds everywhere and lots of people stopped by to get their books signed.

The great success of the day though was the lovely Isobelle Carmody, who had gigantic queues all day, mainly for her sixth Obernewtyn book, which must be one of the longer running fantasy series in the world. The first book, Obernewtyn, was published in 1987, when Isobelle was still in high school, and has never been out of print in Australia since.

She would have signed as many books today as the other 5 or 6 authors together, and good on her.

For more about me and my books: http://www.ian-irvine.com/
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Mapping Vengeance

2011-11-03T11:31:00.000+11:00

I love maps with a passion. I've got hundreds of them here, plus oodles of atlases and books of ancient and historical maps, geological maps, bathymetric maps, atlases of history. Any fantasy novel that doesn't have at least one map – and some of my books have had pages of them – feels deficient. A fantasy novel without a map has an empty dimension; it's an opportunity wasted.

Having said that, the map from Vengeance is a little sketchy. Surely there's more to the place than this?

Well, yes, there is and will be. A lot more.

Vengeance, Book 1 of The Tainted Realm, is a big story but it takes place in a small area, and this was deliberate. All my Three Worlds books roam over vast areas – continents, in some cases – and people occasionally pop through a portal to briefly rummage around in another world, before retreating to safety, greatly scarred by the experience, ha!

It's the same with most of my Runcible Jones YA fantasy novels, and even in the Grim and Grimmer humorous books for kids. I enjoyed writing those tales, and the long journeys, too, though this time I wanted to do something different. I wanted the focus to be more on places than journeys.

Almost all the action in Vengeance takes place in a few small areas in the centre of the island now called Hightspall, a once great realm now crumbling under its own decadence and a series of natural disasters. These areas are:

Cython, the secret underground realm of the bitter, dispossessed and vengeful Cythonians;
The Seethings, a blistering geothermal plain dotted with boiling mud pools, geysers and poisonous ponds, next to a trio of active volcanoes called The Vomits;
The wrythen's lair at Precipitous Crag; and
Palace Ricinus in Hightspall's capital city, which is called Caulderon, on Lake Fumerous.

Alert readers may notice a passing similarity between Central Hightspall and the central volcanic plateau of the North Island of New Zealand, and they'd be right. My first degree was in geology and I'm still fascinated by volcanoes. Where better to look at them than this part of NZ, which is one of the most volcanically active places on Earth, and the site of more of the most disastrous volcanic eruptions of the past million years than anywhere else, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano. I spent a lot of time studying the geology and geography before creating the map, though it's inspired by the area, not based on it. But I'll talk more about world-building in another post.

The second and third books of The Tainted Realm will be called Rebellion and Justice, respectively, and our much put-upon heroes and ruthless villains will be roaming far more widely. More maps to create.

I can't wait.

If you have any geographical fascinations – or exotic locales you'd love to read about in fantasy – I'd love to hear about them.

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