Dear reader,
I’ve decided to switch this newsletter to being all about Romantasy and change its name to ‘Romanon’s Romantasy Ruse-letter’.
Happy April Fool’s.
Also, Happy Easter Monday (a rare lunar-related coincidence). Last weekend the Western Church celebrated the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the greatest fantasy story ever told, so great that it might actually be true fantasy, as Tolkien might have said.
FANTASY BOOK NEWS (not April Fool’s):
More awards news from the last month…
First, the SFWA’s annual Nebula awards finalist list has been posted. Some really cool stuff in there, including lots of fantasy and awards for game writing.
Of the nominations for best novel, here are the fantasies:
The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)
The Water Outlaws, S.L. Huang (Tordotcom; Solaris UK) ←looks especially cool
Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi (DAW, Gollancz)
Witch King, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)
Second, a new set of librarian-run book awards called the ‘Libbys’ has debuted, and it has a fantasy category (and a romantasy category, naturally!). Here were the fantasy finalists for this year (links are to ‘libby’ pages, because Libbys):
Libby Award Finalists for Best Fantasy:
A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon 🎧
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros 🎧
Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo 🎧
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose 🎧
Witch King by Martha Wells 🎧
How many have you read? I’ve read…none. But two are on my huge TBR list! Maybe three, now!
YOUR FREE INDIE FANTASY EBOOKS FOR THIS MONTH*:
*Note: I’m aware that a couple of newsletters ago these banner links didn’t work because I’d just moved this newsletter over from Mailchimp. Sorry about that. They all work now. Please tap/click away!
MY WRITING NEWS
In terms of my own writing news, my YA superhero novel WEAKLING won a thing! More precisely, it got a ‘top 10 finalist honourable mention’ in the ‘BooksShelf Awards’:
I have no memory of submitting WEAKLING to this contest. It does not fill me with confidence that these people cannot spell the word ‘bookshelf’ and that their website looks horrendously amateurish, however…it’s something! Assuming the judges actually read it, WEAKLING beat a bunch of other books to a top 10 spot! Every little bit of encouragement counts for something…
Also, I’m spending the last of the money I earned for writing CLARENT SAGA: CHRONICLES on getting a professional edit for SAGA OF THE JEWELS VOL. 1 and commissioning a new, professional cover for its free taster short story PRELUDE: THE FINAL BATTLE. One of the advantages of being indie is that you can choose your own cover artists. The draft sketch for the cover from my artist at miblart came back, and I love it! See below.
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING:
Last month I finished SWORDS IN THE MIST (Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser 3, continuing my late sword-and-sorcery education), carried on with a bit more of and gave up on SUFFICIENTLY ADAVANCED MAGIC (perhaps more on that in a future newsletter) and most recently I’ve been reading PALADIN’S GRACE by T. Kingfisher. This is a beautifully written quirky contemporary fantasy (er, and maybe actually a romantasy too…) that deals with themes of faith and duty, and so far it’s excellent.
WHAT I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO:
Now this is a very, very guilty pleasure and a deep cut. Did you ever play Warhammer/Games Workshop as a kid? You may or may not remember that in a previous newsletter I mentioned reading TROLLSLAYER by William King, first in the massive GOTREK AND FELIX series which is set in the old Warhammer World. I recently read the second book SKAVENSLAYER as well, and enjoyed it so much I just wanted to keep going…
I read that the audiobooks are excellent, so I picked up the audiobook of DAEMONSLAYER and, well, they are! Jonathan Keeble gets the narration just right, employing fantastic character accents with exactly the right dose of humour—for example, posh British for Felix the human warrior-poet, a hardy northern for Gotrek the slayer, a thick Scottish accent for mad Dwarf airship engineer Malakai Makaison, eastern-European for the ‘Kislevites’, chittering and squeaking high-pitched voices for the Skaven ratmen, and so on…
I’ve gone on to DRAGONSLAYER now too. These books are not great Shakespearean literature by any means, but they are extremely easy reading/listening as you don’t have to concentrate too hard (great for listening while doing mountains of washing up and housework) and lots of fun, with lots of easter eggs hidden in them for fans of sword and sorcery. Sword and sorcery with a healthy dollop of not-taking-itself-too-seriously! Also they allow someone who was very much into Warhammer as a kid to explore that world again. Recommended, with added nostalgia value!
WHAT I’VE BEEN WATCHING:
Speaking of nostalgia, I’m a big fan of the original 90s X-Men cartoon, so I’ve been waiting a long time for its contemporary continuation ‘X-Men ’97’ to come out on Disney Plus. Now it has, and I’m happy to report that it’s awesome. Watching it makes me feel like a kid again, but it’s also more grown up this time round in a very pleasing way. I would argue that the ‘superhero’ genre is a sub-genre of ‘fantasy’ (as Amazon categorises it too, incidentally), hence my mentioning of this here even though it’s not a book. This show may just motivate me finally to write the sequel to WEAKLING (i.e. the next book in my MIRACLE FORCE series). Recommended!
WHAT JO’S BEEN READING:
Jo finished the KETTY JAY series last month and asked me for another book recommendation, so I suggested to her a book that represents a lacuna in both of our fantasy reading (I sometimes get Jo to check out books that I have been meaning to read to see if they are any good): Scott Lynch’s very famous grimdark adventure tale THE LIES OF LOCKE LAMORA. Scandalously neither of us had ever read this, although we saw Lynch and his wife Elizabeth Bear at a comic-con panel a few years ago. Jo is happy to confirm that this book is absolutely awesome, as most of the readers of this newsletter probably already know, and has gone straight on to the second one. Recommended!
IN OTHER NEWS…
Life isn’t all reading and writing fantasy books (in fact it’s sometimes not very much of that at all, believe it or not), but it is packed full of glory, and one of the best things we did this month was go to Woburn Safari park with the kids, taking advantage of the 6yo’s slightly longer school holidays to have it largely to ourselves! We saw rhinos, lions, a bear, zebra, a red panda, and more, oh my! (Sadly the 6yo’s photos were not quite up to scratch so here’s one from google images instead…) If you have kids, or even if you don’t, and live in the UK, this is a good one. Recommended!
CALL FOR A NARRATOR!
Sadly there is no new SAGA OF THE JEWELS episode going out this month because it introduces a new POV, and I had a new narrator lined up to record the podcast version of it, but unfortunately he can no longer do it. Therefore, I am on the hunt for a new narrator for my fantasy serial podcast! If you are male and would like to read for the POV of the character of Huld the warrior monk, please get in touch with me by comment, direct message, or carrier pigeon.
No previous narrating or recording experience is necessary. You don’t even need to have read or listened to the serial before. This is a podcasted fantasy serial, not a professional audiobook, so you just need to be able to read aloud and have a simple headset or USB mic you would use for Zoom. Once I’ve sorted out a new narrator I will get the next written and audio episode out.
According to my stats there are about 18 people consistently reading the serial and about 29 people consistently listening to it, so you will be enabling the story to continue being narrated for them!
By the way, here is Huld. He’s a deeply disciplined, dedicated warrior monk from the land of Farr. He’s cool in a crisis, he has names for all his martial arts moves, and he’s secretly quite racist, but he has room to grow. There will be quite a lot of his POV in SOTJ season 2 (about 2 hours’ worth), but it can be chunked and recorded on an episode-by-episode basis, so it won’t be too big of a commitment.
Anyway, that’s all from me for this week. TTFN, and please check out the indie fantasy ebook sales copied again below,
-Faenon
Call for a narrator