I’m very excited to announce that The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is going on sale on Nov 18, including my story The Last Free Bear.
I’ve seen the proofs for this book, and let me tell you it looks gorgeous, with fantastic cover art (that you can see above), as well as a collection of stupendous stories for anyone who likes epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and heroic fantasy. It’s well worth your time.
As of a few days ago, Storm Bride is no longer for sale.
I’m not sure what that link is there for. It’s a 404 page where once there was a book. You can click on it if you want, if only to convince yourself that nothing is there for you to buy.
My publisher, upon hearing that I had moved to Romania, decided that they had to terminate my publishing contract, because they only work with U.S. authors. This was not an outcome that I considered likely when I moved here; but here I am, and here my book is not.
But all is not lost.
I am getting the file with the typeset book from the publisher. I’m getting a new cover. And I’m going to re-release the book in December 2015. So it’ll be back, and it’ll have some new features which I can do easily now that I’m publishing it myself, such as a map and a glossary.
Meanwhile, if you’re interested in getting updates on when the book becomes available, you can sign up for my newsletter.
I recently wrote a guest post for SFSignal about Storm Bride and the question of “Strong female characters”. Allow me to quote myself:
I think it was because I read one too many cover blurbs for fantasy and urban fantasy novels with female protagonists. There was a depressing regularity: The leading woman will carry a gun, sword, or other weapon on the cover. She will look at the viewer either alluringly or defiantly. Her voice will be snarky. She will be “tough”. If it’s a more traditional fantasy, she’ll declare her disdain for princessy pursuits and traditional femininity. If it’s a contemporary fantasy, that attitude will be written in her torn jeans, tattoos, and the mysterious (but attractive) scar above her eye.
She’ll be, in other words, a Strong Female Character™.
And then I go on for another 700 words.
I was included in this week’s Mind Meld at SF Signal, about movies which were better than the books that inspired them. Spoilers: I wasn’t very original, as two other people in the mind meld picked the same movie. On the bright side, this probably proves that we’re right.
This was neat! I did an interview with my local radio station, a recording of which is available right here:
It was a lot of fun. The interviewer had actually read some things off of my website, which I found slightly astonishing, and we had a good talk. He said afterwards that he was hoping to get a copy of the book himself!
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which is probably the best fantasy magazine out there right now, just sayin’, is reprinting my story The Judge’s Right Hand as part of their Ceaseless West anthology. The anthology’s contents and cover art are right here, and the anthology also includes one of my favorite BCS stories.
The anthology goes on sale at the end of April… so any day now.
For a while now I’ve been putting up articles at jsbangs.conlang.org which relate to elements of the setting, languages, history, and philosophy behind my published works. I haven’t made a very big deal about it, though, mostly because I wanted to make sure that I had a critical mass of articles before I publicized it, to avoid sending people to an empty site.
Well, I guess it’s full enough, because here you go: more than you wanted to know about Storm Bride and other fantasy works-in-progress. The site is still very incomplete, and I have a dozen TODOs written to myself about topics that I still want to cover. I refrain from writing all of the articles right away, since I suffer from worldbuilder’s disease as it is, and writing encyclopedia articles about my creations sometimes threatens to get in the way of actual stories. But I do get to write the encyclopedia articles at some point. Right now you can see a bunch of articles relating mostly to Storm Bride, including a pretty complete description of the Praseo language, and some details about the Yakhat which never quite made it into the published book.
I intend to trickle articles up onto that site, and I’ll make an announcement here whenever I hit certain milestones. For now, though, feel free to poke around and let me know if there’s anything you particularly like or want to know more about.
I have a mailing list now, which you can use to sign up for updates and release notices from me. This might be a good option for those of you who don’t use RSS to follow the blog, or want less frequent updates.
(This has actually been in place for a few months, but I barely publicized it at all, so I figured I should mention it to blog readers who might not have noticed.)
I have finally completed something that at least a few readers have been clamoring for: a map to accompany Storm Bride.
The map, as you can see, is not actually all that complex. Storm Bride has a relatively simple geography relative to a lot of other fantasy novels, which is why I was okay with not having a map when the book was first released. But a map certainly helps, and gosh it’s pretty. I just want to look at it all day.
I want to give full credit to Robert Altbauer of fantasy-map.net, who created the base for this map. I provided him with an ink outline showing the shorelines and waterways that I wanted, and he created the gorgeous full-color version that you see here. (I did the text, cities, and other markers by myself, because I plan on reusing these maps for a whole bunch of different purposes, and text labeling is relatively simple.) If you check out his site, you can see a lot more examples of his work, which is uniformly high quality, and definitely worth a peek if you love fantasy cartography.
This Friday, April 10, I’ll be doing a signing from 2-4pm at Victor Lundeen’s, an indie bookstore near where I live. This place has been open for 100 years, and it’s really lovely.
I hope to see everyone there.
J.S. Bangs 