Anarya’s Secret – Page 2

Snippets: Earthdawn Sale; Readings and Launches; Valley Micropress; Likeable Things

Posted on August 24, 2008

Earthdawn 15th Anniversary Sale

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the roleplaying game Earthdawn. To mark the occasion, publishers RedBrick have discounted the prices of Earthdawn products until 4 September, so you can get my novel Anarya’s Secret for a little bit less until then (in hardback, paperback, or e-book via RPGNow or DriveThru).

Readings and Launches

From the social pages: here in Wellington, it’s been the season of readings, launches, and both combined. I wasn’t able to make the launch of Sue Orr’s Etiquette for a Dinner Party: Short Stories, but did attend the Wellington launch of AUP New Poets 3 – Wellingtonian Janis Freegard is one of the three poets included in this volume, together with Katherine Liddy and Reihana Robinson, and Janis ran an enjoyable launch at Mighty Mighty.

I was also an apologetic no-show at the first instalment of the annual Winter Readings Series, which featured the launch of three books by Mark Pirie, including Slips which I reviewed a while back. There’s an excellent report on Helen Rickerby’s blog.

I’ll be there next week, though, when Helen’s new book of poetry My Iron Spine is launched with Harvey Molloy MC’ing, and the following week sees the launch of Michael O’Leary’s Paneta Street.

I’ve had a sneak peek at My Iron Spine, and it’s excellent.

And the launches don’t stop there: Harvey Molloy’s Moonshot is not far away from lift-off!

(Enough capital-centrism: there’s lots of readings and poetry events right round the country, such as Kay McKenzie Cooke reports on from Dunedin.)

Valley Micropress

I took part recently in a Montana Poetry Day event in Upper Hutt, and organiser Tony Chad kindly sent me a copy of the “Poetry Olympics” booklet arising from the event, and also a copy of the magazine he edits, Valley Micropress. This is a monthly – that’s right, monthly – poetry magazine which Tony produces. Subscriptions cost NZ $30 per annum, and contributions are mainly from subscribers, but also include other work at the editor’s discretion. If you’d like to know more, please email Tony, tony.chad (at) clear.net.nz

Likeable Things: Second Instalment

maps, a poem by Jill Jones

The Bibliophilia shop, which sells the handmade books of Meliors Simms

Blackmail Press 22

Strange Horizons

Eating Greengages, a beautiful piece of writing by Fionnaigh McKenzie.

A few things I’ve learned about writing poetry, a very useful and interesting blog post by Janis Freegard.

New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors

Posted on August 10, 2008

My fantasy novel Anarya’s Secret, set in the universe of the Earthdawn roleplaying game, was on the ballot for Best Adult Novel at the 2008 Sir Julius Vogel Awards, New Zealand’s local equivalent of the Hugo Awards. The award was won by Russell Kirkpatrick’s novel Path of Revenge, and I was impressed by the quality and range of the novels and other works up for awards, and the number of them that had found international publication.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand (SFFANZ) has provided a measure of this upsurge in New Zealand science fiction and fantasy by listing books in the field by New Zealand authors. The listing was based on one created by Jack Ross, subsequently updated by Alan Robson.

Although the listing (split into A-L and M-Z) is short on bibliographic detail in places, it does show that a lot more New Zealanders have successfully written science fiction and fantasy than is commonly assumed by those outside – or inside – the field.

There’s more to come, too – for instance Helen Lowe’s forthcoming YA fantasy novel Thornspell, about to be published in the US, and her subsequent fantasy tetralogy for adults, Wall of Night. Although it has flown mostly under the radar so far, New Zealand science fiction and fantasy is becoming hard to ignore.

UPDATE: There’s more about Helen and her new book on the HarperCollins (Eos) blog.

Earthdawn News: A New Novel, A New System

Posted on July 16, 2008

Two quick items of Earthdawn news:

My Earthdawn novel Anarya’s Secret has become the head of a dynasty (well, a line of books, anyway). RedBrick has now released a second Earthdawn novel, Dark Shadows of Yesterday, to join Anarya’s Secret.

Also, Redbrick and Wizards of the Coast have jointly announced a tie-up between Earthdawn and the mother and father of all roleplaying games, Dungeons and Dragons: Earthdawn Age of Legend Announced for D&D Fourth Edition.

Things are happening in Barsaive!

How It Came To Pass: Transported

Posted on April 9, 2008

I posted earlier about the origins of my Earthdawn novel, Anarya’s Secret. That started with a call from a RedBrick staff member who’d seen some of the writing linked from my website and thought I might be the person to write an Earthdawn novel for them.

The origins of Transported are a little similar, but more convoluted. In early 2007, I got an email message from Fiona Farrell, appointed to edit Random House New Zealand’s Best New Zealand Fiction 4 anthology, to say that she had seen my story A Short History of the 20th Century, With Fries online in Flashquake and enjoyed it. Did I have any stories in the 3000-5000 word range, previously unpublished in book form, that I’d like to submit for BNZF4? I thought this offer over for 1.2 seconds, said I did, and submitted four stories, from which Fiona Farrell chose “Win a Day with Mikhail Gorbachev!” for the anthology.

That was rather nice. Striking while the iron was hot while not letting the grass grow under my feet, I mentioned to Harriet Allan of Random House that I was putting together the manuscript of my second collection of short stories (following 2001’s Extreme Weather Events), and would she be interested in seeing it? She replied that she would. After we did some reordering and I added a couple of new stories, the deal was sealed, and my second short story collection, Transported, came into being. With the aid of excellent editor Claire Gummer, the manuscript was kneaded into shape

I recently learned that Transported will be published on the 6th of June, and there’s preliminary publicity up on the Random House NZ website. This is my first book to be published by a major publisher. Before the process started, I had a little trepidation about it – would I be chewed up and spat out by the giant corporate machine? So far, however, everyone at Random House has been an absolute pleasure to deal with, and I’m looking forward with no little excitement to launch day and beyond. I’ll keep you posted!

Sir Julius Vogel Award goes to “Path of Revenge”

Posted on March 27, 2008

My novel Anarya’s Secret didn’t win the Best Adult Novel category in the 2008 Sir Julius Vogel Awards. In a strong field, the winner was Russell Kirkpatrick’s Path of Revenge.

It would have been nice to win, but I was most impressed by the quality of the field, not just in the Best Adult Novel category but throughout the categories. It’s a very good sign that New Zealand speculative fiction writers are being so widely published.

The Awards were presented at Conjunction, the 2008 New Zealand National Science Fiction Convention, which was held at Easter in Wellington. I attended the Saturday of Conjunction as well as the awards ceremony on the Sunday evening. It was my first New Zealand SF convention for a while, and I was impressed with what I saw: attendance seemed to be good, and on the Saturday, I attended a particularly interesting panel on science fiction and fantasy appropriate for different age groups – or, in other words, what books are suitable at what ages to introduce children to science fiction and fantasy. “What can they read after Harry Potter” was one of the topics discussed.

I’ve now been nominated for a Sir Julius Vogel Award three times: I’ve been a runner-up twice, and on the other occasion, my book (in that case, my first short story collection, Extreme Weather Events) was the only book nominated in its category, and thus ineligible for an award. I guess I’ll just have to keep writing science fiction and fantasy until I win one – which might, of course, set me up for a very long career.

Reviews Roundup

Posted on March 24, 2008

I posted a while back on the first two reviews of my poetry collection All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens. Several more reviews have now come in, and my fantasy novel Anarya’s Secret has received its first review, which you can read in the Earthdawn Live Journal.

All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens reviews

In the New Zealand Herald’s Canvas magazine on 8 March, Graham Brazier gave favourable reviews to both All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens and Johanna Aitchison’s A Long Girl Ago. Despite insisting on describing me as a young poet (well, I look young, but I have this really dodgy portrait hanging in the attic), Graham said some very nice things about the book, describing it as a standout among the recent flood of local poetry publications, and saying “each poem stands on its own merit, a polar opposite of its predecessor”. Given that Graham is the lead singer of New Zealand band Hello Sailor, it’s perhaps not surprising that he draws particular attention to “New Live Dates”, my poem about an aging rock star strutting his stuff one more time.

In Poetry New Zealand 36, Owen Bullock describes the book as “a second collection from this wry and insightful Wellington poet”. He focuses on those poems in the book which incorporate some reference to the rich and famous, such as “Fitness” and “Oprah Relents”, saying that “the results can produce a zen-like, frozen look at the ridiculous in life”.

In Bravado 12, Michael Lee is kind enough to say that the last line of the opening poem in the book, “Elfland”, makes his scalp tingle.He also notes the varied subject matter, and gives some extracts from his favourite poems in the book, concluding by saying that the book “gives us Tim Jones’s lively, poet’s mind”.

In the March issue of a fine line, the New Zealand Poetry Society newsletter, Joanna Preston is less keen: she calls the collection “uneven”, and particularly dislikes “Oprah Relents”. On the other hand, she does like “First Light” and several other poems, so it’s not all bad news.

So, three very good reviews and one less good one: that’s not too bad a ratio.

I’ll add links under “Sample Poems” on the left to those of the poems mentioned in this post that are available online. And here’s “Oprah Relents” – see what you think.

Oprah Relents

Oprah relents
allowing us food and water.

Her guards look on
as we wash off the grime.

The symphony of severed heads
demands a new movement.

In fifteen minutes
we go live.

This poem was first published in the New Zealand Listener, 2 July 2005, p. 42, and republished in All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens.

How It Came to Pass: Anarya’s Secret

Posted on March 7, 2008

Anarya’s Secret began with an email message in late 2005. It was from Richard Vowles of RedBrick Limited. He explained that RedBrick had recently taken over the rights to the “classic” version of fantasy roleplaying game Earthdawn from its American parent company, and were looking for someone to write a novel set in that universe. They had found my website, and thought I might be their man. Would I be interested?

At first I wasn’t sure. It had been many years since I had done any gaming. (I was very fond of Runequest – the first edition, set in Glorantha – and had played a little D&D as well.) I had never played Earthdawn, and was worried that this would lead to me inadvertently breaking the rules of the world. What’s more, novels set in gaming universes didn’t have a universally high reputation.

On the other hand, I’d greatly enjoyed many of the Shadowrun novels produced by FASA, especially those written by Nigel D. Findley, and my interest was piqued when I found out that Earthdawn is set in the same universe as Shadowrun, except that Shadowrun takes place in the future and Earthdawn in the remote past.

And just as I wasn’t yet sure that this was a project I wanted to take on, so RedBrick had to be sure that I could do a good job of an Earthdawn novel. So we agreed that I’d write and send in the first few chapters, and we’d see how both parties felt after that.

By the time I’d written the Prologue and Chapters 1 and 2, I was hooked. I had a protagonist, a naive but well-meaning young man called Kendik Dezelek. I had got him in over his head with some dubious new associates, the Turgut brothers. I had taken them to the mouth of an ancient, long-abandoned stronghold. And someone had emerged from the stronghold to meet them – someone with a secret.

Earthdawn is set in a world in which, though magic, the human race has split into many branches – some familiar from mythology (orks, trolls, dwarves), others not. Perhaps the most alien are the lizard-like t’skrang, and I decided that they would play a crucial role in the story. With that decision, the general outline of the rest of the novel fell into place.

So I sent in my few chapters and waited to see what RedBrick would say. They said yes, and I was away. Kendik Dezelek, Anarya Chezarin – the woman with a secret – and the Turgut brothers left the mouth of the ancient stronghold, Kaer Volost, and went on their way. Adventure, as they say, lay in wait. So did guards, wizards, petty tyrants, and t’skrang with a whole slew of hidden agendas. And if you play Earthdawn, you’ll have some idea what I mean when I say that the Scourge has never quite ended.

I broke the odd rule in my early drafts, but Carsten Damm, my excellent editor, was there to point out my transgressions and suggest creative solutions. With his help, I had a lot of fun writing Anarya’s Secret. I hope you’ll find it a lot of fun (and a lot of shock, surprise and excitement) to read.

Anarya’s Secret is available in hardback, paperback, and e-book formats.

Anarya’s Secret on ballot for Sir Julius Vogel Awards

Posted on February 10, 2008

My novel Anarya’s Secret is on the ballot for Best Adult Novel in the 2008 Sir Julius Vogel Awards, the New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards, which will be voted on by the members of Conjunction.

The full list of nominees is available online. It’s great news for science fiction and fantasy in New Zealand that so many works are eligible this year.

Anarya’s Secret Published

Posted on December 18, 2007

My fantasy novel Anarya’s Secret: An Earthdawn Novel was published yesterday. I’ll put up more information about it soon, but in the meantime, you can see more details about the book on the Earthdawn site. It’s available in e-book, paperback, and hardback formats.

You can now read the novel’s Prologue online.

In late 2005, shortly after New Zealand company RedBrick took over the Earthdawn licence from its American originators, they approached me to write a novel set in the Earthdawn universe. And that’s what I set out to do. My hope is that Anarya’s Secret will work equally well as a novel for those who play the game, and for those who’ve never heard of it before. You don’t need to have played Earthdawn to enjoy this book.