This past year has been hectic, so this post is more than belated.
First of all, shiny awards! Icefall won the Aurealis Best Science Fiction Novella Award for 2018, while my story Pinion (published in Aurum) won the short fiction category of the Norma K Hemming Award.
Icefall has also been reprinted! You can find it in The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 3 (and seriously, go and check out that TOC!). This anthology is currently available in paperback and ebook, and audio is coming soon.
Over the last six months, I have written exactly one story. To be precise, I have rewritten this story – I initially worked on This Silent Sea over the last span of time before my daughter was born last year, at which time it was a short story (and for me, mostly an exercise in trying to write a story to a limited word count).
The last few months of my pregnancy were hard, and the first few months of my daughter’s life were harder (I do not do well, either physically or mentally, with the sleep deprivation that goes with having a newborn). When an opportunity came up for me to publish something in Review of Australian Fiction, I initially hesitated. I wasn’t coping well. I was exhausted, I was dealing with postnatal depression and another baby who has reflux and wasn’t a good sleeper. But I said yes, because I knew I had This Silent Sea waiting there ready, and all I had to do was read over it and send it in. Simple.
Except apparently even in an exhausted state, my brain doesn’t work like that. I started tweaking, and I started expanding. Eventually I gave in and just rewrote the whole thing, expanding it from a short story to a novelette. I got feedback from beta readers, and with the help of my husband and mother, I snatched time as much as I could, and I rewrote and I rewrote.
It wasn’t a sane decision. By the end of it, when I sent in the story (almost literally at the last minute), I was worn too thin, but I was proud of what I’d written.
This Silent Sea was shortlisted for an Aurealis Award (which it didn’t win, but honestly, I can’t complain about losing to Tansy Rayner Roberts, and if you haven’t read her novella, Girl Reporter, which did win that category, you should do so, for it is most excellent). It did win the 2018 Tin Duck Award for Best Western Australian professional short written work.
I was organised with a thank you speech for the Aurealis Awards, but not for the Tin Ducks, but thankfully Russell Farr of Ticonderoga Press accepted the award for me and conveyed my thanks (and thank you to him for accepting and delivering the award, and to everyone who coted). For posterity, I want to paste the speech I sent in for the Aurealis Awards here, because good people need to be acknowledged and it is just as relevant to the Tin Ducks.
The original incarnation of this story was written while I was heavily pregnant with my daughter, and was influenced heavily by that state of waiting, feeling her moving and turning in her own silent sea. The story was later expanded and further developed after Emily had entered the world, written in a fevered haze of sleeplessness, exhaustion and postnatal depression and as a result, has been one of the most difficult things I have ever worked on. Just having this story shortlisted for an Aurealis Award is a huge thing, and winning is something else entirely. Thanks have to go primarily to my mother and husband and son, all of whom pitched in to help while I was madly working on the expansion of the story. Thanks also to Matthew Lamb and Phil Crowley at the Review of Australian Fiction for publishing This Silent Sea, and to Deborah Biancotti, with whom I shared the issue and whose insightful editing and suggestions made it so much better than it was. Thanks also to Pia van Ravestein for being the best critique partner anyone could hope for, and to Anica Boulanger-Mashberg, copy editor for RAF who went above and beyond. I’d also like to acknowledge the judging panel and everyone involved with the Aurealis Awards, most especially Tehani, whose tireless work is so much appreciated. I’d like to dedicate this win to my son Liam and daughter Emily. May the stars always shine on them.
I am very excited to be able to announce that my story, The Flowers That Bloom Where Blood Touches Earth (originally published in Bloodlines, edited by Amanda Pillar) will be reprinted in The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2015, edited by Talie Helene and Liz Grzyb forthcoming from Ticonderoga Publications.
The full TOC:
The collection will be available in hardcover, paperback and ebook in February/March 2017. You can preorder the paperback and hardcover at indiebooksonline.
Peter M. Ball’s first published SF story appeared in Dreaming Again back in 2007, and since then his short fiction has appeared in publications such as Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Interfictions II, Eclipse Four, Shimmer, and Years Best SF 15. He’s the author of five novellas, the convenor of the biennial GenreCon writer’s conference, and spends far too much time tweeting about Conan and pro-wrestling. He lives in Brisbane, and can be found online atwww.petermball.com and on twitter @petermball.
Your most recent work has been a series of three novellas, Exile, Frost and Crusade, collected as the Flotsam trilogy. Can you tell us something about these novellas, and the process of writing them and having them published?
Flotsam got its start when I was doing my honours degree on the Gold Coast and spending two years examining the connection between poetics and place. The Gold Coast is a damned weird place to live, particularly if you’re not interested in the beach, and it feels very temporary. People are constantly moving to and from the city – no-one ever seemed to be from the Gold Coast, originally – and the tourist strip is constantly rebuilding itself.
And yet, when you live there long-term, you discover all these small communities that exist beneath that. There was a surprisingly engaged arts community on the Gold Coast, setting up performance venues and exhibitions in the industrial states and old buildings. Very chaotic, very close-knit, and easily overlooked if you walked past the venues without knowing what was there.
The similarities between those communities and the kind of secret, supernatural communities that tend to exist in most urban fantasy novels wasn’t lost on me, and it occurred to me that the Gold Coast would be the ideal place to live if you were a vampire or a demon or a long-forgotten god looking for a place to hide out. This was in 2003 or so, long before I’d ever thought about writing speculative fiction, but I put down a couple of hundred words about Norse gods hiding out on the Coast in an effort to avoid Ragnarök and promptly did nothing with it.
Eight years later, I dug those notes out and rebuilt the idea into a serialised version of Flotsam that appeared at the Edge of Propinquity. And, literally the day the editor Jennifer Brozek said “yes, we’ like the pitch,” things started to go wrong: my dad had a heart attack; my work situation changed dramatically; my health was slowly deteriorating for reasons I wouldn’t understand until 2015. And so, the year that I thought I’d spend with a certain amount of writing time suddenly became quite constrained. I struggled with the deadlines, again and again, which frustrated me to no end. None of the stories were as well-connected as I’d wanted them to be, when I started the pitch, and I was haunted by the idea that I could have done better.
So, when Jennifer started Apocalypse Ink and asked if I’d be interested in redoing the series as a novella trilogy, I leapt at the chance to revisit the story and fix all the things that had bugged me the first time around. The result is a very different story, with a much stronger film-noir influence, but it’s much closer to the story I’d hoped to write the first time around.
You have written several novellas, as well as many pieces of short fiction. Do you prefer shorter formats over longer length works? Do you feel like the novella is a type of work that has become more popular in speculative fiction over the last few years, and do you have any thoughts on why that could be?
I’m not sure the novella was ever unpopular in speculative fiction – the history of speculative fiction is filled with brilliant novelettes, novellas, and short novels that are part of the common language of the genre. All that’s changed is where we’re seeing those works published, and that’s largely representative of the way publishing itself is changing. Ebooks and print on demand technology changes the business model, which means its slightly more viable to publish a novella as a stand-alone product rather than packaging it in collection or magazine. Suddenly we’re more conscious of that cool novella I just read, rather than that cool longer story in that book of stories I really enjoyed.
But I do love the novella and the novelette as a form, and have done before I ever knew the words to describe them. They walk a balancing act between the brevity of a short story and the narrative complexity of a novel, and that always appeals to me as both a reader and a writer. The novella also allows for the opportunity to take chances with style and content – I still remember the excitement of reading Dirk Flinthart’s crime novella, Brotherly Love, for the first time when I was eighteen, and it was a near-perfect book in terms of delivering an off-beat set of concepts in a short, sharp package.
What can we expect from you in the near future?
My next major project isn’t fiction based – at the moment I’m in the midst of planning for the next GenreCon, which will take place in late 2017. There are very few things I enjoy as much as writing, but convening the first three GenreCons and creating a space for writers to talk about the business and craft of what they do, is one of the most satisfying gigs I’ve ever had.
What Australian work have you loved recently?
I think I mentioned my fierce love of Anne Gracie’s regency novels in the last snapshot, and that hasn’t changed. Except now, when I go to an SF con, I spend a lot more time gathered together with the other Gracie fans in the corner of the bar, getting far nerdier about the romance genre than I ever was about SF. The Summer Bride has just come out, and I am ridiculously excited about this book.
Sticking with the romance theme, I’m also a huge fan of the first book in Kylie Scott’s Dive-Bar series, Dirty. I have learned I cannot start a Scott book after ten o’clock at night, because I will just keep reading until it’s six AM and the sun is coming up.
On the speculative fiction front, my I’ve been rapidly won over by Sean William’s Jump, Gary Kemble’s Bad Blood, and Kate Forsyth’s The Rebirth of Rapunzel.
Which author (living or dead) would you most like to sit next to on a long plane trip and why?
Oh, god, no-one. I am a terrible person to sit next to on long flights, and I wouldn’t wish that on any writer. Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the writers I really admire were quite abominable human beings to be around for any length of time. Can you imagine being stuck on a long-distance flight with a drunk Raymond Chandler, or an incredibly pithy Oscar Wilde just cutting loose on those around him?
That said, I’d quite like to have a long chat with Joe Lonsdale about his work, after working my way through his short story collections earlier this year. He seems to drift effortlessly between genres, has an incredible sense of precision in terms of his narrative voice, and there’s always something pleasingly off-beat about his work. And there are any number of writer-friends I don’t get to see all that often, who I’d leap at the chance to catch up with…
This interview is cross-posted to the 2016 Snapshot blog, along with all the other Snapshot interviews.
Amanda Pillar is an award-winning editor and author who lives in Victoria, Australia, with her husband and two cats, Saxon and Lilith.
and different levels of ableness. Billie (one of the main characters) came to me with her disability – a broken and badly healed hip caused by physical trauma.This interview is cross-posted to the 2016 Snapshot blog, along with all the other Snapshot interviews. Over the past year or so, you’ve been spending a lot of time reading through novels which have been shortlisted for awards and reviewing them. How has the experience of that been? Is there anything you’ve seen that the works tend to have in common? Have you come across works that you’ve been surprised to not see on awards shortlists?
Because my tastes are eclectic I have trouble deciding on the next thing to watch or read. As a result I come up with these insane little projects that, by their nature, remove the need to choose. Cue awards lists. Why should I worry about what to read next when there’s so many genre awards out there willing to do all the work for me. It’s a win / win proposition. I avoid the anxiety of choosing while at the same time reading those novels purported to be the best genre and literary fiction over a given year.
And last year it was fun reading through more than 20 shortlists. I can’t say I gained any great understanding of the type of book that was being nominated, there was no commonality that leapt up and slapped me in the face, but I was exposed to works and ideas I wouldn’t have bothered with in the past. There’s no way I would have picked up Ali Smith’s How To Be Both or Rabih Alameddine’s, An Unnecessary Woman or Karen E Bender’s short story collection Refund if not for my slavish devotion to shortlists. Note the literary bias. If there’s one thing that became clear over 2015 it’s that my tastes have drifted away from core genre. It’s not that I’ve jettisoned genre fiction, but a recognition that I’d rather read books nominated for a Shirley Jackson or Kitschie Award then a Hugo or a Nebula.
This year, though, I made the decision to appreciably cut down the number of shortlists. I realised that while it did reduce my anxiety levels to have other people choose books for me, I didn’t have time to read those handful of novels that I wanted to read. So this year I’ve halved the number of shortlists and I’ll probably cull a few more next year.
I was surprised that that Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson didn’t feature on more lists. I was certain it would get a Nebula nod. And I was also surprised that Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings wasn’t nominated for a World Fantasy Award this year. It’s a fantastic book and I’m eagerly looking forward to the sequel due out in a couple of months.
You and Kirstyn McDermott are the co-hosts of The Writer and the Critic podcast, which has also recently launched a Patreon campaign. How has the experience been of creating such a podcast? Do you have any advice for people who want to start their own podcasts or Patreon campaigns?
The experience of creating the podcast has been wonderful, mostly because Kirstyn does all the work. She edits and produces the podcast, she writes the show notes and she also organised the Patreon campaign. The biggest thing I have to do, other than read the books and sound vaguely coherent about them while we’re recording, is make the 135 kilometre trip from my house to hers. It’s now been more than five years and 50 episodes and it’s been a total blast.
Given how little I do I feel a bit silly providing advice. I’m not sure I’d be brave enough, like a Terry Frost, to podcast on my own. So if you have zero technical knowledge but a burning need to tell the world about… I don’t know… your love for all things Rutger Hauer, then find someone with the same Rutger loving passion and then get them to do all the work.
What can we expect from you in the future?
In terms of podcasting, Writer and the Critic will continue for the foreseeable future, which, for our Patreon fans, is probably a relief.
And after a medium-ish hiatus Shooting The Poo – the podcast I host with Dave Hoskin and Mitch – will be back with all new episodes. We have at least three… or is it four… in the can.
Finally, in a bid to force me to read books published this year Jonathan Strahan, James Bradley and I (with sometimes guest Gary K. Wolfe and Nike Sulway) started the Coode Street Roundtable in January. We review one new release novel per episode.
Which Australian work have you loved recently?
A Single Stone by Meg McKinlay is astonishingly good.
Which author (living or dead) would you most like to sit next to on a long plane trip and why?
It has to be Stephen King. I know, I know… boring and predictable, but before Stephen King all I really read was Doctor Who novelisations (Terrance Dicks would be second on my list of people to sit next to). King didn’t just open me up to a world of horror and dark fantasy but also for a deep love of reading – no matter the genre.
This interview is cross-posted to the 2016 Snapshot blog, along with all the other Snapshot interviews.
Your most recent novel, Day Boy, won Aurealis Awards for Best Horror Novel and Best Fantasy Novel. Can you tell us something about the process of writing that novel and having it published? How did it feel to collect two best novel awards for it?
Most of my writing takes a long time, there’s plenty of missteps and stumbles. And Day Boy was no exception. It started as a short story published in 2008 (and shortlisted for best horror short story in the Aurealis Awards) and I always felt that it had enough to be become a novel – even though I thought it worked pretty well as a short, I like stories that leave plenty of space, and questions unanswered. But it took me nearly six years – and many false starts – to find the shape of that novel. In my defence I also published five novels in that time.
I’ve pretty much come around to the idea that, in most cases, if I come up with something worth writing, regardless of the length, it’s going to take a while. I get a feeling with most of my work that it will be finished at some stage – I just never know when that will be (though about seven years for a novel seems about right). Luckily, I work of lots of things at once.
The next three books I’d like to see published (if the winds of publishing are blowing my way) are all at least four years old. I just kick off with a story and keep swimming until I reach the end of the pool – some of those pools are just very, very long.
Day Boy meant a lot to me. It’s a little darker and more serious than my earlier work, maybe a little closer to my short stories, so I was delighted that it won two best novel awards. If it’s going to be the only time I ever win an award for a book – which it probably will be – then I am very happy that it is that one.
You’ve had novels published with a several publishers, both overseas and Australian publishers. Has the experience of publishing with an Australian publisher differed when compared to an overseas publisher? Do you have any advice for authors seeking to publish novels, with either Australian or foreign publishers?
I’ve enjoyed all my experiences with publishers. I was very lucky with Orbit (on the Death Works Books) to work with some wonderful and thorough editorial folk. My publisher at Orbit Australia Bernadette Foley was a delight, she pushed me with a clear eye and a great sense of story and I respond very well to that kind of editorial. I found my major issue with Angry Robot who published Roil and Night’s Engines was simply the distance and, I think, I kind of had a bit of melt down – I don’t think those books were as good as they could have been, but that’s my fault entirely – I was basically putting one series down and picking up another without any real break while teaching and bookselling, and, while some people thrive in that environment, I really didn’t. I may multi-task my stories, but I do it slowly. I hit my deadlines but the work suffered.
Text has been wonderful too, Mandy Brett is simply a great editor – who pushed me, and helped me get the best book I could write. I found the editorial process on Day Boy a delight, and a challenge – but in the best way. Honestly, my experiences with publishers has always been pretty good – maybe I’m just lucky.
As for advice, everyone’s experience of publishing is different. And, sometimes you don’t get a choice who will publish your book. Try and write the best book you can, and then think about who will help you deliver that book in the best possible way. Don’t overcommit – which is very hard. If you can actually afford to make it over to the country that is publishing your book that is a very good thing too – I’ve never been able to, but I suspect that it may have helped – or maybe not.
Also, the moment you get a bite from a publisher (if not before) find yourself a damn good agent. Publishing is a pretty tough gig (so is writing, but that you can control) it pays to have someone on your side, working in your interest
Can we expect any work from you in the near future?
I’m still working on a draft of a novel called The Stone Road, I doubt it’ll see the light of day for another year or two, by which time I should have a new draft of a book called The House in Arbitrary finished too, and possibly a new Death Works novel – which has been sitting in MS form for a few years.
There are several novels stacked behind them, and a good dozen short stories. But I suspect I am going to be quiet for a while. Fortunately for me the delight is in the writing. The world doesn’t need another novel by me; I just need to write them.
What Australian work have you loved recently?
I’ve enjoyed Gary Kemble’s Harry Hendrick’s books – Bad Blood is the latest. Orphancorp by Marlee Jane Ward was great too. I’m so behind on my reading in the scene, but I’m looking forward to catching up on Angela Slatter, Ben Peek and Rjurick Davidson’s novels too.
Which author (living or dead) would you most like to sit next to on a long plane trip and why?
Ursula Le Guin, I wouldn’t even say a word. I just think we have been so lucky to have her in the world (and to still have her).
In fact, I don’t know if I would even want that. Sometimes it’s best to leave your heroes perfect and on the page. The older I get the less I really want to meet the authors I admire, I prefer their words where they should be. The transporting moment is always in the book; meeting them on a long plane trip wouldn’t bring out the best in either them or me.
Hmm, that really is a terrible sort of answer.
This interview is cross-posted to the 2016 Snapshot blog, along with all the other Snapshot interviews.
Jack Bridges publishes queer romance as Laney Cairo, and speculative fiction under his own name. He is best known for his medical romance novel, Bad Case of Loving You (written as Laney Cairo), which romps through raunchy sex, socialised medicine and the impacts of industrial action in the health care industry. For his day job, Jack teaches research methodology to university students. Jack can be found at www.jacklanebridges.com and www.laneycairo.com Congratulations on your Aurealis Awards short listing for Blood and Ink (for Best Science Fiction Novella). Would you like to share some of the inspiration for Blood and Ink, and how did it feel to be shortlisted for the award?
Thank you!
The settings for Blood and Ink are all local places I know well. The story sparked for me after walking through Jorgensen Park in 
Kalamunda, where smooth grey granite boulders lift up out of the red gravel soil and through the bushland. The boulders feel alive, when touched, as though they are breathing and moving, only on a timescale too huge for humans to notice. That was the initial ‘what if?’ forBlood and Ink, and I wrote the draft of the first section of the story standing up at a counter in the SF bookstore I used to work at. The story grew with time, acquiring new chapters, but it stayed firmly fixed in places I knew.
I was delighted to be short-listed for an Aurealis! Especially in the Science Fiction Novella category! I knew Blood and Ink was solid, but getting this kind of validation from a panel of judges was exhilarating. As primarily a romance writer, I’ve always felt a bit like my writing wasn’t quite as serious or as respectable as Real Science Fiction (implied scare quotes and all), and an Aurealis short-listing means I’m definitely respectable.
You write under two names, as Jack Bridges and Laney Cairo. You are also open about being a transgender writer. How do you feel that the exploration of the world of speculative fiction and the world of being transgender intersect? Do you feel that writing speculative fiction has been an aid in the your own journey to your identity?
Oddly, perhaps, it’s not been spec fic writing that has been an important part of my identity journey, but romance writing. There’s an entire decade of my life, at least, where the keyboard and screen have been the way I tested out the possibilities of how I might live. And the possibilities I explored through writing weren’t fantastic or technological, necessarily, but relationship-based.
I can see strong connections between transhumanism and being trans*. Being trans* is punitively expensive, in more than cash. It has health costs and career costs and personal costs. If I’m willing to give informed consent to these costs and go ahead and modify my body radically in order to be happy, or at least, less sad, then other people also get to change their physical form too, in all sorts of ways that are recreational or functional or experimental, in pursuit of more efficient function, or longer life, or more fun. And maybe those changes are going to be so profound that they stop being human.
What are your plans for future works?
What Australian work have you loved recently?
For published work, I’m currently reading Newt’s Emerald, by Garth Nix, and it’s making me ridiculously happy by meeting both my Regency romance needs and being a delightful fantasy adventure.
Which author (living or dead) would you most like to sit next to on a long plane trip and why?
Elizabeth Fitzgerald is a freelance editor and owner of Earl Grey Editing. She runs a book blog (www.earlgreyediting.com.au/
In terms of the speculative fiction scene in Australia, you have your fingers in several pies – you’re a writer, you’ve edited anthologies, you offer an editing service, you work on collating links regularly of interest to writers, readers and publishers, and you are a reviewer. What was it that drew to you all of these different pursuits? Do you find that all of these different facets of your career work together harmoniously, or can it be difficult to, say, be both an editor and a writer?
I tend to view all these different activities as part of the same thing: my abiding love for books. For the most part, I find they work well together. Reviewing helps me as a writer to remain aware of current trends in publishing and offers great opportunities to network with authors and publishers. Likewise, my writer self would be collating links anyway by gathering resources on writing and looking out for publishing opportunities. Offering them to readers of my blog works on a selfish level by drawing in more traffic while also helping to support the community.
There are a couple of places where these facets work against each other to the detriment of my writing. The first is my inner editor and critic make it increasingly difficult to write. I take forever, overthink everything and rarely manage to finish anything. I recently had the opportunity to write some material for Wyrd Games’ role-playing game Through the Breach. It was pure world-building, a sort of creative non-fiction. I was surprised to find it easier than story writing. I think there were a few reasons for this: the deadline meant I had no time to overthink things; I was working within strict parameters which kept me focussed; and the format made me slightly less concerned with writing style.
The other problem with having all these difference facets is time. It’s a lot to juggle. Anything connected to other people or my professional persona gets priority, which generally puts writing last.
However, I love doing all of it and especially enjoy promoting Australian books to an international audience.
As someone who writes, works as an editor and reviews books, what are your opinions on authors who also review books? Would you like to see more authors reviewing books, or do you feel that it’s something that authors should stay away from?
I don’t see a problem with authors reviewing books, provided they approach the practice sensibly and sensitively. Yes, authors may come with biases—particularly in relation to friends and contacts in the industry or to aspects of storytelling. But reviewers and book bloggers have their own biases, for example favourite authors and tropes they hate.
The key thing about reviewing is that it works best through transparency. A good reviewer (no matter their background) will state these biases so that the reader can figure out how to interpret the review. This means explaining how I acquired the book and my connection to the author or publisher, where applicable. It also means stating where plot or character elements didn’t work for me; I might not enjoy love triangles, but other readers adore them.
I’ve not had any really negative experiences of reviewing books where I’ve known one or more of the contributors. However, I’m aware it can be a difficult line to walk. On one hand, I strongly believe I have an allegiance to the reader. On the other hand, I’m also aware that my reviews could potentially impact on my relationships with other people in the industry. I try to be as fair and as transparent as possible. I won’t shy away from being critical (though it sometimes makes me feel a bit guilty if I know the author). Having said that, I’m not a fan of scathing reviews, be they from other authors or reviewers. If I can’t find at least one good thing—however small—about a book, I won’t review it.
It can be tricky to balance, so I can understand why authors might shy away from reviewing.
Do you have any plans for upcoming projects?
Nothing concrete at the moment. This year I’m a judge for the Aurealis Awards. Juggling the reading schedule for that with my review schedule and freelance work is keeping me busy at the moment. I do have a couple of stories on the backburner that I’d like to finish off. I’d also love to edit another anthology at some point in the future. I feel I’ve learned a lot since I published Winds of Change.
What Australian work have you loved recently?
There are many! My favourite series at the moment is Juliet Marillier’s Blackthorn and Grim. It’s a historical fantasy about an imprisoned healer who is offered the chance to magically escape on the condition she spends a year accepting any request for help people ask of her. I love that the protagonist is an older woman and that her experiences have led her to be an outspoken opponent of injustice and violence against women. I also love the strong, yet platonic friendship between Blackthorn and Grim, her former prison mate. They are sensitive to each other’s traumas and do their best to protect each other. I can’t wait for the third book, Den of Wolves, to come out in November.
C.S. Pacat impressed me with the conclusion to her Captive Prince trilogy earlier this year. Being a m/m romance with BDSM elements, it’s breaking new ground for the big publishing houses. I thought it balanced the romance perfectly with a strong political fantasy plot, and it shows Pacat to be an intelligent and subtle writer. I can’t wait to see what she writes next.
I’ve also been enjoying Amanda Pillar’s urban fantasy series Graced, with the most recent novella being Survivor. Like Pacat, she does a good job of balancing fantasy adventure with romance. I particularly appreciate the thought she’s put into her world-building, mixing her fantasy with judicious servings of sci-fi. She’s also built up a great cast of characters I’m looking forward to hearing more about.
I regret to admit I’m a late-comer to the work of Jennifer Fallon. Her most recent novel, The Lyre Thief, was excellent, so I’ll definitely be going back to tackle her earlier novels. I appreciate an epic fantasy where the characters aren’t entirely likeable but that also steers clear of being grimdark.
Which author (living or dead) would you most like to sit next to on a long plane trip and why?
Diana Wynne Jones. Her Fire and Hemlock is one of my favourite books and she wrote such a wonderful range of material. All the accounts I’ve heard tell me she was a kind and generous person. I’d love the chance to chat about books, writing and folklore with her.
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