When I wrote the first lines of Finn Fancy, it wasn't going to be my book that sold. I was just having some fun while scratching my writing itch because I was burned out on writing deep and seriously serious epicly epics. That first burst of being silly and having fun took me through the opening with the crazy magical attack, and then after a bit of thought through a crazy Dunkin Donuts story, the first snarky interaction with Finn's sister, and Finn's mother's ghost telling a story about the Holy Crap.

Then I had to pause, because I realized I really was having fun with it, and liking the characters, and wanted to keep going. Many of my short stories featured humor, and I'd read folks like Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Jim C Hines, Michael Underwood and Christopher Moore, but hadn't dared dream I could get published writing humorous novels. Yet I really wanted to keep writing Finn Fancy.

So I had to actually think about where the story was heading, and what would drive the plot. I drafted up a rough outline, and brainstormed an initial cast of characters pretty quickly, then forged forward. And as I did, I realized I had to also begin making more conscious choices about where to insert humor, how to insert it, and how much to insert.

I had reached a kind of fork in the road at that point -- I could either attempt the Adams and Pratchett route of complete (and genius) whacky parody with comical characters and crazy other worlds, and hope that it somehow worked; or I could write a story anchored in our reality (with a hidden magical layer), and give it a humorous voice with the occasional dips into complete whackiness.

I chose door number two, the approach of using the humor to balance the darker or more serious aspects of the story, to break it up and make it more fun than grim, more funny that gritty.

Which is not to say Pratchett and others don't also have serious moments and drama in their stories, obviously, and Pratchett definitely explores issues of religion and politics, culture and economics.

But as an example of the difference, the underlying foundation of Finn's reality is our own world with all its rules and issues, a world of embarrassing high school memories and awkward dates, where the characters are folks you might know in real life; whereas Rincewind's world is a Discworld on the back of elephants on the back of a giant space turtle, filled with characters who are parodies of real world and fictional figures, where Pratchett finds a way to shine a light on the ridiculous (and painful) in our world by taking it out of the context of our world and plopping it down in the middle of his wonderfully crazy fantasy world.

Even Adams, who featured Earth in his work, made his characters completely comical (or comically sad), and quickly made it clear that our world was far more ridiculous than we ever realized. In other words, Pratchett and Adams took it to a whole other level that I completely envy but did not feel was right for Finn Fancy (or perhaps that I just wasn't brave enough to commit to). I come close at times, maybe, but there are entire sentences -- nay, paragraphs even -- where I don't make a single joke.

Perhaps in part because I'd read many manuscripts from fellow aspiring writers who'd attempted humor and parody in the Adams and Pratchett style, and failed. I knew enough to see that if you try to write purely comical stuff, or humor that is deeply cultural in nature, it is like telling a long joke -- some people will get the joke, and some won't, some will like the joke, and some won't.

What that means in a practical sense is that if the core of your story is the humor, then that will be a tougher sell both to editors and to readers. Unless you are a genius like Pratchett or Adams. Not an impossible sell, just a tougher sell. But if you incorporate humor as one balanced aspect of a story that also has drama, suspense, action, adventure, and romance, then readers who do not get the joke or find it funny may still enjoy the other aspects of your story.

And while many people are dismissive of humor as being easier to write than serious drama that explores the metaphor and all of that, the truth is humor is often far harder to write -- at least humor that makes the majority of readers actually laugh, and doubly so humor that also makes people think, and triply so makes them laugh again the next day when they think about it, and then think about why they laughed.

Not that Finn Fancy is necessarily at that level (yet). But I am proud of having told a fun story that people seem to enjoy, that will perhaps make someone's crappy day a little less crappy.

Humor: hard work for high risk (and often its own reward). Maybe I should put that on a tee-shirt. With a picture of a fat grumpy cat so it is somehow funny, of course.

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Order Finn Fancy Necromancy HERE

GUEST AUTHOR INFORMATION: Randy Henderson was born in the state of Washington and is the debut author of the darkly humorous contemporary fantasy novel FINN FANCY NECROMANCY. He is the Golden Pen Grand Prize winner of Writers of the Future for 2014, and his short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, the M-Brane anthology 2020 Visions, and Every Day Fiction. Randy graduated from the Clarion West writing workshop in 2009.

NOTE: Author picture courtesy of the author and Fantasy Magazine.

Official Author Website
Read my review of The Better Part of Darkness 
Read my review of The Darkest Edge of Dawn 
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of The Hour Of Dust and Ashes 
Read Fantasy Book Critic’s review of Shadows Before The Sun 
Read Fantasy Book Critic's Interview with Kelly Gay 

I’m a big fan of Kelly Gay and her dark Charlie Madigan urban fantasy series. The series combined the gritty underbelly of Atlanta with inter-dimensional fantasy, and viola the readers were given an urban fantasy series that bucked most of the urban fantasy tropes and explored new avenues.

The series was published by an imprint of Simon & Schuster and after four books being published, the series was dropped by the publisher for reasons that weren’t quite sure but were most likely financial ones. The fourth book Shadows Before The Sun was published nearly three years ago and since then we have been waiting to hear about the next book in the series.

The author recently revealed via her newsletter that the next book is titled “The Cold Light Of Day” and will be released in the summer. The book will be self-published by the author and will be released in e-book and trade paperback format. The author revealed a bit about the story in an email and here’s what it’s going to be about:

“The tale begins where SHADOWS BEFORE THE SUN left off, with Pen, the Druid King, pressuring Charlie to find out who killed certain characters in the preceding title, and the mysterious Leander returning to make Charlie and Hank an offer they can’t refuse. And, of course, along the way Charlie and Hank’s relationship intensifies, Emma’s powers grow, and Rex gets into deep, deep trouble. “

Obviously there will be a bit more to the story and I can’t wait for the official blurb reveal. Here’s looking to more of Charlie, Rex, Hank, Pen & the others…

Order Grim Mistresses HERE
Read Beauty In Ruins' review of Grim Mistresses

Yesterday was also the release day of Grimm Mistresses by Ragnarok Publications. Check out the amazing cover by Brittany Smith and also here’s the blurb:

 "Remember the Grimm Brothers? Those dark fairy tales that made you leave the light on long before Disney went and sanitized them? Well, we do! Now the MISTRESSES GRIMM take back the night, five female authors who will leave you shuddering deliciously. Get ready to leave the lights on again with four pieces of short fiction bringing the Grimm Brother’s tales into the present. Be advised: these aren’t your children’s fairy tales!"

Here are the five amazing ladies who are lending their talents to this amazing collection and given below is the table of contents:

"The Night Air" by Stacey Turner
"Little Dead Red" by Mercedes M. Yardley 
"Nectar" by Allison M. Dickson
"Hazing Cinderella" by C.W. LaSart
"The Leopard's Pelt" by S.R. Cambridge 

 So get yourself a copy of this dark, enticing collection, I'll be reviewing it in the upcoming weeks as well.

Official Author Website 
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of The Whitefire Crossing 
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of The Tainted City 
Read Fantasy Book Critic's multi-author interview with Courtney Schafer 

We are mightily indebted to Courtney for giving us the golden opportunity to host the cover & blurb reveal of The Labyrinth Of Flame last year. The cover art (seen above) was provided by series regular David Palumbo & the cover design is done by Martha Wade.

Here’s what The Labyrinth Of Flame is going to be about:

"Dev's never been a man afraid of a challenge. Not only has he kept his vow to his dead mentor, rescuing a child in the face of impossible odds, but he's freed his mage friend Kiran from both the sadistic master who seeks to enslave him and the foreign Council that wants to kill him."

"But Kiran's master Ruslan is planning a brutal revenge, one that will raze an entire country to blood and ashes. Kiran is the key to stopping Ruslan; yet Kiran is dying by inches, victim of the Alathian Council's attempt to chain him. Worse yet, Dev and Kiran have drawn the attention of demons from the darkest of ancient legends. Demons whose power Dev knows is all too real, and that he has every reason to fear." 

"A fear that grows, as he and Kiran struggle to outmaneuver Ruslan and uncover the secrets locked in Kiran's forgotten childhood. For the demons are playing their own deadly game - and the price of survival may be too terrible to bear."

The kickstarter for the book has been live for the past six days and already has been fully funded at four thousand dollars and is currently very close to reaching its first stretch goal. I’m a backer and I’m hoping many of you consider joining in the kickstarter for this tremendous trilogy ending.

Official Author Website
Read Fantasy Book Critic's review of No Return
Read The Debut Novel: A Series Of Intentions by Zachary Jernigan (guest post)

Zachary Jernigan's No Return was a debut that won me over completely nearly two years ago and now Zachary is releasing the sequel to his complex debut via Nightshade books. Zack was kind enough to allow us to exclusively reveal the cover for Shower Of Stones which has superb art work by Claudia Noble. Also check out the enticing blurb below thanks to the publisher. The book has a tentative release date of July 7th and I can't wait to immerse myself back into the complex world that is Jeroun.

Official Book Blurb — At the moment of his greatest victory, before a crowd of thousands, the warrior Vedas Tezul renounced his faith, calling for revolt against the god Adrash, imploring mankind to unite in this struggle. 

Good intentions count for nothing. In the three months since his sacrilegious pronouncement, the world has not changed for the better. In fact, it is now on the verge of dying. The Needle hangs broken in orbit above Jeroun, each of its massive iron spheres poised to fall and blanket the planet’s surface in dust. Long-held truces between Adrashi and Anadrashi break apart as panic spreads. 

With no allegiance to either side, the disgraced soldier Churls walks into the divided city of Danoor with a simple plan: murder the monster named Fesuy Amendja, and retrieve from captivity the only two individuals that still matter to her — Vedas Tezul, and the constructed man Berun. The simple plan goes awry, as simple plans do, and in the process Churls and her companions are introduced to one of the world’s deepest secrets: a madman, insisting he is the link to an ancient world, offering the most tempting lie of all . . . hope. 

Concluding the visceral, inventive narrative begun in No Return, Shower of Stones pits men against gods and swords against civilization-destroying magic in the fascinatingly harsh world of Jeroun.

Hi! I’m Elizabeth Bear, and I’m salted caramel gelato. Er, I mean, I’m eating salted caramel gelato, and let me tell you, this stuff is a reason I’m glad I live in the future where ice cream flavors like this exist. But I’m not actually here to sell you Häagen-Dazs, fake umlaut and all. I’m here because I’m the author of Karen Memory, a new book that came out this month, and I’ve been invited to Fantasy Book Critic to talk to you about it. (Maybe you’d rather I was selling you Häagen-Dazs? Well, you’re on a book blog, so you’re pretty much stuck now.)

Karen Memory is a steampunk Weird West adventure set in a fictional city in the Pacific Northwest. (I don’t feel too bad about that—I’m a New Englander, and everybody from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King to Jane Langton has felt free to shoehorn an extra town or two into the landscape around here. So I think it’s traditional.) 

The book stars the nearly-eponymous Karen Memery. Karen’s a sixteen-year-old bordello girl with an outsize vocabulary, a shaky sense of grammar, and a complete inability to stay out of trouble for more than fifteen minutes at a time. A number of people have asked me why I might want to go and set a steampunk story in the Pacific Northwest.

Well, I’m not the first, by any means. Off the top of my head, there’s Cherie Priest’s delightful Boneshaker, for example. And an interesting thing that’s happened in the past few years is a real groundswell of the Weird Western, a subgenre that used to be pretty much staked out by Stephen King and Joe Lansdale—and also was a lot more horror focused.

But I started writing Karen Memory in 2009, and the thing I notice is that Emma Bull’s fabulous Western fantasy, Territory, came out a few years before then—and that since, there’s been a steady creep of steampunk elements into Westerns. The TV show and later movie The Wild Wild West is no doubt extremely seminal here, but then we find the blossoming of Cherie’s books, and those of Gemma Files starting with A Book of Tongues, R.S. Belcher’s The Six-Gun Tarot, John Horner Jacob’s The Incorruptibles, Catherynne M. Valente’s Six-Gun Snow White, Tim Pratt’s The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made-World… well, if you just want a list, Goodreads has a couple!

And apparently they’re bringing back Westworld now? Robot gunslingers? Well all right.

So, the simple answer is because it’s a fascinating time. Steampunk is often criticized for assuming the trappings of empire without bothering to engage with its colonialism and class issues, but honestly, that doesn’t seem to be the case with most of the Weird West steampunk I’ve read. I know that one of the things that attracted me to the Gold Rush northwest was exactly that—the chance to unfurl a cast of characters that draws some of its interest and conflict from the often whitewashed diversity of the West; the chance to show the perspective of a working-class heroine; the chance to talk about rapacious exploitation. 

And there’s the added attraction of it being a gorgeous landscape with so much scope for adventure! Meanwhile, let’s talk about the Ben & Jerry’s salted caramel blondie stuff. Because it’s totally sick, yo, and I mean that in the best of all possible ways…

GUEST AUTHOR INFORMATION: Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. This, coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, the mispronunciation of common English words, and the writing of speculative fiction.

She was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005 and has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction along with a Sturgeon Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel.She lives in Massachusetts with a Giant Ridiculous Dog. Her partner, acclaimed fantasy author Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin.