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Author: peadarog

Author of The Inferior -- out now from Random House. "Read this and remember why Science Fiction lit your fire in the first place!" Guy Haley in DeathRay magazine.
On SF Conventions and Brexit

On SF Conventions and Brexit

Brexit vote“Brilliant!” I thought — this was three and a half years ago, you understand. These days I’m more likely to use the word “awesome.” But I digress…

I had received an invite to a Science Fiction convention in Luxembourg. I was expecting a relaxing weekend, sitting in an empty room. You see, everybody knows Luxembourg is tiny, and since they never had a convention before this, the organisers were doomed to struggle for numbers. They might get twenty people, I thought. Thirty tops…

I’ve never been so wrong in my life. The place was swarming with people. In fact, it was the largest Con I had ever attended outside North America. But where the hell did they all come from?

Europe, of course.

My mistake was to think of Luxembourg as a country. Well, it is, but that’s not what’s important here. What’s important, is that it no longer possesses any borders. People arrived from Paris and Brussels by trains that never even slowed down when they passed from one state to another. They drove by car from Germany and only realised they had crossed over from their own country when they started spotting road signs in French.

Then, they reached the Con — thousands of them, overwhelmingly young, buying wonderful Belgian frites with the same currency they already had in their pockets.

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The Iron Dragon’s Daughter: A Wholly Biased Review

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter: A Wholly Biased Review

The-Iron-Dragons-Daughter-smallAh, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. John O’Neill asked me for a review a few weeks ago, and I thought, “Really? You want me to be objective when she and I are so very much in love?”

Because it is love, you know? And it burns hot enough to turn all negative comments to ash.

I’ve driven friends away with this obsession. “What do you see in The Iron Dragon’s Daughter?” they ask. “She’s so incoherent. She has practically no… no character.”

Yes, all right, all right. We’re talking about a book here. I knew that. Ink and paper, rather than flesh and bone. Born — apologies! — published in 1993. To some, like myself, it became a classic, but others greeted it with bewilderment and it has collected a slew (31%) of apathetic reviews on sites like Amazon.

The book has flaws, you see? It takes the type of liberties that would have most sane reviewers flinging stars away like wasps found on a beloved child.

“Where’s the plot?” they cry.

“Why is the main character so bland?”

Both of these accusations ring true. Michael Swanwick’s story does have an arc that flows from the first page to the last, but rather than a rushing torrent, what we have here meanders across an exotic plain of wonders, leaving half-finished tales behind like so many oxbow lakes.

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Confessions of a Reluctant Self-Publisher — Now with extra Giveaways!

Confessions of a Reluctant Self-Publisher — Now with extra Giveaways!

Forever In The Memory Of God-smallI’ll be giving away copies of my mini-ebook-collection Forever in the Memory of God and Other Stories to the first five commenters who ask for one. But why should you bother? Read on!

Here is a list of things I want to do: Write; make a living with my pen.

And a list of the things I don’t want to do: marketing; selling; formatting; cover design; manual reading; forum perusing; guru worshipping; elbowing my way through the pack; self-publishing…

And yet, here we are.

Once upon a time, it was all so very different. I wrote a book and the first agent I sent it to loved it. So did a large number of publishers and in no time at all, they were clawing each other’s eyes out to get access to my manuscript. Then, exactly as it had happened in all my dreams, editors were engaged in an auction for the right to publish me. Me!

My agent used to ring me once or twice a day, cackling with glee over the latest rise in the price and the shameless favours being offered, until finally, we had hitched ourselves up to a brilliant and famous editor. How could it go wrong?

Oh, it didn’t! Not yet! Because, next came foreign language publishers from every corner of the globe. They too pledged undying love for a li’l ole book called The Inferior, and what they said about the story and the characters made me blush in parts of my body that few cameras have ever seen.

I’m sick of this boasting. Can we get to the bad part?

Yes, let’s start the dive now. Or “death-spiral,” if you prefer.

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Popular Marketing Mistakes: Cannibalism

Popular Marketing Mistakes: Cannibalism

the-inferior-small

1. The Sadness — It is too Much!

When my first book, The Inferior, came squalling into the light back in 2007 it received absolutely wonderful reviews.

Read this and remember why Science Fiction lit your fire in the first place!

An exhilarating read, highly recommended and an incredible first novel in what is going to end up an incredible career.

It made several “Best of the Year” lists. Foreign editors snapped up the rights. An agent in Hollywood got excited about the idea of a movie. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for a start, nobody bought it.

By nobody, I don’t just mean sweaty little nerds like myself with fistfuls of notes or book vouchers. No, the shops didn’t want to buy it either. They failed to stock it, or did so in small quantities. They were right too, because the few copies that made it into stores gathered dust or wept quietly in the back of warehouses.

After “Best of the Year” lists, The Inferior began turning up in other places, such as “most underrated book” lists and — now that I have two novels in print — “most underrated series.” That’s a gentle way of saying “loserville.”

Yes, this depressed me and I whined to whoever would listen until I bored my friends to sleep with it. I didn’t understand back then that both myself and my publishers had made some interesting mistakes in our marketing of the book.

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INVADING FANTASY

INVADING FANTASY

CONQUER THIS

Lebor Gabála Érenn — it just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Literally: “The Book of the Taking of Ireland” or, as it’s usually rendered in English: “The Book of Invasions”, or even, “The Book of Conquests”. It’s a medieval history in case you hadn’t guessed. A full and not very frank account of every event that ever happened on the island of my birth.

Jim Fitzpatrick did some amazing illustrations for his version of the story.
Jim Fitzpatrick did some amazing illustrations for his version of the story.

People love to visit Ireland, apparently, and it’s even more fun when you bring an army with you. They’ve all done it, every horde and its crazy gods: Patholonians, Fomorians, Nemedians, Belly Men, The People of the Goddess Danú (who later fled underground to become the Sidhe) and *finally* — drum roll — The Gaels.

I say “finally”, because that’s where The Book of Invasions ends, but just as WWI didn’t quite live up to “the War to end all wars”, and the unification of Germany failed utterly to “end history”… well, Ireland’s attraction for blood-thirsty tourists only got stronger after that.

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R. Scott Bakker: Not the Anti-Tolkien, After All

R. Scott Bakker: Not the Anti-Tolkien, After All

lord-of-the-ringsAre you a Tolkien imitator? A riffer? A rejector? One way or the other, if you’re writing epic fantasy, the Oxford professor is sitting on your shoulder, sniggering and blowing dirty pipe smoke up your nose.

It doesn’t matter that you’ve never read Lord of the Rings; declaring Conan the Cimmerian to be your only true love won’t save you. The man with two “R”s didn’t invent the field, but he dominates it to the extent that we all write in his shadow.

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The Novels of Black Gate

The Novels of Black Gate

childoffire“Why do the review pages always seem to be full of books which no one buys and the bestseller lists full of books no one reviews?”

This was tweeted the other day by a lit. agent called missdaisyfrost and the first thing it brought to my mind was Black Gate.

Day by day, genre short fiction magazines seem to grow more literary even as their sales plummet, while BG — may I call you BG? — is one of the few to proudly assert its pulp roots and to cater to the majority of people who like, you know, something to happen in the stories they read.

So, it’s interesting that while a lot of my fellow BG buddies haven’t had stellar success in most of the Big Mags out there in the wild, many of them are now kicking ass in the real market, novels: the only place outside of Hollywood that writers can make an actual living from their craft.

The first story I ever read in the magazine was Harry Connolly‘s The Whoremaster of Pald. It totally knocked my socks off.

Nor was I the only one to suffer from sudden chills in the foot area — people raved about that story and now, years later, Child of Fire, by the same author has 108 reviews on Amazon.com, most of them equally thrilled.

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Thank Goodness! Why Gatekeepers Will Always Be With Us

Thank Goodness! Why Gatekeepers Will Always Be With Us

bglgSixteen of your US dollars. That’s what the latest (monster) issue of Black Gate has cost you in these days of fear and crumbling factories. It’s strange, isn’t it? You’ll spend all that money on a collection of fiction and game reviews when the internet is bursting with so much free content. If you go looking right now, you can find a million Sword & Sorcery stories out there that you wouldn’t even need to pirate: the authors, overcome in a delirium of generosity, are only too thrilled to supply them for free.

And it doesn’t stop with short-stories! There are more novels waiting for you online than any dozen people could read in a lifetime, along with plays, movie scripts, poetry…

Oh God. The poetry.

So, what’s stopping you? I’ll tell you what’s stopping me: I don’t want to be a slush reader. It is mind-rotting, eye-burning work that actually becomes worse the more of it you do. Like some sort of cumulative poison. And for every great story we read in the pages of Black Gate, there have been several hundred at least that would have had any sane person thinking more and more about drinking that bottle of bleach under the sink. Oh yes.

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Targetted Book Recommendations #2

Targetted Book Recommendations #2

Part One of this enthralling series is here.

Finally, I shut my big mouth and show a few cards. Novels are what it’s all about, but not just any novels. We want something immediate. We want action and adventure. And although introspection and other, more literary qualities won’t be run out of town with the imprint of my boot on their buttocks, they must never, ever slow the story down. In short, we’re after books that embody the spirit of Black Gate.

Got it? Let’s see then…

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Targetted Book Recommendations for Non-Existent Readers

Targetted Book Recommendations for Non-Existent Readers

You and Me

Once upon a time, I met a guy who only ever ate fries*. Anything else, it was claimed, would make him violently ill. Now, he looked healthy enough and suffered no heart attacks while I was watching him, so who knows? Maybe it worked out well for him. But it’s rare in life to find an adult whose belly is so cantankerous that it rejects even pizza with such colourful speed. And it is equally rare to meet an adult reader who only wants Sword and Sorcery, or Flying Carpet Wonder tales. Or whatever.

Most people, enjoy a bit of variety. Personally, I feast at many tables — historical fiction, mysteries, SF hard and soft; fantasy high, low, light and dark. I love it all depending on my mood, and I imagine that most of you will have similar lists, maybe replacing the SF with Romance, or the mysteries with Great American Novels. The only thing we can be sure of having in common, is a penchant for character-driven SFF adventure stories — i.e. the type of thing that BG does best. You probably wouldn’t be reading this otherwise.

Targeted Book Recommendations

Recommending books, as we all know, is a bit like giving presents to a loved one. You can give something that you would like, or, if you’re feeling more generous, you can take their tastes into consideration too.

I remember one particular disaster when a friend of mine suggested George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones to One-Footed Jimmy, even though everybody knew poor Jimmy has had an aversion to swords since that time the display came loose during his visit to a museum… OFJ wouldn’t touch Black Gate with a barge-pole, but imagine, if you will, that you had to buy a book for somebody who loved the magazine. What would you pick? You’re not trying to educate this person, you’re not allowed to show-off. The one thing you know about your victim’s diet is that he or she drools twice a year over the brown envelope that Mr. O’Neill sends from Chicago.

What would you choose? Why?

I’ll be putting up my answers to these questions some time next week.

* In Ireland, we refer to them as “chips”. Do NOT be confused.