Links and Elyana Sadrastis

Keeping with ancient tradition (established last Thursday) I have more Links of Interest. PLUS a few updates on my Paizo book, now vacuuming up all of my time.

First, related to my own musings about epic fantasy in the last week or so, John Fultz took a post live earlier in the week that’s brought in some interesting comments from some of my own favorite authors, and it’s probably worth a look. You can find it here.

Second, my friend and fellow author Alex Bledsoe is looking for some footage of the Smokies. For the whys and the specifics and the reward for assistance, visit here.

Third, I dropped by Fictional Frontiers with Sohaib and discussed The Bones of the Old Ones at length. I always have a good time on Fictional Frontiers! The podcast can be found here.

Fourth, my good friend Eric Knight just had his first three Vampire Earth books released in a way-cool Science Fiction Book Club edition. If you haven’t visited the apocalyptic future where brave resistance fighters are trying to overthrow life-sucking alien invaders, now’s your chance. Great action stories with wonderful character arcs and smart plotting. Here’s a link to the book.

Fifth, I just learned that all the Ben Haas westerns are gong to be made available as e-books. I wrote a long post about just how great Ben Haas was in August of last year. Now everyone will soon have a chance to find out for themselves. I don’t always read westerns, but when I do, they’re by Ben Haas.

I just received a super cool book in the mail yesterday, but I’ll have to blog about that in a day or two. Right now I am still fully enmeshed in my rewrite of my next Paizo novel, now titled Stalking the Beast.

I’ll be honest — it’s been a rough six months because of my mom’s medical condition, and as a result writing’s been a real challenge. But I’m very pleased with the way the book has finally come together. It’s got a lot more moving pieces than the first one and there were times during the drafting I despaired that I’d be able to get it running. Now, though, as I’m tuning it up, I think I might have something pretty nice here.

I stumbled across some discussion of the main character of my Paizo books, Elyana Sadrastis, the other day. Some Pathfinder players occasionally wonder what her specific stats would be if she were written up as a game character. Well, I think some of that should be left to the imagination, but I’ll give a few hints. When I roughed out her stats I multi-classed her as a high-level Fighter with some Ranger levels. I didn’t want her casting a whole lot of spells around because I find high magic in fiction (at least on the side of the heroes) problematic. Thus almost all her feats come from the fighter side of the equation. Apart from the cure light wounds spell she uses in the first book, about the only Rangery magic you’ll see her use are some communicate with animal spells, and those I write as though she’s just specifically in tune with an animal, not as though she’s waving glowing fingers about and mumbling.