Two of my absolute favorite fantasy novels are Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell and Jack Vance's The Green Pearl. Both are big hefty tomes that suck you into richly detailed, immersive universes, and one of the techniques the authors use to do that is the liberal sprinkling of footnotes. These serve as little asides, often mini-stories in their own right, that you can dip into to get a sense of the broader world behind the action of the novel.I reckon that's one way that e-publishing and regular publishing can co-exist and feed into each other, instead of fighting it out to the death as some publishers seem to fear. Ebooks are ideal for flash fic that you can snack on in between longer episodes of the main narrative. And with that in mind, I've corralled all our whimsical letters to the Royal Mythological Society from Mirabilis and packaged them up as a Kindle book that goes on sale on Amazon today.
The Year of Wonders comprises more than fifty fantasy and SF tales in vignette form, from the mysterious giant hand found in a wood in Yorkshire to the best way to deal with a dragon that's taken a shine to the gold reserves of Fort Knox. Best of all, you won't actually need a Kindle because I've sneaked a preview up on free flipbook site BookBuzzr. And thanks to the magic of widgetry it's right here:
