Footnotes and fancies

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:

Nerd heaven

Reluctant as I am to bump the marvellous news about Kate's award off the top of the blog, life goes on even if it must move from the sublime to the outright geeky. So this is just to announce that role-playing game stalwart Jamie Thomson and I have started up an occasional blog devoted to all things orcish, elvish, sorcerous and swordy.

We'll be covering a lot of fantasy game-related stuff, including comics and novels, with particular focus on our Fabled Lands choose-your-own gamebook series from the 1990s which looks set for a revival on iPhone, iPad and other iCool gadgets. There's even a snippet from an interactive graphic novel we had planned.

So, if you have a secret stash of polyhedral dice gathering dust on the top shelf, pop over to the Fabled Lands blog and say hi. Gameheads and proud of it, that's us.

Faery

This has been done for CAPTION. The Oxford comics convention. Will be interesting to see which version they use

A slushy hiss

Another super-duper swords-n-sorcery picture from the extremely talented and imaginative Russ Nicholson - whom I think Garen is going to invite onto the blog, so I'll get all the flattery out of the way now so as not to embarrass him.

This was an illustration for my role-playing game Dragon Warriors to accompany the following scene:

The crew scatter in all directions as the strange projectile descends. For a moment you think it is going to miss the deck, but then it veers in mid-air and falls with a slushy hiss. It looks like a huge ball of green snow, maybe, or else a very dense cloud of glowing vapour. You take a few steps forward, perplexed. The captain has ordered pails of water brought, thinking that the object was a lump of flaming pitch. But it gives off no heat or flames, just a billowing column of pale-green vapour.

The column of vapour rises higher, thickening. Dark outlines become visible inside the swirling cloud. Three cloaked figures. A sudden gust of wind stirs the cloud and disperses it. As the tattered wisps drift away, three black-armoured warriors are revealed. They are swathed in cloaks of black and vermillion and stand in a circle, their hands resting on the pommels of their unsheathed swords. The tallest has long black hair with a single streak of silver. You draw your own sword as you see how his eyes blaze with malevolence...

Purple prose? We gamers call it flavour text :-)

Russ gave me the original artwork for this one btw. Hence the self-satisfied tone.