Promo round-up 5/6/13

This past week, Assassin’s Gambit was reviewed by Dear Author! I am thrilled with this since Dear Author is a high-profile site with a lot of readers, and the review was long, positive, and thoughtful. Here it is.

Also, I found the list of Fantasy Romance novels on Goodreads, so that I could add my own books to it, and discovered that the list is pretty much all paranormals (e.g., vampire & werewolf novels). There wasn’t a fantasy novel to be found. So I created a new list called Epic Fantasy Romance and made it clear in the description that it’s only for novels set in a fantasy world (not novels set on Earth). I’d like to get the list populated with all epic fantasy romances, not just my own. Here is the list if you’d like to contribute to it. And if you want to vote for Assassin’s Gambit, I won’t complain.

I did a guest blog for Tote Bags ‘n’ Blogs, about Writing the Flawed Hero.

And here is a nice review from Little Bookish.

Also, I have another giveaway active on Goodreads! It’s open to the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the UK. Enter here.

History for the fantasy buff: werewolves and vampires

There are some interesting ideas about monsters in history in Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters, by Matt Kaplan.

Monsters from the ancient and medieval eras were primarily large pedators. Think the Nemean Lion or the Calydonian Boar, both extra-large, extra-powerful versions of frightening wild beasts. Or the Minotaur, half man, half beast. Or the fire-breathing dragon of the Middle Ages.

But as we enter the Renaissance, stories about large predators begin to take a back seat to stories about human-like monsters infected with a deadly contagion. Think the vampire, the werewolf, the zombie. As the wild areas of Europe began to be conquered and predators driven extinct, human populations grew more dense and there was a lot more danger from contagious disease than from lions or boars.

The author makes an interesting case that stories of vampirism or lycanthropy may have originated from the disease rabies. Today, rabies is controlled, but in the 1700′s, there was a rabies epidemic among wolves and dogs. The rabies virus, in humans, causes patients to wander restlessly. They drool bloody saliva, retract their lips, and cough and gasp. They can be highly aggressive, and the disease is spread by being bitten. The animals most likely to spread rabies to people are, notably, the dog, the wolf, and the bat.

Tuberculosis was also epidemic during the same time period and may have influenced myths as well. It had a long incubation period and caused people to waste away.

Nowadays, vampires and werewolves are more likely to appear as the protagonists in romance novels than the villains in horror stories. This may suggest that contagion-based monsters have largely run their course. Rabies and tuberculosis are well controlled in the western world, and the concept of contagion is well understood. So now we have sparkly vampires.

History for the fantasy buff: fossils and storytelling

Say you lived in ancient times and you walked to the top of a mountain. There, you were astonished to find fossils of seashells and various marine creatures. What explanation would you come up so that your find made sense?

The actual reason those fossils are there is plate tectonics. In many cases, the land now at the top of a mountain was once at the bottom of the sea. But given how frequently sea fossils are found far from the ocean, it’s no surprise that just about every ancient culture has a story describing a great flood.

Let’s turn to Ancient Greece. Elephants once lived on the islands in the Mediterranean; they’ve been extinct for a long time. But say you’re an ancient Greek who stumbles across an elephant skull like the one pictured on the left. You have never seen a live elephant. What would you think this creature looked like when alive? The hole for the trunk looks rather like a hole for a gigantic single eye. Might you tell a story about a one-eyed giant (the Cyclops) who lives on an island?

The ancient Scythians, while mining for gold in central Asia, discovered well-preserved fossils of protoceratops, what we now know is a type of dinosaur. The ancient Greeks first made contact with the Scythians at around 675 BC, and at around that time they first began to describe the griffin: a lion-sized quadruped with a raptor’s beak. On the right is a picture of a protoceratops skeleton. Might the Greeks have seen those fossils, discovered by the Scythians, and invented the griffin to explain what they saw?

Further reading: Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters, by Matt Kaplan; The First Fossil Hunters, by Adrienne Mayor

Promo round-up 4/23/13

Here’s the big news for this week: my fantasy romance trilogy just sold to French publisher Bragelonne! That’s Assassin’s Gambit, Spy’s Honor, and the book I’m still writing, Prince’s Fire. I am so excited that my book is going to be available in France! I can’t wait to get my author copies. Won’t it be ironic that it will be my own book, yet I’ll be unable to read it? Maybe I should spring for Rosetta Stone. The only foreign language I know is Latin, and unless someone invents a time machine, I won’t be selling my books to ancient Rome.

I consider my books to be true hybrids; that is, they fulfill both the requirements of the epic fantasy genre and the requirements of the romance genre. They are not in any way “fantasy lite.” My agent offered them both to romance imprints and fantasy imprints. In the U.S., they sold to a romance imprint, and in France they sold to a fantasy imprint. I think that’s cool. It validates what I set out to do with the books.

In other news, the Romantic Times gave Assassin’s Gambit 4 stars! Here’s the review.

SF and dark fantasy author Kenneth Mark Hoover wrote a wonderful review of Assassin’s Gambit. It’s detailed and insightful. Here it is.

And Coffee Time Romance gave Assassin’s Gambit 4 “cups.” Review here.

Jill Archer writes a fun fantasy series in which demons and humans intermingle in a post-Armageddon world. I wrote a guest post on her blog about writing brainy heroes.

I was interviewed on Manga Maniac Cafe, in which I was asked some really tough questions!

I was interviewed by Darke Conteur about the fantasy romance genre and also my thoughts on erotica.

And lastly, Laura Lee Nutt interviewed me on her blog and got me talking about the emotional life of my hero Lucien and about the most interesting thing I learned when researching post-traumatic stress disorder.

History for the fantasy buff: Eating utensils

If you’re writing a historical or fantasy novel and come to a scene where the characters are eating a meal, you may need to think about what they eat with. One utensil you can, with confidence, provide to your characters is the spoon. Spoons exist in every human culture. They appear to be the only universal utensil.

As for the fork, it’s been around since ancient times as a tool for prodding and lifting meat during cooking, but the use of the fork at the table is relatively recent. In the 1600′s, using a fork at the table was considered unmanly and exposed one to ridicule. By the 1700′s, this had completely reversed and forks were used commonly throughout Europe and America. This may have coincided with the increasing tendency of people to eat off of flat plates rather than out of bowls and trenchers. A fork isn’t terribly effective when eating out of a bowl.

Of course, there are many cultures that have no use for a fork, for example the Chinese, who have used chopsticks since ancient times (they became established during the Han dynasty, 206 BC – 220 AD). Chopsticks go along with an entirely different means of preparing food. In Europe and America, a fork and knife are used to cut meat on one’s own plate at the table. But in China, all the knife work takes place in the kitchen. There is no need for a knife at the table (or a fork). Incidentally, the reason most restaurants use disposable chopsticks is because there has been an historical taboo against sharing chopsticks.

And there are some cultures where people eat with fingers. These cultures tend to have elaborate before-meal washing procedures to ensure cleanliness, and usually only certain fingers are used: the thumb, forefinger, and middle finger of the right hand.

So there are a lot of options, and if you’re writing a fantasy based in medieval Europe, your characters don’t use forks.

Spy’s Honor cover reveal!

Look what I have. It’s the cover for Spy’s Honor!

I’m really happy with this cover. Rhianne (the heroine) has a softer look than Vitala, which is appropriate given her character. But the cover is similar in style to the one for Assassin’s Gambit, so it’s easy to tell they are in the same series.

Spy’s Honor, book 2 in the series, is actually a prequel. We go back a few years, to the time when Lucien wasn’t yet emperor of Kjall.

I’m doing copy edits for this novel now! It will be out in October.

History for the fantasy buff: kitchens

Sometimes I run into this question when writing scenes in my fantasy novels: where do the people cook? And how is it done?

The kitchen–a room built for the purpose of cooking–is a relatively recent invention. So where have people cooked throughout history?

The ancient Greeks had no dedicated kitchen but moved their cooking devices (such as portable ovens) and utensils from room to room.

The ancient Anglo-Saxons cooked outdoors, especially during the summer.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, houses generally had a fixed hearth for cooking, but since most homes were one-room dwellings, the room with the hearth wasn’t just the kitchen, but also the living room and bedroom. Wealthy households did have kitchens, but the kitchens weren’t attached to the house. They were separate buildings, probably to minimize the risk of a fire spreading from the kitchen to the main house.

In the Renaissance era (where most historical romances are set), wealthy homes would have not a single kitchen, but several rooms dedicated to various types of food storage and preparation. These could include any or all of the following: a dry larder for storing foods like bread, butter, and milk that needed to be kept cool and dry; a wet larder for raw meat and vegetables; a game larder; a dairy; a bakehouse with a brick oven; a smokehouse; a salting room; a pastry room for making pies and tarts; a scullery; and the kitchen itself, where the cooking took place. The scullery was the least desirable place to work because it was where all the least pleasant jobs were done, including preparation of ingredients before cooking, and cleaning up with the wash water from a large copper boiler. Because all the dirty work happened in the scullery, the kitchen itself was pleasant. But only the ridiculously wealthy families enjoyed this kind of setup.

The modern concept of a kitchen as a single separate room within a middle-class home, designed specifically for cooking, did not emerge until the 20th century.

(Photo by Richard Croft.)