Staying true to what actually happens in the book, Dave Dorman first painted Jane topless, then covered her up for the official cover of Jane Carver of Waar. Now he’s sent me the topless version, and like the true friend I am, I’m sharing it with you!

Night Shade Books wants you to know that this has nothing to do with them. They publish respectable books with no nakedness on the covers. This is just between me, Dave Dorman and the world.

Thanks, Dave!

I haven’t done an art post in a while, but I found Noelle’s blog and had to share. Noelle is a great illustrator and cartoonist, and apparently a complete and utter geek. Yay! There’s a lot of fun noodling and doodling on the blog, but every once in a while she does something like this…

Yes, that would be a matador sailor fighting a giant squid while riding a sea horse. As they say on the internet, “Your argument is invalid.”

Noelle seems to like kick-ass heroines having over the top adventures. I wonder what she’d do with Jane or Ulrika.

My advance reading copies are here! So cool!

I just got the okay from my bosses at Night Shade Books to post a sample chapter from Jane Carver of Waar.

So here, behind the cut, is Chapter Two – In which, having touched a strange gem in a cave, Jane has an unsettling awakening… [...]

Yes, I’m blogging about posting on another blog when I have neglected this one for too long.

Head on over to the Night Bazaar, Night Shade Books’ author blog, where I will be blogging every Friday until Jane Carver comes out. This week I introduce myself, talk about my favorite books of last year, and last but not least say a few words about Jane Carver of Waar and reveal the full cover for the first time.

Oh, and it’s here too…

Night Shade Books put it up ON THEIR SITE, so I can at last show you the fantastic art Dave Dorman did for Jane Carver of Waar. I am so thrilled to have my story illustrated by such a consummate professional. Just look at this!

A late but lovely review of Bloodborn by Shadowhawk over at Founding Fields. Check it out HERE.

Black Library have finally posted the cover art to BLOODSWORN, the third Ulrika novel, which will be available in June 2012, so I can at last share the amazing art WINONA NELSON did for the cover. I think it’s her best cover yet!

As a State College hometown boy and PSU alumn, I’ve been reluctantly following the Penn State scandal, and it’s got me thinking about what makes a hero a hero.

I write what is often called Heroic Fantasy, which generally involves strong, active men or women running around killing monsters or evil villains with swords or axes. These are known in the trade as heroes. But those kinds of heroes are usually people who have been left with few options.

MOVIE TRAILER VOICE

They killed his family and burned his village.

He had two choices, give up and die…

Or seek vengeance!

When you think about it, that’s kind of an easy choice. What was shown to me this morning while reading John Scalzi’s essay on the PSU situation (which is much better than this one, by the way, and you should go read it) is that a true hero is a man or woman who makes a hard choice.

It’s pretty easy to go after the bad guys when you’ve got nothing left to lose, right? But what if you’ve got everything to lose? Imagine you are a man in a comfortable position, doing a job you love, and that you have thrived in for more than forty years. Imagine you are living in a nice house, with a nice family, in town so serene and secure they call it Happy Valley. Next imagine you discover that a friend and employee has done something horrible to a child. Then imagine what will happen if you say something. The confrontation with your friend. The disruption of your job and your life as investigations begin and the media swoops in. The uncomfortable public conversations about topics men of your generation just don’t talk about. The damage to your community and the image of your much-beloved institution.

To throw your life and the life of everyone you know into chaos, upend the routine of your job, expose a man who had been your friend, and start shouting things in public that you don’t even like to talk about in private until the victims are saved and your friend is caught is a hard choice – a heroic choice. Paterno didn’t make that choice. That doesn’t make him evil – but it doesn’t make him a hero either. He’s just a man, and after all this time as JoePa that’s kind of hard for us old Penn Staters to accept.

What’s even harder to face this morning is that I can’t say, putting myself in the same circumstances, if I’d have made the hard choice either. How many times have you been driving somewhere and seen something that wasn’t right – somebody sideswiping a parked car and racing off, somebody else graffiting a home or business – and thought about doing something about it, but then the light changed and the guy behind you started honking his horn, and you were late for your appointment, and getting involved would mean talking to the police for hours and hours, so you drove on, feeling guilty and hoping somebody else would do something about it.

You’d like to think that, with something more serious, you’d actually stop the car, but would you?

As writers, I think we owe it to our readers to force our heroes into making hard choices – even in fantasy fiction – because, while it’s unlikely that those readers will ever be faced with a slavering monster while armed only with a sword, there’s a very real chance that someday they might learn that something terrible has been happening under their noses, and have to decide whether or not to stop the car and do something about it.

A good story could help them make that choice.

For the past couple books, I have been writing directly from my layout of 3×5 cards. I now think this was unwise, and cost me time and effort later on in the process – fixing things that I didn’t notice were wrong at the beginning, and realizing that things I thought were cool in concept were actually unworkable messes. Thus my eureka moment – laying out the plot on cards is an essential step for me, but there should be another step before beginning to write.

When I first started writing for Black Library, they insisted I do detailed synopsises and chapter by chapter breakdowns. I thought it was an unnecessary pain then, but now I see that it helped the novels. When forced to turn the sketchy notes on my cards into a document that somebody else had to read, I would find holes and bits that didn’t work, and was able to put them right before I got too deep into the book. Now I’m writing that detailed breakdown for myself, and it’s already helping me fix the weave and smooth out the rough corners of the new novel.

Note to self – hubris and laziness are a writer’s worst enemies. Do the fucking work!