Bard Constantine's Blog

It’s been over a decade since I began writing under . Many things have changed since then, and at long last, I feel that the name should as well. Ever since the pandemic originally wrecked my creative drive, output, and publishing schedule, I’ve had time for a lot of time for reflection. What I’ve accomplished on my publishing journey, the mistakes I’ve made, and where I want to go now that I’m back in the saddle. The first thing on the agenda is reissuing my fantas...

Eye of Everfell is special to me. It is the first novel I attempted to write, an ordeal that nearly killed me. Or, at the least, drained me like a vampire does its thrall. It has been revised innumerable times and took so much effort that I took a break and wrote two other novels before coming back to finally complete it.

It was a beast.

And I’ll always love it for that. I cut my teeth on an epic fantasy, a bold endeavor I wasn’t ready for but nonetheless wrestled with until completion. I’...

Might as well start fresh.

To say the last couple of years have been strange is an understatement. The changes, the losses, the stress … we still don’t know how damaged we’re all going to be since the fallout continues at the time of this writing. I’ve been fortunate. I didn’t lose any loved ones to the pandemic so far. What I did was
get my car totaled in a wreck, chop off the tip of my index finger in a workplace accident, and get diagnosed with Covid seven days ago.

Can’t complain.

It’s been forever since I wrote a blog post, but no lengthy explanations nor apologies. The priority has been the novel writing, which has finally picked up to something of a regular occurrence. Which brings me to today’s subject: The Troubleshooter: New Haven Blues, my first full-length novel. (The Aberration is the official start, but counts as a novella)

Published on June 22, 2012, the hastily-written McGuffin chase introduces Mick Trubble, a private eye in a...

I’m very happy to announce the first release of this year for my personal imprint, BWB Publishing. Not only did I have a blast writing Nimrod Squad, but I also was able to stick to my writing schedule and get this novel out on time for a March release. (Just barely, but did it!)

So what is Nimrod Squad about? It’s a fast-paced action adventure following the exploits of four misfits who ultimately band together to become Nimrods, as bounty hunters are called in Havenworld. There’s Cash Murdock...

The design of a cover is an exciting process, and I’m sharing a peek behind the scenes. In this article, the cover in question is Nimrod Squad, my tale of a dysfunctional crew of bounty hunters.

The cover started off as a premade designed by J Caleb Clark of J Caleb Design, whose fantastic work I can’t recommend enough. What’s a premade? It’s when the designer creates a cover for a specific genre, puts mock title and author fonts on it, and then presents it for sale. It allows them to work fr...

I discovered Trail of Lightning when I saw the cover to its sequel, Storm of Locusts. Being a fiend for good cover art, I immediately wanted to buy that book. Then I found out it was the second book in the series and went back to find the first, which also had fantastic cover art by Tommy Arnold. Finding out Rebecca Roanhorse was a Pueblo/African American writer definitely impelled me to buy as I’ve meant to read more fantasy told from a non-Western POV.

Trail of Lightning is the story of Mag...

Imagine a world broken. Where humanity believed our only chance of survival was hibernation in stasis chambers until the day arrived to claim the world as ours again.

Imagine a dystopian future where glittering cities exist alongside unchecked wilderness, where you can stumble from a cyberpunk setting into a post-apocalyptic one. Imagine the strange and wondrous sites and residents of such a place.

If you can imagine that, you just might be in Havenworld.

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The concept was first conceived in t...

Looking at the odds, Blade Runner really shouldn’t have become such an iconic film. While visually dynamic, it features an almost entire cast of morally dubious, unsympathetic characters, including its protagonist. The only two characters who qualify as innocents in the film are Rachel and Sebastion, who both suffer greatly in spite of that fact. The world of Blade Runner is dark, hopeless, and chaotic, where acts of sudden violence appear to be the norm, and the best of humanity has already...

Anyone who’s read my previous reviews knows that I’m a fan of H. Leighton Dickson’s writing. Her prose is evocative and poetic, her stories and characters memorable and intricate. So it was only a matter of time before I got to her latest novel, Dragon of Ash & Stars. (Which boasts one of the best-looking covers I’ve seen in a great while.)

In this fantasy world, there are no horses, and little else in the way of domesticated animals of burden other than oxen. So the human inhabitants take to...