Sebastien de Castell's Blog, page 4

Did a ton of travelling in 2018 and now it’s time to hunker down and focus on writing Our Lady of Blades (the new swashbuckling book in the world of the Greatcoats) and Crownbreaker (the final book in the Spellslinger series.)

Vancouver is remarkably warm this season, with temperatures often hitting 10 degrees Celcius (or 50 Fahrenheit) which is rather warm for the dead of winter.

Some interesting facts about Vancouver:

The Lions Gate Bridge (a beautiful bridge once used for the Tom Selleck movie “Runaway” which featured homicidal mechanical spiders running across it) was originally built by the Guinness Beer Company.

We have the second largest port in North America, second only to New York. Suck it, Los Angeles.

We have 5 – count ‘em – 5 sister cities, namely: Odessa (Ukraine), Yokohama (Japan), Edinburgh (Scotland), Guangzhou (China), and Los Angeles (United States). Uh . . . sorry about what I said before, Los Angeles.

Oh, and we invented Ryan Reynolds. You’re welcome.

Our Lady of Blades is the first book in the Duellist Series.

Story Journals are where I talk about the writing of the books I’m working on. I update these with the latest content at the top, so start from the bottom if this is new to you.

January 7th – An incomparable work of unimaginable genius . . . or a mess, I’m not sure which.

This is by far the most complicated novel I’ve ever written from a structural perspective. It’s turning into The Count of Monte Cristo meets The Sixth Sense. May need to u-turn here somewhere . . .

December – Oh, hell, what am I doing?

Wrote myself not so much into a corner as a long, dark, and very deep hole in the ground. Now attempting to dig myself out.

November 21st – First 19K words meet with Jo’s approval

One of my favourite things about writing Greatcoats novels is working with editor-to-the-stars Jo Fletcher. In addition to being monumentally experienced and skilled in this arena, she’s also incredibly patient with me, and frequently agrees to read things that are nowhere near finished. Long story short, we’re in agreement now that this new opening is headed in the right direction.

One interesting note: so far Our Lady of Blades has more resonances with Traitor’s Blade in terms of approach than any of my other novels. I kind of like the idea of a return to that style.

November 1st – A new opening . . . and new problems.

There’s a strong Count of Monte Cristo vibe in my new opening, which I love, but by starting the novel the way I am, with the main character as a mysterious stranger who comes to town with their own devious plan, I’m going against a ton of modern narrative conventions. “Save The Cat” this ain’t.

October 15th – An excellent false start

Wrote the opening to the book and it had all the flair and style I was aiming for: swashbuckly, quirky, and full of intrigue. There’s just one teensy-weensy problem: it doesn’t work. I have this entire outline which makes perfect sense and has all the right dramatic beats but I’m realizing now that if I go ahead this way I’m going to end up writing an unintentional YA novel. Don’t get me wrong, I love a great coming of age story, but that’s what Spellslinger is for and I don’t want to dilute that series or this one.

So . . . back to the drawing board.

October 1st, 2018 – Duels, duels, and more duels.

This book is in many ways the biggest challenge for me since I first wrote Traitor’s Blade. The Duellist is meant to be a new series but set in the world of the Greatcoats, but I don’t want to repeat myself, so that means navigating new territory without any assurance that fans of the original Greatcoats series will want to come along.

One of the more fascinating things about being an author these days is that sometimes you’ll learn that one of your characters is actually out there wandering the world. I was overjoyed to hear that actress and cosplayer Megan Kingsbury went to Glasgow ComicCon dressed as the one and only Ferius Parfax!

Going above and beyond, note the thigh holster for some of Ferius’s throwing cards. Megan did an amazing job both with the costume and taking on Ferius’s trademark sass!

Check out more of the photos on Megan’s page on Facebook.

Check out my events page if you want to know where I’ll be on the tour. I’ll try to update as soon as I get info from the organizers.

One of the first things people warned me when I started my career as an author way back in 2014 was that only blockbuster authors ever got to do book tours. Fortunately for me, that rule seems highly bendable. I’ve been fortunate enough to have my books published in fourteen languages and to get to do quite a bit of book touring. What’s surprising, though, is just how much variety there is in each type of event:

Guest of Honour

This was my first time being a guest of honour and I couldn’t have asked for a nicer group of people than the fine folks at the Esbjerg Fantasy Festival in Denmark. Not only did they fly me out from Canada, put me up in a nice hotel, and take excellent care of me, they were also just plain fun to hang out with. Best of all, I got to meet and spend a great deal of time with the legendary Patricia Briggs and her best friend and assistant, Ann. The two of them are wonderfully down to earth and kind, which meant I had the benefit of mentorship and thus managed to not completely embarrass myself in public.

Convention Panelist

What’s fun about panels is that you get to learn from other authors as well as from thoughtful and informed audiences. I’ve done a lot of panels and I never seem to get tired of them. I’m really looking forward to being on panels at Wigtown, DeptCon, and others.

Bookstore Events

The trick with these is that you never know if you’ll be talking to a packed house or four people who just happened to walk by when you started talking. Often these happen as interviews, which can be a lot of fun depending on whether the interviewer has heard of your books before or not . . .

School Talks

I’m always a bit shy about these. It seems like schools get squeezed more and more, and lesson time is at a premium. In a bookstore it’s just understood that you’re there to meet fans and promote books, but students at a school have a right to expect that everyone put in front of them is there to enhance their education. I’ll try my best.

Stock Signings

Sometimes you’re sent to a bookstore to do nothing more than sign copies of the books they put out on the shelf. No audience, no fanfare, just you and a pen and a soon-to-be-sore hand. That said, almost every time I’ve done it I’ve gotten to meet interesting booksellers who are, of course, some of the most well-educated and informed fantasy fans you could hope to meet.

Dinners . . . Dinners . . . Dinners!

I swear, there’s nothing publishers love more than taking authors out to dinner. The conversation is always fun and informative (publishing people generally being a fun lot), but I always feel like I should pick up the cheque. Trying to do so just gets you a slap on the wrist and a stern talking-to.

It’s always a privilege . . .

Whatever form a book event takes, it always feels like you’re getting this amazing and undeserved opportunity. Whether it’s standing on a big stage, delivering a guest of honour talk to a crowd, or chatting with a reader in a signing line, it’s always fun and invigorating.

How many of these tours will I get to do? Who knows. They’re certainly rarer than in the old days (or so I’m told, anyway), so I always try to approach them as if this one is the very last one for me. Fingers crossed that’s not the case!

I’m on a five-week book tour that’s taking me to Denmark, the United Kingdom, France, the Czech Republic, and Ireland!

I’ve spent a lot of time in the U.K. these past few years since Traitor’s Blade was first published. The main reason for this is that both my main publishers (Bonnier and Quercus) are based in the London. Every time I come here I get to see a bit more of the city and the way it’s evolving as time goes by. Despite the multitude of transit options, I walk everywhere, which gives me plenty of opportunities to take in the sights. I’ll also be heading to Glasgow, Wigtown, Bath, and Cheltenham for various literary festivals.

I’d never been to Denmark until this year, and strangely this will be my second visit. In March I was in Aarhus for a couple of events, and in September I’ll be at the Esbjerg Fantasy Festival along with Patricia Briggs as guests of honour.

Next to the U.K., France is the country I’ve visited the most. Still, it’s always a thrill to go to Paris and this will be my first time meeting my delightful French publishers in person!

Prague will be an entirely new city for me, so that’ll be exciting, too. I’ve been to Ireland once before, but that was ages ago, so a visit to Dublin for DeptCon will be a terrific treat!

This article originally appeared in SFX magazine. Or at least, I think it did. I never did get a copy . . .

The problem with funny books – I mean, really funny, giggling-uncontrollably-whilst-everyone-in-your-crowded-train-car-speculates-about-whether-perhaps-someone-ought-to-call-the-paramedics sorts of books – is that you can get so wrapped up in the pleasure of reading that you forget to take the story seriously. That would be a terrible mistake in this case, because Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman is a seriously funny book.

Any attempt to encapsulate the story is doomed to fail, but lets just say it’s about the arrival of Anti-Christ (who gets accidentally switched at birth with the wrong baby by a slightly clumsy satanic nun) and the coming battle between the forces of Heaven and Hell (well, except for the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley who’ve become rather good friends over the centuries and would just as soon the Earth not be destroyed, thank you very much). Of course, you can’t have the end times without the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse making an appearance: War, Famine, Death and Pollution (Pestilence retired in 1936) as well as their hangers-on, the Four Other Horsepersons of the Apocalypse, whose members include Grievous Bodily Harm and Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them a Good Thumping.

Oh, and there’s a bit with a dog. Well, a hellhound, technically, but even that doesn’t work out as expected.

Good Omens is a very English book, which makes you wonder how all those poor souls who had to translate it into so many different languages once it became a bestseller managed to make sense of the endless stream of distinctly British references. In fact, if ever a book didn’t deserve to age or travel well, it’s this one. Written in the late eighties and published in 1990, Good Omens embraced the technologies, celebrities and social aggravations of the period. This alone should have doomed it to irrelevance – and yet with minimal adjustments, the fabulous 2015 radio drama produced by the BBC proved not only that both the humour and underlying social commentary of the book apply equally well to our own era, but also provides grounds for optimism about the upcoming 2018 television adaptation.

Neil Gaiman, acting on a posthumous request from Terry Pratchett, has signed on to write the six-episode miniseries. No doubt Gaiman’s talent and passion for the project will ensure that the humour and satire, the eccentric characters and devious plot twists will all be carried forward from page to screen. As a longtime fan, however, my hope is that this new incarnation will also bring forward the book’s subtle but distinctive political theme – one which may either delight audiences or send them racing to their respective social media bubbles in search of suitably vitriolic posts that validate their sense of being absolutely right about everything. Because while Good Omens takes shots at everything from religion to fad dieting, the real targets of its satire are those who demand that human beings take absolute sides against one another. Heaven and Hell get equally skewered in this – notably in the revelation that they’re both unintentionally funding the same Witchfinder Army. More significantly, it’s precisely the series of unpredictable friendships that violate these traditional divisions – between an angel and a demon, a witchfinder and a prophetess, and most importantly between the Anti-Christ and a bunch of punk kids – that provide the chance at salvation. For a book full of supernatural characters and events, Good Omens turns out to be a profoundly humanist book, and one that resonates even more for me in this polarised age than it did when I first read it twenty-five years ago.

See? I meant it when I said that Good Omens is a very funny book that’s worth taking seriously.

Queenslayer is the fifth book in the Spellslinger Series.

Story Journals are where I talk about the writing of the books I’m working on. I update these with the latest content at the top, so start from the bottom if this is new to you.

August 21st, 2018 – Okay . . . how do I do this now?

Queenslayer was actually the first Spellslinger book I wrote. I’d wanted to write about an outlaw mage with a lousy life – no money, no prospects, hunted by his people and abused by his mean-spirited “business partner”. However when it was time to go to a series, everyone agreed we needed to see Kellen’s origins, and so the earlier books came to life. Since Queenslayer’s already written, this should be easy, right? Piece of cake. Just a tweak here or there for continuity . . .

Nope. I’ve got to go line by line, page by page, and chapter by chapter to figure out what the book wants to be now, and not what it was when I first wrote it.

Still, it sure is fun to read just how much of a jerk Reichis was in that book.

Of all the strange turns in my career – earning a degree in archaeology only to discover I hate digs, taking up fencing for fun only to end up working as a fight choreographer, becoming one of the world’s truly terrible actors yet getting some fun parts, falling into becoming a product strategist . . . etc – the one thing I’ve kept doing since the age of nineteen is performing as a musician. Sometimes I’m hired to play guitar, other times keyboards or bass, often I do a lot of the singing  (See? Even in music I’m the prototypical jack-of-all-trades, master of none.) Sometimes I’m playing very straight, formal shows, sometimes . . . well, here are a few of my recent gigs.

Bring back the eighties . . . and nineties?

A good friend of mine swears that the nineties were the end of rock & roll because almost nothing from that era has really stood the test of time (even Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hardly gets any radio play anymore compared to, say, A-Ha’s “Take on Me”). Still, it’s not for lack of trying. I recently got to play songs like Edwyn Collins “Never Met A Girl Like You Before” and Smash Mouth’s “All Star”. Classics? I don’t know, but people seemed to dig them.

Where’s my damned yellow submarine?

One of my favourite gigs is playing John Lennon in a groovy Beatles show called the Mop Tops. I’ve done a few of those gigs recently. There’s something truly fun about just playing the music of a single band – especially one as sonically compelling and diverse as the Beatles.

Wait . . . you want me to wear a what?

So apparently this was the fortieth anniversary of Animal House. Yes, that’s me wearing a toga. Yes, that look on my face perfectly expresses how weird I felt dressed like that while rocking out to tunes like Shout by Otis Day and the Knights and Twistin’ The Night Away by Sam Cooke.

I’ve since demanded that this become my official author photo for all my books. A good look, don’t you think?

The entire Spellslinger series is coming out in audio, with each book released simultaneously with the print and ebook versions! Best of all, the narrator is the incomparable Joe Jameson who also narrates The Greatcoats series. You can hear an excerpt of his fabulous work below:

When we were choosing narrators for Spellslinger, I really wanted someone who could deliver a performance rather than simply read the novel out loud. Joe has a knack for giving each character they’re own voice and style, and for bringing an actor’s sense of drama to the work. I very much hope you enjoy the audio series as much as I do!

After coming out in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Turkish, and other languages, Spellslinger is finally coming to the shores of North America. The print, ebook, and audio editions will all be available starting on July 17th, 2018! Take a look at these lovely US/Canada-only covers!

Publication Schedule:

Spellslinger: July 2018
Shadowblack: August 2018
Charmcaster: September 2018
Soulbinder: October 2018
Queenslayer: May 2019
Crownbreaker: October 2019

How can I preorder the series?

Just click the book covers above and they’ll take you to the preorder links for each one. Preorders are a huge deal for authors; they make the difference between a hit and a flop, so if you’re thinking of picking up this series about magic, trickery, adventure, and a particularly larcenous squirrel cat sidekick, now’s the time!

Preorder Spellslinger!