A lot of times, my novels will be catch-alls for everything I find interesting about a particular topic. Burn Me Deadly, for example, deals with dragons, and Blood Groove with both vampires and 1970s culture. Usually by the time I finish, I’ve burned out my intense interest in a sort of positive exorcism that gets the obsession out of me … Read More
Across the same river with The Idylls of the Queen
Alice Walker wrote The Same River Twice about the process of turning her novel The Color Purple into a movie. The title itself is a paraphrase of the philosopher Heraclitus, and is more fully translated as, “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.” In 2011, I wrote Dark Jenny, the third in my Eddie … Read More
The grubby heirs of Excalibur: swords in the world of Eddie LaCrosse
My friend Teresa Frohock, author of Miserere: An Autumn Tale (my review is here), asked me how the idea for naming Eddie LaCrosse’s swords came about. I thought this might be interesting to others as well. First came the idea of writing the initial novel, The Sword-Edged Blonde, as if it were a 40s detective novel. This was after years–well, … Read More
The Next Big Thing blog tour
My friend from the Heroic Fiction League on Facebook, Violette Malan, graciously invited me to participate in The Next Big Thing blog series. Each author answers the same set of questions, and passes them on to five more authors, who post their answers the following week and pass them on to five more authors, and so forth. You’ll find Violette’s … Read More
The origin of character names: Eddie LaCrosse
One of the most common questions I get from fantasy fans is, “Why is your hero named ‘Eddie’?” Naming characters, especially the main characters of continuing series, is an art far more than a science. For example, one of my favorite characters, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, has a first name, but in the 40 books Parker wrote (and who knows … Read More
Dark Jenny mass market paperback release
Today the mass market paperback edition of the third Eddie LaCrosse novel, Dark Jenny, hits shelves. It includes a preview from the upcoming Wake of the Bloody Angel, one that’s different from the preview in the paperback of Burn Me Deadly. There was no book trailer for the original release of Dark Jenny, but there is one for the new … Read More
To Avoid Shark-Jumping
As I await the page proofs for Eddie LaCrosse IV (Wake of the Bloody Angel) and begin the first draft of Eddie LaCrosse V (so far, Eddie LaCrosse V), it occurred to me that every book in the series begins with two concepts, one of which is the same each time, while the other is very different. If you’re out … Read More
Kurosawa meets Eddie LaCrosse
Quite a while ago, I posted the trailer to Akira Kurosawa’s crime thriller High and Low, and mentioned it was one of the influences on my novel Dark Jenny. I never got around to explaining that until now. High and Low is based on one of Ed McBain’s “87th Precinct” series of police procedurals, in this case King’s Ransom. And … Read More
Help the southern storm and flood victims (and get cool swag)!
I’m donating both a signed copy of DARK JENNY and my personal DVD of “Excalibur” as part of the HELP WRITE NOW auction to aid victims of the recent southern storms, tornados and floods. Bidding starts at $5!
The Betrayal of Arthur and the scent of disdain
About five years ago, when I was first thinking about the story that became Dark Jenny, I began looking for books that dealt in a critical and scholarly way with the meaning of Arthurian stories. I’d read the basic, classic fiction texts–Le Morte d’Arthur, The Alliterative Morte Arthure, The Once and Future King, The Mists of Avalon, The Wicked Day–but … Read More
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