My friend and boon companion, Brent Thomas, invited me to appear on his podcast where we discussed Rat Queens, scandals thereof, Villains by Necessity, and about 14 other topics.
This was a ton of fun – mainly because that jerk lives in Japan and we rarely get the opportunity to speak the Nerd Cant. His podcast is focused on exploring comics and our relation to them, but he’s also a fantasy author himself. Check his blog for his short fiction and keep your eye peeled for his debut novel, The Deadly Troubadours.
I was interviewed for a local podcast, hosted by the inimitable Demon of the Sea: Sean Polite.
It’s sort of a follow-up interview from a podcast we did about a year ago, when I had just finished the first draft of Spell/Sword — kind of fun to talk about it now, when I’m right near the oncoming cliff of self-publishing. The first half of the interview is basically me just yammering incoherently about the plot of the book, story structure and my aspirations as a self-published genre writer. I even give a somewhat coherent description of the book.
The second half Sean surprised me with a veritable gunny sack of various nerd/comic / genre greats — I expound at great length about their cultural impact. I have some killer material on Why Neil Gaiman is a Wood Nymph and Scott Summers Man-Love.
Click the image below to listen for free, or download to put on your music device of choice.
There is some naughty language used in the podcast.
1. It’s fun. Looking at it just makes me smile. It’s unapologetically goofy and cartoony. Most fantasy art takes itself so freaking seriously.
2. It’s different. This doesn’t look like 98% of the fantasy novel illustrations I’ve ever seen before. Not on the shelves at Barnes & Noble, not on Amazon.com or anywhere else.
3. It’s clean. All of the negative space just pleases me aesthetically. A traditionally published novel would want to cram more information and more verbiage on there. I’ll probably have my name on their, somewhere very small, but that’s it. I also think it’ll really stand out when seen online as a tiny thumbnail on someone’s Kindle.
4. It makes me think of Chrono Trigger. My book sits very comfortably in the mental space occupied by Dungeons & Dragons, JRPGs, and manga. I adore that this would not look terribly out of place on the cover of any of those three.
5. It will make people vaguely embarrassed to be seen reading it. Not so much with the Kindle version, but people who have the paper copy. Anyone reading this will be broadcasting to the world that they are a Huge Nerd.
Huge props to Poopbird on the illustration, you should follow the link from here or the image itself and check out his entire portfolio and buy stuff from him.
I hope this gets you marginally excited about reading the book. I know it gets me far more than marginally excited about finishing it.
spell-sword.com 