Prologues have a bad rap. There are readers out there who have been so badly burned by bad prologues that they will not read any more books with prologues. (I’m not one of them. As a rule, I like my epic fantasy with prologues.) But this was my debut novel. I was going to have…
Fantasy maps occupy a weird space for me as a reader. I don’t tend to do more than look at them briefly before I start reading, and I rarely go back to study them in detail afterwards, yet if an epic fantasy novel doesn’t have any maps, it somehow detracts from the reading experience for…
I am a huge Brandon Sanderson fan. Not just as a reader, but as an author, too. His annotations and his unrivaled transparency taught me a lot about the craft of writing, and his YouTube lectures demystified the intimidating process of taking an idea for a story through to a published work. There is nothing…
Prologue: Anchor The 19th day of early summer, 530 A.E./A.F. Azosh-ek trembled as the first sacrifice toppled over, face first, onto packed earth. He tried not to breathe, but it did no good. The after-echoes of the heathen’s death surrounded him like flames. Hundreds of tiny, purple-edged wisps of gold licked at his bloodied robe, squeezing…