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Not a Prologue
When I began writing seriously, I was a prologue skeptic. Too many fantasy novels I’d read or browsed in the bookstore/library had unnecessary prologues, often prologues with a poorly written poem-cum-prophecy or with a dump of worldbuilding informatio…
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Silk Betrayal: cover art
Another break from my long-windedness today to simply admire the cover art of the novel. We went through a variety of suggestions for the cover. Usually I’m a fan of a more landscape-focused cover, and we went through a few possibilities in that vein, …
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The Silk Betrayal: Marankiya’s epic
Tolkien once gave a now-famous talk about how his impulse to create languages had always been a sort of secret vice for him—and he suspected for a small but passionate number of others. I’ve always admired Tolkien’s language creation, but I am also wel…
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Silk Betrayal: Dramatis Personae
The Silk Betrayal has a lot of characters, including seven who are our points of view for different chapters. I’ve highlighted some of those characters in posts this month. As you read the novel, you may find it useful to have a complete list of them, minor and major, in one place. The book…
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The Ship of Silk on the Calmest Sea
a fable of the Forgotten SouthThe founding mythology of the Valley of Eghsal is that their ancestors came by sea hundreds of years earlier, sailing through usually impassible waters from a distant land known only as the Forgotten South. Before I’d begu…
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Silk Betrayal: timeline
While I have no plans to do a massive George R. R. Martin style multi-book history of the Eghsal Valley and all its twists and turns, the book does include a broad timeline of the major events of the past 600 years. This is, to be clear, the timeline a…
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Silk Betrayal main character: Jaritta
Jaritta is one of those characters writers will tell you about, one who takes over a story and demands recognition.She is an outcast, an untouchable, who spends time at Chaitan’s house with Rashul and all the other dreamers who imagine a different worl…