Category: unbirthday

And now we have come to the end of this past month’s celebration of The Silk Betrayal. Thank you for joining with me in this series of posts, and be sure to get yourself a copy of the novel and a few more to share. Encourage your local library...

As I’ve mentioned before, there are many characters in The Silk Betrayal. I’m not going to go through and introduce every one of them. But I’d like to highlight a few here and introduce them to you:RashulRashul is pure charisma. He’s the Beto O’Rourke*......

The Religions of Eghsal Valley


I’m part of several different online fantasy writing communities. One topic that comes up periodically in worldbuilding discussions is how to handle religion in our imaginary worlds. I’ve always answered that I’m not the least bit interested in any sort of divine reality behind the...

The third principal character I'd like to introduce is Prince Jasfer Talai, one of the Thirty Princes who rule the valley. That makes him one of the thirty most powerful people in the entire known world...but that responsibility rests light on him—for ......

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......

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, ......

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......

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,...

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......

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...