THE SECOND BELL named one of SFF180’s 31 most anticipated 2021 Fantasy novels!
A friend sent me a link to this yesterday!
My debut, The Second Bell, coming out in March 2021 from Angry Robot, has been listed as one of SFF180’s 31 most anticipated Fantasy novels of 2021!
I’m so incredibly chuffed and grateful to be listed alongside Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne (whose books, Empire of Sand, and Realm of Ash, inspired by the Mughal Empire, I absolutely LOVED), as well as some really exciting debuts, The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec (a Norse retelling about the wife of Loki), and Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, the first volume of a new fantasy trilogy inspired by the pre-colonial empires of West Africa!
There are many more amazing books on that list, so I link the video below, so you guys can have a look!
Writing Scenes of Pain
Now my writing is filled with a whole lot of pain and hardship and difficulties. Misery writes itself, as we all know. But that could lead you to the entirely wrong assumption that I enjoy inflicting pain upon my characters. I do not. The scene I wrote today felt as upsetting to write as it was for my MC(well, close at least). The current WIP is a first person narrative, which adds another level of upset to the whole thing. As I type I channel the sensation of touch, smell and taste into the descriptions, because that’s what my character is experiencing. There is a sense of responsibility here. If you make your darlings suffer, you have to make it good. Suffering not written well feels trite and like a betrayal of this person you have created.
And, unlike in life, suffering has to serve a purpose. We’ve all sat through a badly written show or movie where the protagonist seems endlessly knocked about, but learns nothing, does nothing, and the viewer in the end gets the uncomfortable impression the authors of the protagonist’s suffering are either a)getting some unsavoury sort of satisfaction from the whole thing or b) they keep writing the same thing in the hope the next plotline will eventually reveal itself. Which, as we all know, is the first sign of madness.
But here’s the rub: striking that balance, where the suffering of the MC serves a purpose but not in a too obvious and realistic way is the hard bit. And each time I take from my MC something they love, or inflict physical pain on them, I hope I get it right.
Character sketches
Now for something entirely different… When I write I like to do a few sketches here and there: mostly of my characters and maps, though I have in the past done larger illustrations too. I thought I would share a few of them.
It serves a purpose further than just indulging my love for art. It fixes the characters in my mind. Though they might and often do change within the time it takes me to complete a manuscript, taking the time to pause and commit their features to paper gives me a sense of where they are and where they’re going. And once the manuscript is indeed finished, it’s interesting to look back and see the snapshot of how I imagined certain elements of my WiP at each moment in time.