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2012 Debut Author Challenge: Jeff Salyards
“Please welcome Jeff Salyards to The Qwillery as part of the 2012 Debut Author Challenge Interviews. Jeff’s debut, Scourge of the Betrayer (Bloodsounder’s Arc 1) was published on May 1 by Night Shade Books. You may read Jeff’s Guest Blog – Open 24/7 – here.
TQ: What would you say is your most interesting writing quirk?
Jeff: You mean besides the fact that I need to wear butt-less chaps and a Donald Duck mask every time I sit down to write? I kid, of course. No on has to wear anything like that—it’s clearly a choice.
In all seriousness, you hear about some writers who absolutely have to write everything longhand on certain color tablets with one particular kind of pencil that has to be a precise length, not too sharp, not too dull, nor too long or short, and they have to work between the hours of 10:15 a.m. and 1:15 p.m., with the temperature between 71 and 74 degrees, and their whole writing mojo goes out the window if they deviate from this script or pattern in the slightest, and you can’t help but think: try decaf, you neurotic crazy person. Or worse, the apocryphal stories of writers who need intense pressure or even physical danger to be able to produce, like a loaded gun on the desk next to them, silently pledging to blow their brains out if they can’t put 3,000 words to paper (I wonder if you wrote a suicide note that was 2,800 words—would you cut yourself some slack and round up and call it a day?).
Those are extreme, but a fair numbers of writers have elaborate rituals or need just the right accessories or atmosphere or whatever to make it all happen. Those make for great anecdotes, but I’ve largely been too inconsistent to develop anything like that. Having a day job and three small kids at home, I pretty much write whenever I can knock two minutes together to do so—at night when the house quiets down, on the train, in a notebook, on a laptop, on the roll of toilet paper. It’s a free-for-all.
I promise, though, if the books ever take off enough for me to write full time, I’ll be sure to come up with something wacky, funny, frightening or quirky to reveal next time you interview me.” Read the full interview at The Qwillery.
“Worlds Beyond Your Ken: A Guide to the Nebula Awards.”
“God’s War by Kameron Hurley: First-timer Hurley has a sensibility not too far removed from Jemisin’s. Both have a fine feel for action and have no compunctions about burying readers up to their necks in conspiracies and bloody intrigue. Where Jemisin works in a vein of mythological overkill, Hurley has a grittier cyberpunk feel to her writing. Her fascinating God’s War is another far-future story set on a planet far from Earth in terms of light years, but quite neighborly in the similarity of its politics and problems.” Read more.
“By the time I finished reading it, my list of authors to check out was considerably swollen.”
“I used to read a lot of science fiction back in the 1960s and 1970s. Among my favorite authors were Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Barry Malzberg, Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree, Jr. I stopped reading the genre around the time that it took a quantum left field turn into Star Wars territory. I remember walking into a chain bookstore and finding that an entire wall of the store had been set aside for science fiction and fantasy, but there wasn’t anything I wanted to read. I never cared much for fantasy or space opera (with some exceptions), and the whole genre was given over to it.
What fantasy/science fiction I have read in the intervening decades has been tapped with the horror tar brush, so I have been, shall we say, out of touch with the genre for some few decades now. So it is that THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY OF THE YEAR: Volume Six, edited by Jonathan Strahan, contains a great number of authors who are award-winning in the field yet whose work I am encountering for the first time. My feeling with respect to anthologies of this nature is that, at least in part, they should provide an introduction to those who are looking to broaden their reading habits; this installment does that very well. By the time I finished reading it, my list of authors to check out was considerably swollen.” Read more.
Recent Releases
The Croning by Laird Barron
Strange things exist on the periphery of our existence, haunting us from the darkness looming beyond our firelight. Black magic, weird cults and worse things loom in the shadows. The Children of Old Leech have been with us from time immemorial. And they love us…
Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly eighty years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret…
…of The Croning.
From Laird Barron, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation, comes The Croning, a debut novel of cosmic horror.
Scourge of the Betrayer by Jeff Salyards
A gritty new fantasy saga begins . . .
Many tales are told of the Syldoon Empire and its fearsome soldiers, who are known throughout the world for their treachery and atrocities. Some say that the Syldoon eat virgins and babies–or perhaps their own mothers. Arkamondos, a bookish young scribe, suspects that the Syldoon’s dire reputation may have grown in the retelling, but he’s about to find out for himself.
Hired to chronicle the exploits of a band of rugged Syldoon warriors, Arki finds himself both frightened and fascinated by the men’s enigmatic leader, Captain Braylar Killcoin. A secretive, mercurial figure haunted by the memories of those he’s killed with his deadly flail, Braylar has already disposed of at least one impertinent scribe . . . and Arki might be next.
Archiving the mundane doings of millers and merchants was tedious, but at least it was safe. As Arki heads off on a mysterious mission into parts unknown, in the company of the coarse, bloody-minded Syldoon, he is promised a chance to finally record an historic adventure well worth the telling, but first he must survive the experience!
A gripping military fantasy in the tradition of Glen Cook, Scourge of the Betrayer explores the brutal politics of Empire–and the searing impact of violence and dark magic on a man’s soul.
The Black Opera by Mary Gentle
Naples, the 19th Century.
In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, holy music has power. Under the auspices of the Church, the Sung Mass can bring about actual miracles like healing the sick or raising the dead. But some believe that the musicodramma of grand opera can also work magic by channeling powerful emotions into something sublime. Now the Prince’s Men, a secret society, hope to stage their own black opera to the empower the Devil himself–and change Creation for the better.
Conrad Scalese is a struggling librettist whose latest opera has landed him in trouble with the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Rescued by King Ferdinand II, Conrad finds himself recruited to write and stage a counteropera that will, hopefully, cancel out the apocalyptic threat of the black opera, provided the Prince’s Men, and their spies and saboteurs, don’t get to him first.
And he only has six weeks to do it . . . .
The Best Horror of the Year Volume 4 edited by Ellen Datlow
Fear is the oldest human emotion. The most primal. We like to think we’re civilized. We tell ourselves we’re not afraid. And every year, we skim our fingers across nightmares, desperately pitting our courage against shivering dread.
A paraplegic millionaire hires a priest to exorcise his pain; a failing marriage is put to the ultimate test; hunters become the hunted as a small group of men ventures deep into a forest; a psychic struggles for her life on national television; a soldier strikes a gristly bargain with his sister’s killer; ravens answer a child’s wish for magic; two mercenaries accept a strangely simplistic assignment; a desperate woman in an occupied land makes a terrible choice…
What scares you? What frightens you? Horror wears new faces in these carefully selected stories. The details may change. But the fear remains.
Night Shade Books is proud to present The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Four, a new collection of horror brought to you by Ellen Datlow, winner of multiple Hugo, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy awards.
Table of Contents:
The Little Green God of Agony – Stephen King
Stay – Leah Bobet
The Moraine – Simon Bestwick
Blackwood’s Baby – Laird Barron
Looker – David Nickle
The Show – Priya Sharma
Mulberry Boys – Margo Lanagan
Roots and All – Brian Hodge
Final Girl Theory – A. C. Wise
Omphalos – Livia Llewellyn
Dermot – Simon Bestwick
Black Feathers – Alison J. Littlewood
Final Verse – Chet Williamson
In the Absence of Murdock – Terry Lamsley
You Become the Neighborhood – Glen Hirshberg
In Paris, In the Mouth of Kronos – John Langan
Little Pig – Anna Taborska
The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine – Peter Straub
Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess by Phil and Kaja Foglio
Intrigue! Subterfuge! Circus Folk! In a time when the Industrial Revolution has escalated into all-out warfare, mad science rules the world… with mixed success. With the help of Krosp, Emperor of All Cats, Agatha has escaped from the massive airship known as Castle Wulfenbach. After crashing their escape dirigible, Agatha and Krosp fall in with Master Payne’s Circus of Adventure, a traveling troupe of performers dedicated to staging Heterodyne shows–dramatizations of the exploits of Bill and Barry Heterodyne and their allies–who are unaware of Agatha’s connection to the Heterodyne line. Pursued by the ruthless Baron Klaus Wulfenbach, his handsome son Gil, and their minions (not to mention Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer), Agatha hides in plain sight among the circus folk, servicing their clanks and proving herself adept in performing the role of Lucrezia Mongfish, nemesis to–and later wife of–Bill Heterodyne. She also begins training under Zeetha, swordmistress and princess of the lost city of Skifander. Together, Agatha, Krosp, and the performers travel across the treacherous wasteland of war-torn Europa, towards Mechanicsburg, and the ancestral home of the Heterodynes–Castle Heterodyne. But with many perils standing in her way–including Wulfenbach’s crack troops, mysterious Geisterdamen, savage Jagermonsters, and the fabled Storm King–it’s going to take more than a spark of Mad Science for Agatha to get through.
Faustus Resurrectus by Thomas Morrissey
Unholy murder is just the beginning of the ritual…
When Donovan Graham, newly-graduated occult scholar, helps the NYPD investigate a man killed by scorpions in a midtown hotel, he learns the world is far stranger and deadlier than his studies ever suggested. Evidence forces his academic skepticism to give way to astonished belief that ancient evil exists, and the more he investigates, the higher it rises to overshadow the normality of his life. Can he save those he loves from its power?
In a Central Park overrun with madness, a suave sociopath seeks to achieve his darkest desires by tearing apart the world. Battling him through death and beyond, Donovan risks his soul to learn reality is flexible, and even the impossible can be had if a high enough price is paid…
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