Category Archives: Gail Z. Martin

by Gail Z. Martin

With my new novel Deadly Curiosities (Solaris Books, summer 2014), I make the jump to urban fantasy.  I’ve been writing epic fantasy for seven years, and will be continuing my Ascendant Kingdoms Saga books for Orbit with Reign of Ash in April, so I’ll really have a foot in both camps.  That’s like trying to ride two horses at once, which are each running at different paces.

I’ve read a lot from both epic and urban fantasy, but it was a bit of a switch shifting from third-person narrative for the epic books into first-person for the urban stories.  But I would say that the hardest part has been convincing myself that it’s ok to use modern phrases in the urban book since I worked so hard to become aware of them and avoid them in the epic books.

There are so many words and phrases that we use every day that do a great job of conveying exactly what we mean.  In normal conversation, we don’t worry about the origin.  In writing, it matters a lot.  There are a couple of etymology web sites that have become bookmarks on my computer because I am frequently checking to see when a word or phrase was first used, and how it was used.  For example, people have been puking since the Middle Ages, but they didn’t barf until recently.  And while they have been pissing for hundreds of years, it’s only in the last few decades that anyone has been pissed off.

It matters because the wrong word choice is an anachronism and it ruins the suspension of disbelief for the reader.  The right words take the reader deeper into the atmosphere of the book.  The wrong word yanks them out with a hook.

Since I’m a word junkie, I find this fun.  I collect cool words like other people collect shiny rocks.  So I’m overjoyed when I find a great period-authentic word that is exactly what I need.  The trick is to sprinkle those less familiar, but authentic, words so that they are enjoyable little bonuses instead of annoying readers by sending them to their thesaurus on every page.

With Deadly Curiosities, it’s also fun because the book is set in modern-day Charleston, SC, so there are some wonderful concepts and phrases unique to that area that help to set the mood.  And while visiting the Middle Ages to check out locations isn’t entirely possible (although it’s amazing how instructive it is to visit what’s left), scouting local spots in Charleston is easy and always a pleasure.

So there you have it–the hardest part is remembering to have characters speak in modern English.  Strange, but true!

Reign of Ash, book two in the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga launches in April, 2014 from Orbit Books.  My new urban fantasy, Deadly Curiosities, comes out in July, 2014 from Solaris Books. I bring out two series of ebook short stories with a new story every month for just .99 on Kindle, Kobo and Nook—check out the Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures or the Deadly Curiosities Adventures.

by Gail Z. Martin

I grew up around antiques.  My dad haunted antique shows and flea markets, dragging me with him on my childhood weekends.  Dad would go off on a quest for whatever he was looking for at that particular time, leaving mom and me to wander the aisle on our own.  Even back then, I remember being fascinated with the idea that these objects had a history of their own.

I would imagine what they had witnessed, what secrets they had overheard.  Perhaps a vintage evening purse had been to the opera or to Lincoln Center.  Maybe a piece of jewelry had been worn when the former owner met a dignitary, movie star, or other luminary.  To salvage the day from utter boredom, I would start concocting stories about what I saw and regale my mother with my imaginings.

Decades later, going to an antiques or collectibles sale became a stroll down memory lane.  I’d spot a piece of furniture that an aunt had owned, a vase that looked familiar from the home of a childhood friend, a dish or clock that I remembered from my youth.  My husband and I would laugh at how pieces donated to charity just to be rid of them were now fetching big money as “collectibles.”

Fast forward again, and I learned how much objects become a touchstone for memory as my husband and I had the task of cleaning out our childhood homes after our parents passed away.  Handling the family silverware, the good dishes, the table linens became almost sacramental as we remembered the events and people who had used them.  Surrounded by family members, someone would pause from cleaning out a cupboard or closet to hold out an item and say, “Wow, do you remember this?” Reminiscing became a way to honor the memory of those who were gone and to pass on those stories to the younger cousins and grandchildren.

Perhaps after all that, it was inevitable that I would come up with the concept behind my upcoming Deadly Curiosities urban fantasy series, which will debut from Solaris Books in the summer of 2014.  Cassidy Kincaide is a psychometric, someone who  can read the history of an object by touching it.  She runs Trifles & Folly, an antiques and curio shop in historic, haunted Charleston, South Carolina, whose real business is getting dangerous magical objects off the market before they cause disaster.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of strange, unnerving and odd items laid out for sale at antique shows.  I’m not worried about running out of fodder for tales about Cassidy and her team!  I’m excited about the chance to share her world with readers in Deadly Curiosities!

My new urban fantasy, Deadly Curiosities, comes out in July, 2014 from Solaris Books. I bring out two series of ebook short stories with a new story every month for just .99 on Kindle, Kobo and Nook—check out the Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures or the Deadly Curiosities Adventures.

by Gail Z. Martin

“May you live in interesting times,” is a Chinese curse.  Boring times may be well, boring, but they also tend to be stable, safe, and predictable.  All the things that make those times boring also make them less dangerous.

By contrast, “interesting” times are unstable, dangerous, unpredictable and in a constant state of flux.  Those times make for great fiction, but aren’t such fun to live through while everything is being decided.

In my Chronicles of the Necromancer series, Tris Drayke has the misfortune of living in interesting times.  The king’s murder touches off a chain of events that lead to Tris running for his life with a few close friends, trying to outwit bounty hunters and figure out how to unseat the despot who has usurped the throne.

The chaos that makes things interesting for the reader bring hardship and misery to Tris as he fights his way through a dangerous landscape where nothing is as it seems and no one can be trusted.  When times are “interesting,” rules change, old ways of doing things don’t work anymore, and there’s always a dangerous power grab as the chaos of the moment unseats the previous top dogs.

As society reshuffles itself, there are winners and losers, and the people who were on top under the old order rarely end up keeping their spots (or their heads).  Sometimes, the entire social order is upended, as when a country is overrun by invaders from a foreign country.  A natural disaster, a bad harvest, or a plague can bring down the mighty and raise the powerless, and when the dust settles, nothing is the way it had been.

Creating “interesting times” is one of the fun parts of being an author.  We love to torture our characters, and it’s a challenge to make things bad, then worse, then even worse to see what the character will make of it.  It’s also a great way to learn about your characters, because you won’t really know what they’re made of until they’re in hot water.  Some will turn out to be heroes.  Others will betray their friends, run from the fight, or sacrifice themselves for others.  Even we authors don’t always know for sure what’s going to happen until we put the characters in the situation and see what happens.

“Interesting times” are at the heart of great stories.  All stories focus on something that changes, or else there is no tension, no opportunity for growth.  So here’s to “interesting times”!

Reign of Ash, book two in the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga launches in April, 2014 from Orbit Books.  My new urban fantasy, Deadly Curiosities, comes out in July, 2014 from Solaris Books. I bring out two series of ebook short stories with a new story every month for just .99 on Kindle, Kobo and Nook—check out the Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures or the Deadly Curiosities Adventures.

By Gail Z. Martin

I love the quote, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”  That’s true in the real world, but it’s always true in fantasy.

In my Chronicles of the Necromancer series, all of my female characters “aim to misbehave.”  Kiara Sharsequin may be the heir to the Isencroft throne, but when she needs to find a way to heal her father the king, and avoid an arranged marriage to a tyrannical monarch, she takes off on her own and breaks all the rules to find a solution.

Carina Jesthrata is a healer whose been making her own way since she and her twin brother, Cam, were cast out of their home because their neighbors feared that twins were bad magic.  Between Carina’s healer’s talent and Cam’s brawny size, they find work with a mercenary troop, and later with a traveling caravan.  It’s not the genteel life of a healer to a noble house, but it puts Carina in position to affect the future of the Winter Kingdoms.

Aidane is a serroquette, a ‘ghost whore,’ a medium who can permit a ghost to inhabit her body for an intimate reunion with a living lover.  She makes her way despite the Nargi priests who hunt down and kill the serroquettes. When she is caught, beaten and left for dead, her unlikely rescuers sweep Aidane up into intrigue in a war-torn kingdom, setting a chain of events into motion that put the fate of the new queen in Aidane’s hands.

In my Ascendant Kingdoms Saga, Kestel Falke is a spy, a courtesan and an assassin.  (It was the assassin part that earned her a one-way ticket to the Velant prison colony.)  Her fighting skills keep her alive and protect her within the brutal Velant prison, and her adaptability helps her survive was a colonist in the harsh Edgeland climate.  When magic fails, Kestel finds herself being the bodyguard and lover of the one man who might be able to put things right.

And in my Deadly Curiosities series, Cassidy Kincaide is the owner of Trifles & Folly, an antiques and collectibles store in Charleston, SC that is much more than in appears to be.  Cassidy is a psychometric, able to read the history of objects with a touch.  That comes in handy, because Trifles & Folly is the front for an organization dedicated to removing dangerous magical objects from circulation.  Cassidy’s work involves a fair amount of breaking and entering, and a certain level of subterfuge to keep the store’s real purpose under wraps. (You’ll see more of Cassidy in my story, ‘Retribution,’ in the Athena’s Daughters anthology, and in the new Deadly Curiosities series from Solaris books in 2014.)

If any of my heroines had been “well-behaved,” they would never have gotten into the situations that let them save the monarch, save the kingdom, or chart their own destiny.  By defying the norms of their culture, social class and circumstances, they break the constraints that would have kept them from coming into their full abilities and making a huge difference in the world.  Let’s hear it for women who misbehave!

Reign of Ash, book two in the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga launches in April, 2014 from Orbit Books.  My new urban fantasy, Deadly Curiosities, comes out in July, 2014 from Solaris Books. I bring out two series of ebook short stories with a new story every month for just .99 on Kindle, Kobo and Nook—check out the Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures or the Deadly Curiosities Adventures.

by Gail Z. Martin

One of the reckoning points when we watch apocalyptic shows like Revolution, the Walking Dead or the series Life After People is how quickly life as we know it vanishes without the power grid, at least for those of us in First World existences.

Without electricity, settlements in areas of extreme heat (like Las Vegas) or cold (like North Dakota), or that rely on either irrigation for water supply or on power to rid them of excess water could not sustain the population under natural conditions, at least not on the scale to which they have developed.

High rise buildings are not sustainable without electricity to run the elevators and provide light, heat, water flow and necessary services.  City sanitation breaks down without sewer treatment facilities and garbage trucks can’t pick up trash if electric gas pumps don’t work.

In my novel Ice Forged, magic functions like the culture’s power grid.  Most magic is of the small, convenient and useful variety–protecting crops from pests, draining swampy areas, preserving food, and the like.  Magic is their science, and those small magics undergird more of their everyday existence than anyone realizes until one day, the magic disappears.  A devastating war with the neighboring kingdom provokes the battle mages on both sides to employ a doomsday strike. The strike has the unforeseen consequence of breaking the bonds that had made it possible for people to control magic and returning the power to its wild, untamed state.  Fire rains from the sky, weather becomes more extreme, and in all the hundreds of ways in which people had depended on small magics, life falls apart.

One man might be able to restore the magic, but there are factions that like the opportunity chaos provides, and therein hangs the tale.

While I’m not usually a fan of modern apocalyptic stories, I was intrigued by the premise for Ice Forged for a couple of reasons.  First, because it’s a medieval apocalypse, which was suited to an epic fantasy format.  And secondly, because the idea of struggling to do things the old way, without magic, just got a hold of my imagination and wouldn’t let go.

Back in the 1970s, when the back-to-nature movement got started, the Foxfire books seemed to be on everyone’s bookshelves.  These books sought to impart what most of our great-grandmothers and grandfathers knew (and what the Amish and other cultures without modern technology still do, but city-dwellers don’t).  Canning, growing a backyard garden, folk cures and low-tech solutions suddenly became interesting as people began to wonder about sustainability and the unintended consequences of pesticides, EMF fields, chemical additives and other modern “miracles.”

I was on an apocalypse panel at Dragon*Con where we were talking about what it would look like 10 years after The Event. We agreed that preserving the accessible (no disk drives!) forms of knowledge that explain how to do the crucial things (farming, first aid, surgery, canning, etc.) would be essential for society to rebuild in less time than it required to evolve those technologies the first time around.  Blaine’s world has to go back four hundred years to find out how things were done without magic, so the transition is even starker.  And in order to try to fix things, you’ve got to live long enough to make the attempt.

In Ice Forged, one group that adjusts without difficulty to the lack of magic is the talishte, the immortal vampires.  They remember how things were done centuries ago because they were around when it was done that way.  And while they’re quite capable of coping without magical conveniences, some of the talishte join forces with my hero, Blaine McFadden to bring back the magic because they appreciate the civilizing value and the convenience that “power grid” provided.

It’s the little things that disappear when the world ends, as much as the big things.  In Blaine’s world, when the magic fails, both the living and the undead have their reasons to get the world back on track, and their enemies have just as many reasons to want the dark times to stay as dark as possible.

Reign of Ash, book two in the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga launches in April, 2014 from Orbit Books.  My new urban fantasy, Deadly Curiosities, comes out in July, 2014 from Solaris Books. I bring out two series of ebook short stories with a new story every month for just .99 on Kindle, Kobo and Nook—check out the Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures or the Deadly Curiosities Adventures.

by Gail Z. Martin

What is it about National Enquirer headlines, traffic accidents and the end of the world that make us squeamish about looking and unable to look away at the same time?

It’s kind of like being at the top of one of those really high observation decks and double-daring yourself to go to the edge and look over, while fighting that evil little voice in the back of your mind that keeps yelling “jump, jump, jump!”  You don’t want to look, but you can’t help yourself.

For me, that’s the appeal in writing about the end of the world.  You don’t want to be there, but you can’t stop rubbernecking.

Reign of Ash is the second novel in my Ascendant Kingdoms Saga series, due out from Orbit Books in April, 2014.  It’s the sequel to Ice Forged, in which I took a lovely medieval world and blew it to smithereens all for the sake of adventure.  Well, to be perfectly honest, conniving kings, territory-grabbing neighboring kingdoms and mages who became weapons of mass (magical) destruction really did the blowing up part.  I just came along afterwards to chronicle what happened next.

While I’m not usually big on modern post-apocalyptic stories, the idea of writing a medieval end-and-rebuilding story fascinates me.  Perhaps it’s because the real Middle Ages had its share of end-of-the-world moments.  I’m sure that’s what the fall of the Roman Empire looked like to the people living in the aftermath, as well as the time of the Black Plague, various and sundry dynastic wars, the Inquisition and periodic invasion by warlike neighboring kingdoms.

Reign of Ash follows up where Ice Forged leaves off.  The kingdom of Donderath has been leveled by a combination of war and a catastrophic doomsday magical strike that not only brought down devastation on both warring kingdoms, but unexpectedly knocked out the magic on which the culture depended for its survival.  Imagine depending on magic the way we rely on the power grid, and you get an idea of what’s at stake. What if the only person who might be able to restore the magic was a disgraced lord serving a prison sentence in an arctic penal colony?  What if some powerful lords saw the opportunity to gain power by maintaining chaos??

Those “what if” questions lay behind the creation of the Ascendant Kingdoms books.  One of the intriguing questions for the survivors of the Cataclysm is what does the future look like, when just rebuilding what you had in the past won’t work?  When you can’t get back what you’ve lost, where do you go from here?  It’s a meaty question, and one that my characters will be exploring for several more books!

Reign of Ash, book two in the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga launches in April, 2014 from Orbit Books.  My new urban fantasy, Deadly Curiosities, comes out in July, 2014 from Solaris Books. I bring out two series of ebook short stories with a new story every month for just .99 on Kindle, Kobo and Nook—check out the Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures or the Deadly Curiosities Adventures.

by Gail Z. Martin

I love writing epic fantasy–so why am I stepping over to spin some urban fantasy tales?

This year, 2014, will be the first time I’ll have new novels out in both epic and urban fantasy.  In April, Reign of Ash will continue the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga from Orbit Books. It’s the sequel to Ice Forged as the apocalypse continues in the kingdom of Donderath.  And in July, Deadly Curiosities from Solaris Books will introduce readers to a brand new urban fantasy world set in historic, haunted modern-day Charleston, SC.

Reign of Ash will be my eighth epic fantasy novel.  I love the broad canvas of epic fantasy, and the opportunity to tell a sweeping, complicated story that is both big enough to encompass kingdoms and dynasties and intimate enough to depend on personal relationships.

I’m personally having a blast imagining the medieval apocalyptic scenario that lies at the heart of the Ascendant Kingdoms storyline.  The high Middle Ages had a rich and complex culture, dependent on alliances, the feudal system, a network of trade agreements, and a complicated social structure.  Layer in a dependence on magic akin to our reliance on the power grid, then blow the whole thing to smithereens, and you’ve got a ruined world ripe for intrigue, power games, social restructuring, chaos and anarchy on a scale that’s, well, epic.

As someone who majored in medieval history in college, there’s a level of perverse pleasure in being able to make a living from a much-maligned liberal arts degree (see Mom, I knew what I was doing!).  I enjoy writing what some people call “big fat fantasy” and novels the size of a brick because it’s fun to mentally move into a fictional world for an extended stay–packing a steamer trunk instead of a carry-on bag, so to speak.  It’s exciting to tell a detailed, richly layered, complex story with a juicy tangle of plotlines that eventually sort themselves out to a conclusion on a big screen scale.

So why venture into the dark alleys and shorter word count of urban fantasy? Because different stories require a different setting, and I had some characters that weren’t going to leave me alone until they got their own book.

Deadly Curiosities grew out of a short story I did for the “Magic” anthology by Solaris books.  That story, “Buttons” was set in the Trifles & Folly curio and antique shop, where the real mission is to find and remove dangerous magical objects from circulation. I’d been writing stories in that universe for several anthologies, but in different time periods ranging from the 1500s to the late 1700s, so “Buttons” was the first story set in modern times.  Since my epic fantasy series have always taken place in entirely fictional worlds, it was a new challenge to remain historically accurate while slipping supernatural mayhem into the mix.

I discovered that jumping into a completely different setting, era and voice not only felt like taking a literary vacation, but it actually recharged my epic fantasy batteries as well.  Switching back and forth between the two subgenres keeps me on my toes, and it’s created a level of energy and creativity that is both exciting and surprising.

You know you’re in the right place when writing feels like too much fun to be how you make your living.  Here’s to having a foot in both worlds!

Reign of Ash, book two in the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga launches in April, 2014 from Orbit Books.  My new urban fantasy, Deadly Curiosities, comes out in July, 2014 from Solaris Books. I bring out two series of ebook short stories with a new story every month for just .99 on Kindle, Kobo and Nook—check out the Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures or the Deadly Curiosities Adventures.