New Cover For Guardian of the Dawn
As you can probably tell, I have been sprucing up the Kormak ebooks recently. Here is the lovely cover that the talented Clarissa Yeo over at bookcoversale.com did for the short story Guardian of the Dawn. If you’re interested, you can read the whole story for free here. The Author’s Notes are here.
New Kormak Covers
Here are the new covers for the first three books in the Kormak series. I think we can all agree they are a gigantic improvement on the ones I designed myself using Powerpoint and stock art. They were created by Clarissa Yeo at bookcoversale.com. I highly recommend Clarissa if you’re in the market for a cover for your print or ebook. She is fast, talented, patient and very pleasant to work with as well as reasonably priced.
A Map Of Kormak’s World
So finally the Kingdoms of the Sun have what all serious/series fantasy worlds seem to need– a map. This beautiful one was done by Chazz Kellner using Campaign Cartographer 3. (Thanks Chazz!) It’s an enormous improvement on the vague sketches and lists of names that I produced when I first started writing the stories. The distances are accurate and I now have a much clearer idea where everything is. It’s been a fascinating process watching bits of background from my published books, my notes and my half-completed short stories take shape. I’ll be adding this map to the latest version Read more…
Author’s Notes: Weaver of Shadow
Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilisation is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph. That quote, as you probably well know, comes from Robert E. Howard. More specifically it comes from his 1935 story Beyond the Black River, one of my two all-time favourite Conan tales. (It’s a toss up with Red Nails. I can’t choose between them.) Beyond the Black River illustrates Howard’s theme all too well. It’s a tale of violence along the border between the civilised land of Aquilonia and the Pictish Wilderness. It was written late in Howard’s Read more…
Author’s Notes: Defiler of Tombs
I started work on Defiler of Tombs almost seven years ago, back in 2006. I really wanted to write a novel about Kormak, the monster-hunting hero of The Guardian of the Dawn but I was trying to fit it into the template that would be acceptable to a conventional fantasy publisher. I’ve written about what a struggle that was elsewhere, but to recap, I was trying to fit a lean, taut sword and sorcery tale into an oversized vessel, to make it longer than it was meant to be. It could not to be done (by me at least) and Read more…
Stealer of Flesh Released In Czech
Here is the cover for the Czech edition of Stealer of Flesh now on sale throughout the Republic. My thanks to the good people at Polaris for the release. (And thanks to Radka for the photo.)
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