Tag Archives: natureofapirate

This is your Origin Story: Giveaway and Interview

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Today is the The Nature of a Pirate book birthday and you get the presents! Here’s a giveaway of all three Hidden Sea Tales books, along with an interview containing a proposition I’ve been wanting to share:

There’s a story we tell here in the west. We tell it over and over. In it, you are sleeping in your pit in the castle kitchen, your only reward a crust of bread and the faint hope that Chef won’t cuff you hard enough to concuss you again. Then some grizzled old dude turns up with a sword, and says you have to go fight a dragon. If you don’t he’ll eat all your villager friends, starting with the brown ones and the queers.

Book birthdays bring many things, and contests, blog posts and interviews are just a few of them. Not-at-all veiled political rants, on the other hand… well. I wrote this essay a couple weeks ago, when I was sick as hell and, along with many of you, was reeling at current events. It’s cousin to the letter I wrote to Canada’s Prime Minister, and like that letter, I hope it’ll speak to some of you.

I am very grateful to the (perhaps aptly named!) Book Wars blog for giving me the space to talk about fantasy worlds and real ones, about good and evil, about fighting and winning. You all have a week to enter that contest!

Sneak Peek at The Nature of a Pirate (ICYMI)

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Tor Books has posted the first chapter of my upcoming novel, The Nature of a Pirate, at its blog. Some of you may have heard me read this chapter… but for those who haven’t, or anyone who wants a refresher, here’s the opening. A taste of a taste, call it.

Kitesharp was bleeding.

The wounded ship was fifty feet long, with a crew of fourteen sailor-mechanics, and when dawn rose over the Fleet of Nations, her blood trail was just a thin line of crimson threaded into her wake. It twisted against the blue of the sea, a hint of pinkish foam that might have gone unnoticed for hours if it hadn’t begun attracting seabirds and sharks.

The whole Fleet watched as the birds shrieked and Kitesharp’s captain raised a warning cone up her mainmast. Soon—presumably after her bosun had been below for a look—a sphere was raised, too. From a distance, both cone and sphere would appear as flat shapes, seeming to onlookers to be a triangle and circle. It meant Ship in distress. Help required.

This particular distress call had gone out twice before.

The entire book will be available in less than a month, on December 6th.