“A gritty, medieval fantasy full of enchantment” (Publishers Weekly), David Keck’s epic Tales of Durand trilogy concludes with A King in Cobwebs

Once a landless second son, Durand has sold his sword to both vicious and noble men and been party to appalling acts of murder as well as self-sacrificing heroism. Now the champion of the Duke of Gireth, Durand’s past has caught up with him.

The land is at the mercy of a paranoid king who has become unfit to rule. As rebellion sparks in a conquered duchy, the final bond holding back the Banished break, unleashing their nightmarish evil on the innocents of the kingdom.

In his final battle against the Banished, Durand comes face to face with the whispering darkness responsible for it all―the king in cobwebs.

* * *

Of Daughters & Day Jobs

I learned a little about writing and time while I worked but on The Tales of Durand. The final book, A King in Cobwebs, was a wee bit late — it really ought to have been published in the 1850s. And, for this inordinate delay, I would like to blame my family.

When I was an unattached, semi-employed youth, I had a special sort of time. There were whole days and evenings and weekends when time yawned like the sea and I could jump right in. If I wanted to work out ideas and build stories (or worlds) over months and months, I could do it. Magic. Now that I’m a proud parent with a real job and various responsibilities, I’ve noticed some fairly obvious things about writing in scattered fits and starts.
First, if you don’t keep nudging a story along on a nearly daily basis, the whole architecture of the thing tends to fade from the imagination. (I want to use the word “palimpsest” here, or maybe some metaphor with watercolors and drizzle, but I’d better not). When the interrupted writer returns to the work from a long break, the story has become a strange place. And it can take real time to find the blueprints and collect the tools. So, clearly, a monastic life of penury and solitude is the way forward. (Although now that I think about it, there are advantages to love and regular meals which ought to figure in the balance. You may wish to draw your own conclusions).

The Magic of the Jouster’s Armpit

The Tales of Durand is a harrowing story, but researching the books was a great fun. For me, the best finds were those telling, unexpected bits that make a person feel that the past is a real, weird, particular place you’ve never been before. They popped up everywhere. I remember reading a First World War memoir and gathering stories of mud and fleas. A crowd of school kids and I heard an old castle guide explain time (with sundials and bits of dangly jewelry). And modern day jousters? They use the internet to grumble about how a well-struck lance chews up the lancer’s armpit. How can you not collect these things?

I suppose the notion is that readers will, for a second or two, feel like they’re meeting the real people of some real place (at least as peculiar as our own).

Squashing My Orcs

There is great fun to be had in catching cliches, and I caught a few while I was working on Durand.  (I imagine every writer fights with them). If you can spot one of these terrible things — and squash it — the resulting splatter of new and interesting ideas can be immensely satisfying.

Of course, it isn’t always easy to catch the things: they will often arrive disguised in little bits of superficial creativity. I remember, as a teenage writer, feeling quite proud of the unique qualities of “my orcs”, for example. And, to this day, I keep a forest of cunningly disguised elves hiding just off camera. Fantasy is full of such temptations.

But, when you do manage to catch a cliche, what fun you can have! I’d planned a scene where my hero would ride up to a strange castle and call for the man in charge. You can picture a castle wall. Guards on top. A big gate.

Fortunately, before I tried to reupholster scene, I caught myself. What if there was no one at the castle? What if everyone has vanished? What if they’d followed their leader into the hills? It could be a pilgrimage! What sort of holy place could it be? Why would they go? In the end, I was very pleased with the little world of motivations and repercussions that popped up when the story left the well-trodden path. (There’s a scene now where a doomed father grieves a lost but once-promising son in a strange gorge of hanging rags).

Splat!

Time, Tide, and Disappearing Horses

In the future, I may write a novel set entirely in a single room.

In my favorite stories, the landscape is alive. It is its own character, and it has the power to conjure up boatloads of awe and dread and wonder. I’m thinking of the cold, claustrophobia of the Icelandic sagas; the majesty of the Tolkien’s broad spaces; Sherlock’s moors; or Shelley’s arctic wastes. It’s all good fun.

If you are going to take your readers through a few good landscapes; however, you are almost forced to put your characters on horseback and send them trotting all over creation. (This is unfortunate).
Horses are ticklish things. Anybody who knows anything about horses will tell you that nobody knows anything about horses. I gathered useful hints about personality and maintenance from guidebooks and handbooks and conversations with actual people, but no practical amount of research could ever do the job. There is a neat and frustrating divide among historians, for example, about whether a medieval charge was a galloping affair or only a grim and resolute canter full of razor sharp points.  Worse, horses have a curious tendency to disappear from the pages of a novel. During the revision process of The Tales of Durand, horses popped in and out of existence more times than I am comfortable admitting. I suspect that this is where centaurs came from.

When there’s a lot of traveling, time soon becomes a challenge as well. In The Tales of Durand, time is measured by the movements of the sun and moon. In fact, the moon has a new name each month (based on timeless cycles of the agricultural year, because it’s a fantasy novel and people expect things). Sadly, all of this created a record keeping issue. Over the course of the series, I’m not sure how many times I put two full moons in the same month, two sunsets in a single day — and I’m still not sure I understand tides.

(Thank goodness for editors. Really).

Little Actual Exploration

The seed of this trilogy was a flawed little short story about a fellow who felt miscast in the role of hero. He did the job, but he didn’t feel that he deserved the accolades. That was the idea, but I’m not sure I could have told you precisely where the story was going; the notion of the doubting hero felt like something I wanted to explore.

Three novels in, I’ve started to see more clearly where my head was. The reader meets quite a number of tortured souls in these pages, and, typically, their wounds are self-inflicted. People hang onto their guilt or doubt or anger no matter how it hurts them. And, because we’re in an enchanted world, their suffering renders them monstrous and tears at the landscape. Thankfully, by the end, some of my favorite characters are beginning to come to their senses. (They might even have a chance at happiness).

Maybe what I’m saying, in several hundred thousand words is that we should cut ourselves some slack.

And be careful with our armpits.

* * *

David Keck is a New York based writer, teacher, and cartoonist who grew up in Winnipeg, Canada.

David Keck: Portal

The Tales of Durand: Print | eBook

THE FUTURE IS CURIOUS.

This novel in six parts is a look at the unlimited possibilities of biotech advances and the ethical quandaries they will provoke. Dayton shows us a near and distant future in which we will eradicate disease, extend our lifespans, and reshape the human body. The results can be heavenly—saving the life of your dying child; and horrific—the ability to modify convicts into robot slaves. Deeply thoughtful, poignant, horrifying, and action-packed, this novel is groundbreaking in both form and substance. Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful examines how far we will go to remake ourselves into the perfect human specimen, and what it means to be human at all.

* * *

Writing a novel in six parts may be easier than writing a novel in one huge part

The six sections of this book are interconnected so that I consider it one complete story. Each piece can, to some degree, stand on its own, but not fully. The six parts are necessary complements that tell, in the end, one united narrative.

And yet…

Because there were six sections, there was freedom to tackle each separately, as I would with a series of short stories. I wrote them out of order, however the whim took me, which happened to mean that I wrote the last section first and the first section last. This unintended sequence was serendipitous because A) it’s always helpful to know your ending when you write and B) and it’s much easier to write a good beginning when you already know how the rest of your story will unfold.

But it was more than writing out of order that made this book easier. There’s the mechanical factor that editing something short involves dealing with fewer “ripple effects” than editing something longer. This meant I could work on discrete chunks and not worry about the whole story for long stretches of time. This novel fits together like an extravagant domino pattern with enclaves that wouldn’t be knocked over by a general domino-pocalypse. Those enclaves were places I could work without all the other sections of the book peering over my shoulder, as it were.

I don’t know if this lesson is useful, because unless I’m planning to slice up all future stories into many distinct parts, editing this book was a surprise vacation that may never happen again.

Sometimes science fact is so amazing that you have to remind yourself why you’re writing science fiction

Writing about human genetic modification and medical advances that will allow us to rebuild ourselves and vastly extend lifespan…well it’s frankly such an enticing topic in real life that I found myself repeatedly up against the dilemma of what to include in the story. I’ve read hundreds of articles on CRISPR, growing human or human-compatible organs in livestock, advanced prosthetics, life extension, you name it. I’ve also interviewed researchers on the forefront of the science—people who are figuring out how to edit and reprogram our immune systems, for example, in order to combat or even cure diseases like HIV. Not in the distant future, but within the next few years. I mean, holy shit!

There were a days when I wanted to go back to school and study biology. And there were other days when I was absolutely certain that I needed to include some tidbit of medical reality in the book because it was so incredible.

I had to reel in my excitement about the reality and channel it into the imagined future. The medicine, the gene editing, the drastically extended lifetimes…they simply aren’t important in fiction, unless they are the context for an intensely personal story that allows you to follow a human being (or a version of a human being) that you care about. This was harder than it sounds and there are so many great ideas lying on my metaphorical cutting room floor. But they were abandoned in service of the six main characters and what mattered to them. Essentially I had to remember whose story this was—not mine but theirs.

A character will only do so much, unless…

And speaking of characters, I got to re-learn a lesson I’m taught in every book: a character will only do what she is meant to do intrinsically. If that doesn’t happen to include what you believe that character should be doing, then there are two possibilities: 1) the thing you’re asking the character to do doesn’t make a lick of sense and you should get your shit together and change things around or 2) you don’t know that character as well as you think you do.

For me, it’s 2 a surprising number of times. Trouble writing the story I see in my head frequently boils down to not having a true feel for who a character is, what made her the way she is, the formative experiences and relationships of her life, and what, if she ever took the time to think about it, would be her personal philosophy. A legal pad and nice pen and six or ten pages of backstory usually do the trick.

Sometimes it’s okay if the tail wags the dog

When I’m coming up with new ideas, I usually see the characters before I see the world they’re in. But in this book, I understood the world first. I knew I wanted to write stories that involved the genetic and medical future of humans as a race and the experience of growing up and discovering who you are when the very essence of ‘you’ is changing.

That idea wasn’t originally connected to any specific protagonists who would carry the story on their shoulders. Yet it turns out that these snippets of context were enough, and in a short time the characters began to show up to live in the house I was building. I guess the take-away here is that there are many potentially workable ways of staring at a blank page.

Write something meaningful to you, regardless of imagined commercial implications

This one is hard. As I began putting this book together, with its unusual structure and its potential for being categorized incorrectly as an anthology, I couldn’t help wondering: Who will buy this? Could a publisher get behind it or will it be too odd? Is this what I “should” be writing? Will this be a waste of a year?

I stopped asking. Or at least I tried to. Because the thing is, there aren’t valid answers to those questions until you’ve written the book. Unless your name is so huge that your publisher is going to buy whatever you pitch them, no matter how vague the idea, isn’t it better (I asked myself) to simply write the story you want to write? Then you can show people a completed novel. And it will speak for itself.

So that’s what I did. Because the simplicity is this: every publisher in every country of the world, and every reader who has ever existed, wants the same thing: a good book. That’s all. I don’t think I can write a good book if I’m writing to chase an idea of what people might want. And besides that, who wants to spend time on something that doesn’t make you want to jump out of the bed in the morning so you can get to work?

Happy writing to all of you!

* * *

ARWEN ELYS DAYTON is the best-selling author of the Egyptian sci-fi thriller Resurrection and the near-future Seeker Series, set in Scotland and Hong Kong. She spends months doing research for her stories. Her explorations have taken her around the world to places like the Great Pyramid at Giza, Hong Kong and its islands, the Baltic Sea. Arwen lives with her husband and their three children on West Coast of the United States. You can visit her and learn more about her books at arwendayton.com and follow @arwenelysdayton on Instagram and Facebook.

Arwen Elys Dayton: Website | Twitter

Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful: Print | eBook

Some quicky bits —

A bunch of my eBooks just popped up for sale, I believe going for the whole duration of December. Those titles include all my Skyscape-pubbed YA books:

Under the Empyrean Sky (Heartland 1)

Blightborn (Heartland 2)

The Harvest (Heartland 3)

Atlanta Burns

Atlanta Burns: The Hunt

They’re all a buck a pop. (Well, $0.99.)

The Heartland series is a Steinbeckian Star Wars riff, and Atlanta Burns is a dark teen noir with, honestly, a bunch of trigger warnings in tow. Both series are ostensibly about sticking it to rich people, to be honest.

The audio looks like it’s on sale for each, too, for $1.99.

Also it looks like my run on Turok is collected for $3.99 if you so desire it.

And I think that might be all the news that’s fit to print.

HAVE SOME MACRO PHOTOS.

First is a… well, a stick. It’s just a stick. And it has snow on it. But the glow of the morning light and the shallow depth of frame gives it kind of a magical vibe.

Second is broccoli.

Yep, broccoli.

Wet broccoli, in fact.

Point of trivia: Wet Broccoli was my nickname in the CIA.

Enjoy!

Charity Blake survived a nightmare.

Now she is one.

Punk-rock runaway Charity Blake becomes a Harpy at night—a treacherous mythical monster who preys upon men just like the ones who abused her. Struggling through an endless stream of crappy coffee shop jobs, revolted stares, and self-isolation during the day, Charity longs to turn into the beast at night. Doing the right thing in all the wrong ways suits her.

But a Harpy’s life belongs in Hell—the gruesome Wood of Suicides, where the Harpy queen offers Charity just what she’s looking for: a home where she can reign supreme and leave behind the agony of her past. The choice to stay in Hell would be easy, were it not for a rock-and-roll neighbor who loves her for the woman she is—even when he discovers the creature she becomes—and unexpected new friends with their own deranged pasts and desires who see Charity as their savior. But salvation isn’t in the cards for Charity. Not when her friends see through her vicious attitude and fall in love with her power as the Harpy. 

Struggling between the life of an injured outcast and the grizzly champion of a blood-red hellscape, Charity must thwart her friends’ craving for her power enough to fear her corruption—and determine once and for all where her salvation lies: in eternal revenge or mortal love.

* * *

Shying away from the real horror is SHY and shy is stupid when writing horror or anything else.

The blood, the viscera, that’s all the safe part. Even the sometime setting of Dante’s Wood of Suicides in THE HARPY—which, I mean, wow—is partly safe. I mean, you’ve probably not been there. You’ve probably not been gored by a bird broad. The real horror in writing this book was knowing that some of my readers were runaways, were abused, were scarred in every way they could be. I pushed boundaries writing this book at all, but there were points when I asked myself should I? So many people will wince at Charity’s past and what’s leaked into her present. Is it too much? Yes, it is. It most definitely is. The horror in this book is in what Charity’s past has made her think of herself, what it’s done to her mind, her heart and soul. And that’s a horror that shouldn’t be shied away from, specifically because it is real. Exploring that, knowing the emotional flaying it will cause for some scares the smoke out of me for a multitude of reasons. But I want to be the kind of creator that is afraid of what I create. I want it to open doors that have been closed too long, to pull the skin slowly when the Band-aid comes off, for the novacaine to wear off just a little too soon… I want it not to just terrify, but to make me feel. I want that for my readers.

“Too cerebral” means “too stupid” and I refuse to believe that of my readers.

Though it’s fun, THE HARPY isn’t light reading. To make it surface would be disrespectful of the subjects it treats and it’s not the way I write. I didn’t get a college degree in English to not overcomplicate shit. I’m also a grand-standing advocate of giving kids books beyond their age group if they want them, because they want them. How do we learn if we don’t challenge ourselves? And what gives anyone the right to say who’s smart enough to take interest in any book? The interest alone says the reader is smart enough. When THE HARPY was rejected by one editor for being “too cerebral” after having been pitched to many by my agent, I knew it was time to change my publishing path. I will not now or ever dumb down my work because someone else thinks it’s too involved. If a reader doesn’t get it and wants to? They’ll read it again. They’ll dig deeper. Hopefully it will inspire them, teach them something new about themselves. Maybe it won’t work, but hell, I will not shallow-fy ™ myself in any way because The Man or any man tells me to. Which leads me to…

There is no definition of “strong female character” because there is no end to the list of fights we fight.

Ah, the old “strong female character.” As though women are these amoeba-like crybaby gelatin molds that speak, and the examples of ones that can stand on their own should be pointed out. The strong female character needs to be defined by how much ass she can kick. She doesn’t need to be AMAZING. Charity has horrible self-esteem, does plenty to kick her own ass psychologically and physically. But not thinking she’s SUPER FUCKING AWESOME DOES NOT MAKE HER INTRINSICALLY WEAK. She can call herself a dirty Hell-whore, but you can’t. Is it self-demeaning, self-flagellating, unhealthy as fuck? Yes. But she faces this vision of herself head-on. This is how she feels, and she won’t hide it. Charity fights back just by getting out of bed every day. Her choices once she rolls out of bed suck. But she makes them, and she defends them. She’s a bastard on the outside to almost everyone she meets, and she’s afraid but she’ll never show it, and she’s hurt and lonely and thinks she doesn’t deserve any kind of happiness—but she keeps going. Day in, day out. That’s strength. Those of us who fight every day whether we lose more often than not, who are exhausted by existence for All the Reasons, who keep going though sometimes it might feel easier not to—that’s a hero. Charity’s acknowledgement of her dark and uglies, showing them to you whether you want to see them or not, that’s what makes her honest, and that hideous honesty is a type of strength that can’t be denied. Strength isn’t always what it looks like. Who she is isn’t up to you.

“Anti-hero” is still a label, and a real anti-hero doesn’t care what you think.

I love an anti-hero. Long live the anti-hero. But this character… This book isn’t about a hero or an anti-hero as much as it is about a woman. A woman who doesn’t need to be quirky and cute, thoughtful and kind. She can be Batman but more bitter. She can be the Crow but funnier. She can be Hannibal Lecter-esque with a sticky lipstick smile. She doesn’t have to be a nice girl, feminine or not feminine; she doesn’t have to be a rough and tumble, bitingly sarcastic bitch either. IT’S ENOUGH THAT SHE JUST IS. Like anyone who feels hopelessly beaten, she’s thrilled at the idea of release, of escape, of revenge, of winning something. Giving in to it doesn’t make her a weak woman, or a villain, or a hero. She’s a monster, but she’s human. Heroes, and women for that matter, can want revenge and still be called heroes. And she certainly doesn’t have to be everyone’s hero. She does right in the wrong ways though it doesn’t necessarily help her. And it’s not selfless. I think I like that I’m not quick to label her because she’s more than one thing. Aren’t we all? What matters is that she’s somebody, and someone who is ever-changing. Not a straight-shot change, either, but one with a lot of back-tracking and bumps and falls. If I had to say one way or the other, yes, I would say Charity is an anti-hero. But she would tell you to fuck off for asking.

Once again, there is no right way to write a book.

This is not a new statement, but it’s one that bears repeating. There are no rules to writing. I write because the rules don’t work for me. I make the rules and break my own rules pretty quickly. To write something brand new, I had to try something brand new, something I didn’t even know was possible. I can’t believe how smoothly it worked out. I say that, but it wasn’t luck either: I know what makes my writing mine, and I stuck to it; a tether to keep myself firmly in my world. First, I twisted mythology to my own devices. Second, I made the book scary on the outside, pretty on the inside. Third, I made sure that nobody else could tell this story but Charity Blake. But the weird thing I tried? I took a concept that I hold dearly and I stripped it naked. I live and breathe by the idea of building a room around a piece of art. Don’t buy the painting to match the couch; find the art you love and get the couch to go with it. The rug to go with the couch, etc… For THE HARPY I started with one sentence that came to me—I swallowed a Hell splinter—and I made it a chapter title. Who would say it? What would make her say such a thing? And what is the lie that she believes?  I built a book that way. I shaped the story around the chapter titles I created. Of course, I did all the other stuff to make a book into a wonderful thing, but this was my strategy, and it was refreshing and fun and allowed me to explore words and concepts in a way that I would never have thought of in my usual context. So, you know—try stuff. Rebel against what you know. I like to say make your passion matter, it’s kinda my slogan. What I learned from writing THE HARPY is to make your passion bigger, different, moving. Be a mad scientist with your work and you’ll get something unexpected. And don’t be afraid of the scary stuff.

* * *

Julie’s a mythology-twisting, pizza-hoarding karate-kicker who left her ten-year panty peddling career to devote all her time to writing. She is the author of Running Home, Running Away, The Wind Between Worlds, and now, The Harpy. Julie revels in all things Buffy, Marvel, robots, and drinks more coffee than Juan Valdez and his donkey combined, if that donkey is allowed to drink coffee. Julie lives in Plymouth, MA, constantly awaiting thunderstorms with her wildly supportive husband, two magnificent boys, and a reptile army.

Julie Hutchings: Website

The Harpy: Print | eBook