Fantasy writer and history buff Django Wexler discusses the writing epic fantasy warefare and the societal conditions which likely would (and wouldn't) produce a female warrior class. (Previously published May 2013 on ye olde World Weaver Press website; content relocated to shiny new website.)

This piece got its start in a Twitter exchange about the ridiculousness of the armor female warriors are forced to wear in fantasy movies, games, and artwork.  Eileen Wiedbrauk asked if I would write something about it for the World Weaver Press blog, but after a little bit of research I discovered the ground had already been well-covered by parodies and people with a lot more experience than I have. [see: Fantasy Armor and Lady Bits]

In any event, I'm a novelist, not an artist, and my background is in history.  So I thought I would try something a little broader.  Since we were discussing the realism of women's armor in a fantasy context, let's consider how realistic those female warriors are from a historical point of view, and what fantastic elements an author might want to introduce to create a society that plausibly fits the story he or she wants to tell.

In short: If we want to create a society that encourages female warriors, what might that society look like, and why?

It was very early in the writing process when I realized Eve’s marriage to Ryam DeLeon was pretty much critical background to the first book in the Fate of the Gods series. In the beginning, I just was never quite sure how to include it. Include journal entries sporadically throughout the book? Full-on flashbacks? Or leave the story out completely, letting Eve and Garrit’s discussions inform the reader to the most crucial elements?

By the time I sent FORGED BY FATE (then titled The Book of Generations) to World Weaver Press, I had settled on the multiple timeline framing for the first two books, and happily, that meant that I could include at least one chapter about Eve’s marriage to the Marquis from Thor’s perspective, but I knew even that wouldn’t be enough, ultimately. Not to satisfy me, anyway! 

World Weaver Press (Eileen Wiedbrauk, Editor-in-Chief) is pleased to announce Taming Fate by Amalia Dillin, a novella in the “Fate of the Gods” series, and previously featured in A Winter’s Enchantment is available in trade paperback and ebook today, Tuesday, June 24, 2014.

For the first time in her many lives, Eve would rather be anywhere but home. In 15th Century France, Eve would have burned as a witch if it hadn’t been for the too-timely arrival of the Marquis DeLeon to save her skin. But Eve didn’t ask to be rescued, and their hasty marriage is off to anything but a smooth start. As tensions in the town grow and plague threatens, Ryam DeLeon knows if he and Eve cannot find common ground, their first Christmas may be their last.

Available now in trade paperback:
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Available now in ebook:
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Wholesale available through World Weaver Press and Ingram.

Amalia Dillin began as a Biology major before taking Latin and falling in love with old heroes and older gods. After that, she couldn't stop writing about them, with the occasional break for more contemporary subjects. Her short stories have been published by Daily Science Fiction and Birdville magazine, and she's also the author of the FATE OF THE GODS series and HONOR AMONG ORCS, the first book in the Orc Saga. Amalia lives in upstate New York with her husband, and dreams of the day when she will own goats — to pull her chariot through the sky, of course.

Learn more about Amalia at www.amaliadillin.com.

More books by Amalia Dillin:

Submissions are opening up very soon for Scarecrow and Corvidae, and I’m so excited. One of my favourite parts of editing an anthology is getting to read all the fantastic stories that are sent my way. 

I see on social media that some people are just waiting for the calendar to flip over so they can hit the send button on their submissions, but I assume just as many people are in much earlier stages of their process. So here’s a sneak peek into what I’m thinking and looking for heading into this reading period:

• For both books I want to cover as wide a spectrum in themes, moods and voices as I possibly can. I want frightening corvids and goofy ones, wise scarecrows and menacing ones and everything in between.

• I want stories set in unique and interesting times and places because they couldn’t take place anywhere else. Lush settings that feel immersive and real.

• Give me characters with dimension.
  

• An hour after I finish your story and walk away will I be able to recall the characters with any detail? Are you sure? I’m going to be reading dozens and dozens of stories, make yours stand out.
  

• Please remember the anthology is called Corvidae, not Crows. I do want crow stories, but I also want to cover as many different birds within that family as possible. I want magpies, blue jays, treepies, choughs, rooks, nuthatches… see what I’m saying? The whole Corvidae family, not just the Corvus genus within it.
  

My wishlists include...

Last chance to enter to win paperbacks of these three great new World Weaver Press titles or the huge paperback romance novel giveaway.

June submissions are my favorite. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s the long hours of daylight, or maybe the weather. Spring in Michigan has been cool and wet, which I love. Or at least I love reading during rainstorms. Once the rain stops and the lawn’s shot up four inches overnight, the flower bed’s full of mushrooms, and the basement’s become home to a reflecting pool’s worth of groundwater that seeped in for a visit . . . then I’m not so enamored.

It’s been a few months since my last “From the Editor’s Desk” column, in part because big behind the scenes changes were going on. I teetered between writing about them, and consequentially announcing them too early, and being too exhausted post-change to sketch it down in some coherent form. But here they are! Unpreemptive and (hopefully) cogent!

Taming Fate cover art has arrived! A novella and book 2.5 in the Fate of the Gods series by Amalia Dillin!

For the first time in her many lives, Eve would rather be anywhere but home.

In 15th Century France, Eve would have burned as a witch if it hadn’t been for the too-timely arrival of the Marquis DeLeon to save her skin. But Eve didn’t ask to be rescued, and their hasty marriage is off to anything but a smooth start. As tensions in the town grow and plague threatens, Ryam DeLeon knows if he and Eve cannot find common ground, their first Christmas may be their last.

Previously published in the anthology A Winter’s Enchantment.

Publication date: June 24, 2014. Paperback and ebook.

Full availability on Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, and Kobo on June 24; Pre-order paperback on World Weaver Press. For ebook pre-orders query publisher [at] worldweaverpress [dot] com.

Add it to your Goodreads shelves today!

Who was your first vampire? We're contemplating the first vampires we encountered in film, fiction, and television.

From Rebecca Roland, author of Shards of History: 

When the movie The Lost Boys came out, I was 12 years old. I developed an immediate crush, not on the Coreys, but on Keifer Sutherland who played David, the ultimate bad boy and leader of a band of vampires in Santa Carla, California. With a perfect vampire sneer and contempt for the living, Keifer managed to scare me and send a pleasant little chill down my spine.

Looking back on the movie now, I think David and his vampire gang represented the pitfalls we all must navigate as we're growing up, and so that movie spoke to me on many different levels.

And did I mention the fabulous soundtrack? "People are Strange" still takes me back to that movie and that moment in my life. Junior high is one of the strangest times in a person's life, isn't it? Things change so quickly at that age -- not just our bodies, but our personal tastes as well -- as we start to try on and discard different personas.

From Susan Abel Sullivan, author of Cursed: Wickedly Fun Stories and Haunted Housewives of Allister, Alabama: 

My first vampire was Barnabas Collins on the original gothic soap opera Dark Shadows.  I was only four or five years old when the show first aired, but Barnabas was the reason I kept watching.  The wonderfully talented Jonathon Frid, a Shakespearean actor with a Master's in Drama from Yale, brought a deeply textured performance to a character that very easily could have been campy in the hands of a lesser actor.

I had a major crush on Barnabas even though I was pretty young.  Surprisingly, Frid was a middle-aged man with average looks, nothing at all like the leading men of that time such as Paul Newman, Robert Redford, or Rock Hudson.  But he brought such heart and pathos to the character that I couldn't help falling in love with him.  And neither could the ladies of Dark Shadows such as Josette DuPre, Angelique Bouchard, Roxanne Drew, and Dr. Julia Hoffman. 

I believe Barnabas is the first instance of the vampire as a tragic hero in film, TV, or movies.  Dracula was portrayed as a villain by Bela Lugosi in the 1930s and Christopher Lee in the 1950s, and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire's tragic vampire hero Louis was not published until 1975, four years after Dark Shadows' last episode.  The character of Nick Knight from the TV show Forever Knight owes quite a bit to Barnabas Collins, not only in Nick's quest to reclaim his humanity, but also in the character of Dr. Natalie Lambert, a coroner, who like Dr. Julia Hoffman on Dark Shadows, attempts to cure Nick of vampirism with medical science.

Today, I’m supposed to write a guest post about what it’s like to release Legally Undead.

Part of me wants to just say SQUEE! and call it a day.  (But I won’t.)

This release has been a long time coming.

Ten years ago, my friend Bill suggested I give National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo.org) a try—for anyone who doesn’t know about it, the goal of NaNoWriMo participants is to write a 50,000-word novel in a month. I did that, and more, ending up with what was then a 100,000-word novel in six weeks.

That novel—edited and revised and edited again, but still at heart the same book—was just released by World Weaver Press as Legally Undead.

There are no words for how exciting that is. This book is my first novel-baby, my first novel-love, the first world in which I immersed myself completely as I created it. I went to bed at night thinking about the next scene and sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with words to put down on paper. I’ve done the same since with other books, but as the first, this one holds a special place in my heart.

I love this book.

I love this book so much that I couldn’t stand to see it rejected. It gathered dust for a very long time (so long that I had to go back in and change all the tech references!). I was terrified to send it out. But I finally took a deep breath and submitted it.

And it couldn’t have ended up in better hands. The cover art is perfect. The interior design for the paperback is great (check out that cross between sections!). The blurb rocks.

Perhaps even more important, Eileen’s editorial direction gave me a much stronger sense of where Elle is headed next, and I’m pleased to say that I’m once again immersed in Elle’s world. We’re hunting down vampires together, and Elle’s snarky comments fill my mind.   

I couldn’t be happier.

Margo Bond Collins lives in Texas with her husband, their daughter, several spoiled cats, and a ridiculous turtle. She teaches college-level English courses online, though writing fiction is her first love. She enjoys reading urban fantasy and paranormal fiction of any genre and spends most of her free time daydreaming about vampires, ghosts, zombies, werewolves, and other monsters. margobondcollins.com