Wind Weaver

Wind Weaver

After a long hiatus – due to work and the world going a bit crazy – I’m so happy to release my new fantasy romance Wind Weaver.

For this novel I combined my interest in Ancient Greece with my love for the sea and sailing. The protagonist, Xanthe, is a wind mage, able to weave the air into what shape she desires, a useful gift in a world of islands and sailing ships. However, to reach her full potential she needs to find her Shadow, the one person who holds the power to compliment her gift.

But of course it’s not so simple. Ashkar, a noble from a desert kingdom, has ideas of his own. Not exactly delighted with such an inconvenient passenger aboard his ship, he nevertheless offers her a bargain in exchange for her services as a wind weaver, for he has a secret mission to fulfil.

And so their journey begins. But unless they manage to reach a true understanding, they might well run aground on the dangerous shoals ahead.

If you’re interested in their adventures, you can find the story on Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, Nook, Smashwords and Scribd.

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Daughter of Wolves

I’m afraid it’s been a while since my last post. Real life is just keeping me rather busy and I don’t have as much time for writing and reading as I used to. However, I did find the time over the winter to get another story ready for publication.

Daughter of Wolves is set in the same world as Bride to the Sun, but a couple of years later. This time I wanted to explore the culture of the Khotai, who are cast as the villains in my other two novels.

The protagonist Javaneh is half Khotai, half Sikhandi with a heritage of metal magic from her mother’s family. And we encounter her as she is on the run and desperate for another horse – so desperate that she’s willing to gamble her body for it. Only it turns out she might get more than she bargained for.

If you’re interested in Javaneh’s adventures, the novella is available for free on iBooks, Kobo, Nook and Smashwords or for a minimal price on Amazon (they won’t let me give it away for free).

I hope you’ll enjoy coming on this adventure with me!

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Nabokov’s favorite word is mauve

This book is a fascinating read for anybody who – like me – likes both words and numbers. The author applies the tools of statistical analysis to a database made up from thousands of books and answers questions such as: did writers follow their own advice (Hemingway on the use of adverbs), who uses the most clichés in their work or even how often the weather is used in the first sentence of an author’s novel.

A particularly fascinating chapter shows how some words are used with different frequency by male and female writers and how it’s possible to tell the gender of an author from such commonplace words as ‘is’, ‘the’, ‘but’ or ‘and’. There’s also a table comparing the use of the words ‘he’ or ‘she’ in individual books with the most extreme being ‘The Hobbit’ – which only has a single ‘she’ for nearly two thousand ‘he’!

Going even further, it’s not only possible to guess the gender, but each author has an individual ‘fingerprint’ of how they use certain words, so with a large enough sample you can tell if they used alternative pennames (like for example J.K. Rowling and Stephen King) or how much of a co-written novel was the work of which author.

The chapter dealing with authors’ favourite words (which gave the book its name because Nabokov uses ‘mauve’ 44 times more often than the average English writer) also makes for fascinating reading. While it’s not surprising that J.K. Rowling should use ‘wizard’ a lot or Tolkien ‘elves’, Hemingway seems to have had an unusual liking for the word ‘concierge’?

All in all, the book has a really interesting approach towards analysing literature using statistical tools and it’s also an entertaining read. I only wish it were longer – or that some of the tools used were available online!

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Flame in the mist

Flame in the Mist, set in a world strongly based on Medieval Japan, tells the story of Mariko, the daughter of an important Samurai lord who is betrothed to the younger son of the emperor of their land. On her way to the capital to get married, her party is ambushed. She can escape into the forest, but everybody else is killed. For reasons of her own, she then decides not to return home, but to discover who wants her dead and why. In order to do that she dresses up as a boy and joins an outlaw group called the ‘Black Clan’ and from there the story takes off.

I have to say I’m rather conflicted about this book. There are some aspects of it I liked a lot, but others I’m not so fond of. So let’s start with the good:

The world! I love reading fantasy novels inspired by Eastern cultures and the world of this one is well researched.

The language – it’s rather flowery and probably not to everybody’s taste, but I thought it fitted the theme of the novel well and enjoyed even the more far-fetched metaphors.

The characters – for such a traditional society the heroine Mariko is surprisingly modern in many of her attitudes (for example to pre-marital sex or women’s roles), but on the other hand she’s got spunk and I also liked some of details the author added to flesh her out, for example that she’s got an interest in inventing things.

The not-so-good:
The magic – I would have liked a better idea of how magic works in this world. Perhaps there will be a better explanation in the sequel, but as it is, it’s frustratingly vague and does not seem to follow any rules.

The plot – this unfortunately asks for a lot of suspension of disbelief. To give an example, Mariko is kept as a virtual prisoner in the camp of the Black Clan and has one of the outlaws spy on her secretly. And yet they never notice she’s a girl dressed up as a boy? All the practical considerations like finding a place to pee out of sight or menstruation just do not seem to exist in this world.

So for my taste, overall Renée Ahdieh got a lot of things right and quite a few wrong. Yet I will probably still read the sequel ‘Smoke in the Sun’, simply to immerse myself in this world again (and because I hate not knowing how a story ends!).

 

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Elephant Thief is live

Releasing a new book or fanfiction story always feels a bit like letting a child go out into the great, wide world and hoping that people will like it!

I suppose it’s all the time and effort you invest as an author, the enthusiasm you feel while writing, and the wish that your readers will see the characters and world you’ve created through your eyes and fall in love with them.

So today I launched my youngest offspring – Elephant Thief – a fantasy romance. It’s available as both eBook and print edition and I hope you’ll have as much fun reading it as I had writing it!

Elephant Thief on: Amazon  iBooks  Kobo  Nook  Smashwords

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