Babel Clash

Thank you to Bill, James and Matt.  It’s been a great conversation.

Peter & Max didn’t get its fair share of time as a featured title, so I want to take a moment to recommend it.  If you’re a fan of Fables, then you’ll love Peter & Max.  That’s a given.  If you haven’t yet read this award-winning comic series, then thankfully, the novel stands on its own merit.  Bill puts his own unique spin on the classic fairy tale of Peter Piper.  Learn the secret history of the Piper family and then enjoy a classic battle of wills and wits between Peter and his evil brother.  It’s a well told tale by a storyteller who now deserves equal admiration as both a novelist and a comic writer.

Now for our next guest.  I’m honored to welcome R. A. Salvatore to Babel Clash.  Salvatore is the author of the Drizzt Do’Urden novels, including the brand new The Ghost King.  Among his other notable series is the Saga of the First King.  The lastest volume in that series, the Dame, is also available in stores and on Borders.com now.

James, Matt and Bill,

You’ve spoken a lot about influences.  What might developing writers find to be most influential in your own new books?  Can you speak to how or why Midwinter,  This Crooked Way and Peter & Max might prove influential on impressionable young minds?

Excerpts of Blood of Ambrose, This Crooked Way and Midwinter are now listed on the blogroll.  You can also find links here.  Enjoy!

Blood of Ambrose Excerpt
This Crooked Way Excerpt
Midwinter Excerpt

Back to our regularly scheduled program.

I’m pleased to announce and welcome our third guest. Bill Willingham, writer of Fables and author of new novel Peter & Max, joins James and Matt.

Bill, thank you for joining us!

Every writer begins as a reader, so it makes sense to start this conversation about writing by talking about our influences.

My first brush with fantasy (like that of lots of people) came with Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings was a big book on campuses at the time and some of my parents’ hip young friends had given them a copies to get them up to speed. I don’t know if they ever read it, but I was fascinated by the weird covers and the alien runes decorating the splash pages.

Reynolds, cover for "Fellowship of the Ring"

Everyone in the world seemed to have given it a good review, including people I’d never heard of like C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden. So I read it and instantly became obsessed with it. I took all-too-seriously Tolkien’s gravely flip remark that “the book is too short” and, after I ‘d read LotR and The Hobbit a couple times, I launched on my own multi-volume fantasy epic. This one was going to be five volumes long–I didn’t want to repeat the one mistake Tolkien himself admitted making. I wasn’t very far into it before I gave up, but I did, of course make a map. I don’t remember much about it, but there was a mountain range that ran west-to-east and it had a dangerous pass through it called the “Kirach Kung”. There was a scary Mirkwoody sort of forest in it, but I’m not sure if I was already calling it Tychar (the winterwood, at whose verge readers first encountered Morlock a few years ago in “Turn Up This Crooked Way”).

(continue reading…)

Our next guests at Babel Clash are Matthew Sturges and James Enge.

Matthew is the author of the novel Midwinter and is also the writer for comic and graphic novel series House of Mystery and co-writer of Jack of Fables.

James is the author of Blood of Ambrose, and its new sequel, This Crooked Way.

Tune in tomorrow to learn the topic of our next geeky debate. Until then, I recommend cruising over to IO9.com to check out their new Book Club. Their current pick is The Quiet War by Paul McAuley.