G.D. Burkhead's Blog: The Burkshelf

G.D.’s new standalone novel, Original Sin, is now available. Purchase here.

𝒀𝒂𝒚! 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒒𝒖𝒆𝒆𝒓, an LGBTQ+ anthology from Inkd Publishing, is available now!

We both have stories included, and Mandy was the editor, so we can guarantee it’s full of good stuff

Buy a copy here.

Cozy fiction is still on the rise, and I’m here for it. The more hectic life gets, the more appealing it becomes to read stories about likeable characters just kind of living their lives and vibing without any clear stakes or massive conflicts to deal with. That lack of a clear plotline is supposed to be storytelling poison according to conventional wisdom, but I’m happy to learn I’m not the only weirdo who has been liking books that my high school English teachers would have had a fit over.

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Life comes at you fast, and these past few years have come with a whole lot of extra life stuff to deal with. So it’s been a bit of a while since I’ve actually read much of anything, much less read anything to completion, and much less even than that read anything that’s left me with strong enough feelings to write another one of these.

But then I saw this book on a little shelf in a thrift shop a couple months ago offering “high fantasy and low stakes,” and it looked like the kind of chil...

One of my favorite storytelling tropes is the found family. I thought Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the best movies of the past decade. I still unironically enjoy pirate stories. Badass ladies are badass.

So Seafire by Natalie C. Parker is checking a lot of my boxes.

Seafire is a swashbuckling dystopia following Caledonia Styx, a young woman on the run from a powerful warlord Aric Athair. After her family is ambushed and murdered by a crew of the warlord’s Bullets — loyal soldiers groomed...

This is kind of a hard review to write, just because I’ve already written it once already, so now I have to try not to repeat myself. Part of me just wants to drop a link here to my review of the first book in the series, The Grey Bastards, and leave it at that. And while I won’t actually be that lazy, I will go ahead and link that first review — check it out here, if you’ve a mind.

Honestly, I’m not sure at first what to say here besides: Did you read The Grey Bastards? Did you like it? Bec...

Judge this book by its cover. I did, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Dragon Apocalypse: The Complete Collection by James Maxey is a thick-as-a-brick compilation of four hack-n-slash action fantasy novels (plus the original short story that inspired them): Greatshadow, Hush, Witchbreaker, and Cinder (plus “Greatshadow: Origins”).

Just to be thorough, I did a quick image search of each individual novel’s cover art, and my initial thesis still holds up. Badass lady jumping down a dragon’s throat, sma...

I know it’s gauche to start an essay with a definition, but bear with me for a second, I promise it’s relevant.    Pulp fiction is technically defined by how it’s published, in magazines made with inexpensive wood pulp paper, priced cheaply to be sold and read in bulk. Sometimes this “quantity over quality” approach applied to the stories themselves, but sometimes it didn’t; pulp fiction, like all fiction, is only as good or as shoddy as the author writes it.    But beyond the technicalities...

Hot take: Orcs are bitchin’.

Big, tough, ripped, brutal badasses, for years they’ve been the go-to choice in fantasy for evil power players in need of intimidating mooks. More recently, modern fantasy has granted them a PR boost, both in reimaginings and in original stories. Black-and-white morality is out of fashion, shades of gray are in, and this gives orcs the opportunity to take the powerful, intimidating, dangerous image they’ve cultivated through decades of villain status and turn it t...

Like the 500 million people who downloaded the thing (according to Venture Beat) and its 21 million daily users (according to SurveyMonkey), I am a little bit fascinated by Pokemon GO: the social aspect, the use of augmented reality, and the incentive to get out and wander around new and/or familiar places. It’s kind of amazing to see how many people this little free-to-play game is bringing together through a shared interest, giving folks who might otherwise have trouble socializing an easy ice...