Matthew Hughes's Blog: barbarians of the beyond - Posts Tagged "the-dying-earth"
Jack Vance YouTube Channel
Before he died, Jack Vance and his son, John, set up a webstore to sell Jack’s backlist. I was pleased to be asked to write some blurbs for the titles, some of which are favorites of mine from way back when.
More recently, John, together with Koen Vyverman, created a Jack Vance YouTube channel. Gradually, they are producing individual YT videos a minute or so long, to stimulate interest among the vast and fortunate throng who have never read Vance – I call them fortunate, because I envy them the experience of discovery.
The individual shorts feature artwork and music chosen by Koen and a blurb narrated by John. I’ve been writing quite a few of the texts – I’ve been told I have a knack for such wordsmithery, which is not surprising because I wrote PR materials of all sorts for forty years. More recently, John asked me if I would not only write but narrate the words I’d written. I said sure, and now I’ve done a dozen or so, with more to come.
The first of them promotes Mazirian the Magician, Jack’s preferred title for his seminal work originally released under the publisher’s choice of title: The Dying Earth. If you’re interested in hearing my oddly inflected mid-Atlantic accent trying to stimulate the world to read a Jack Vance classic, tune in here:
More recently, John, together with Koen Vyverman, created a Jack Vance YouTube channel. Gradually, they are producing individual YT videos a minute or so long, to stimulate interest among the vast and fortunate throng who have never read Vance – I call them fortunate, because I envy them the experience of discovery.
The individual shorts feature artwork and music chosen by Koen and a blurb narrated by John. I’ve been writing quite a few of the texts – I’ve been told I have a knack for such wordsmithery, which is not surprising because I wrote PR materials of all sorts for forty years. More recently, John asked me if I would not only write but narrate the words I’d written. I said sure, and now I’ve done a dozen or so, with more to come.
The first of them promotes Mazirian the Magician, Jack’s preferred title for his seminal work originally released under the publisher’s choice of title: The Dying Earth. If you’re interested in hearing my oddly inflected mid-Atlantic accent trying to stimulate the world to read a Jack Vance classic, tune in here:
First draft of The Pelerin's Eye in the can
I’ve finished the first draft of The Pelerin’s Eye, a Dying Earth novel about a necromancer who stumbles into a career as a diplomat for the Duke of Golathreon, the city on the south shore of the Sundering Sea where Baldemar retired after his stint as a wizard’s henchman.
The draft topped out at 82,000 words, which I consider a comfortable length for a fantasy novel. I’m going to let it sit for a little while because the characters mutated as I wrote them, so there will be some need for shoring up in the early chapters to cohere with what happens later.
In the meantime, I will turn my attention to writing the third in the series of novelettes about Cascor the discriminator.
This makes three novels I have now have “in inventory.” The other two are the Baldemar stories, which were consciously written as an episodic novel, and Passengers and Perils, a space-opera sequel to my 2008 novel Template.
I’m not doing anything with these properties while I wait to see what effect Barbarians of the Beyond, the authorized sequel to Jack Vance’s The Demon Princes, has on my ability to sell to publishers. If it makes enough of a splash, I may be able to break out of the small-press ghetto and sell to larger outfits (although having been to The Show twice before, I have mixed feelings about that).
In regard to both my space-opera and Dying Earth settings, I ought to mention: I have no idea what the geography of the lands I’m writing really looks like. Please don’t ask me to draw any maps. These are, after all, realms of the imagination and therefore, by definition, always somewhat hazy.
The draft topped out at 82,000 words, which I consider a comfortable length for a fantasy novel. I’m going to let it sit for a little while because the characters mutated as I wrote them, so there will be some need for shoring up in the early chapters to cohere with what happens later.
In the meantime, I will turn my attention to writing the third in the series of novelettes about Cascor the discriminator.
This makes three novels I have now have “in inventory.” The other two are the Baldemar stories, which were consciously written as an episodic novel, and Passengers and Perils, a space-opera sequel to my 2008 novel Template.
I’m not doing anything with these properties while I wait to see what effect Barbarians of the Beyond, the authorized sequel to Jack Vance’s The Demon Princes, has on my ability to sell to publishers. If it makes enough of a splash, I may be able to break out of the small-press ghetto and sell to larger outfits (although having been to The Show twice before, I have mixed feelings about that).
In regard to both my space-opera and Dying Earth settings, I ought to mention: I have no idea what the geography of the lands I’m writing really looks like. Please don’t ask me to draw any maps. These are, after all, realms of the imagination and therefore, by definition, always somewhat hazy.
