Conor Kostick's Blog

I'm excited that the Dragon's Revenge is available on pre-order and will be out in paperback and eBook on 9 August. An audio book is in production too with Tantor.

The Dragon's Revenge is the start of a new LitRPG series and is something of a prequel to Epic in that it is set on Earth in the near future, when a games company with the backing of a crypto-currency investor has created the first version of Epic.

Here's the blurb:

When a multinational games company recruit Tom, a smart, streetwise Dublin teenager, to get a team together and come to San Francisco to immerse themselves in a massive fantasy world, he thinks it is the job of his dreams. His challenge is to level up fast so as to eliminate an AI dragon that has gone rogue and is preventing the release of the game.

As Tom comes closer to that goal, he starts to realise that the game is not what it seems, not least because a powerful crypto-currency company seem to have funded the creation of the game for their own purposes.

LitRPG from Level Up
https://www.levelup.pub/

I recently became commissioning editor at Level Up publishing, with a remit to find great LitRPG books. Here's an interview about my new role:

https://www.writing.ie/news/from-auth...

Back in 2004, I wrote Epic about a world where everyone had to play a MMORPG for their income and social standing. Back then, audiobooks weren't so much of a thing and even though the book was relatively successful, neither O'Brien (Ireland) or Viking (USA) got around to making the audio version. But that's just changed, with a wonderful, immersive narration by Samuel Hoke.

Edda is featured in the new Penguin Young Readers Group, Summer 2012 catalog. Plus one of Tony Sahara's images for Edda is used as the title page for the Firebird section.

Both the Irish Times (in a supplement on Children's Books for Christmas) and the Sunday Independent have recommended Edda for Christmas reading. The Independent says (after I corrected their spelling):

Conor Kostick's Edda (O'Brien Press, €9.99) is the third fantasy in Kostick's series based on gaming and virtual worlds. In spite of the science fiction/futuristic challenges, at its heart are good-hearted clever teenagers confronting danger and oppression in an exciting series of adventures. Continuity is created with the earlier novels in the series, in the form of characters who we know and like, while at the same time there is inventiveness, especially in the figure of Penelope who is physically on a life-support system but whose avatar is free to roam worlds. Kostick challenges the young reader intellectually, but the heart is always in the right place too. This book would work equally well for younger and older teenagers.

Conor says:

I've made the longlist for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for 2012. In Pippi Longstocking Astrid Lindgren created one of the most delightfully irreverent and independent characters in children's literature; this creative act was connected to the fact that Astrid Lindgren herself was a radical humanist and opponent of violence. I'm proud to be associated with her legacy.

A new cover for the Polish translation of Epic.

There is an interview with Conor by Elizabeth Rose Murray at writing.ie. You should go over there and read it all as this is one of the best interviews with Conor that I have seen. I will extract just one exciting quote about Conor's possible next book:

I am enjoying a certain sense of freedom about my next novel. Mind you, I'm not going to be writing anything in a hurry as we've a baby due soon. When I do begin writing fiction again, it will be to develop a couple of characters I have been sketching out. I was thinking of writing something about a boy who is being trained for the priesthood in a Neolithic moon-worshipping society. The interest there being the clash between his own good nature and the darker more oppressive values that he is expected to project on to his people. I'm also having fun making notes on a hedonistic community of electronic intelligences.

Conor writes:

One of my favourite books is The Táin, Thomas Kinsella's version of the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, with illustrations by Louis le Brocquy (Dolmen, 1969; Oxford University Press, 1970). So it was with great pleasure that I learned that Thomas Kinsella was visiting Farmleigh Library, which is where I am working at the moment: unravelling the mysteries of the Gerald of Wales manuscript I came across last year. Neither of us are particularly gregarious upon meeting someone for the first time, so I have no lively anecdotes from the day, other than this. Ed Mulhall (of RTE news) was showing Thomas Kinsella an ipad and by way of illustration of its use, called up an app to do with James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Kinsella leaned over and began to read the page aloud. We were in the cafe at the time and in our corner of the room a hush developed as we leaned in to hear him. He has a great reading voice and what's more, it all made sense. It makes me think that someone - now that the Joyce copyright has nearly expired - should produce an audio book of Kinsella reading Finnegans Wake and I'm sure all of us who have struggled to get through it would then appreciate it so much more.

In conversation with Oisin McGann, award-winning author Conor Kostick
talks about his new novel Edda which completes The Avatar Chronicles.