Jeremy Erman on "The Tower" in GIFTS OF DARKOVER

On a wondrous planet of telepaths and swordsmen, nonhumans and ancient mysteries, a

technologically advanced, star-faring civilization comes into inevitable conflict with one that has pursued psychic gifts and turned away from weapons of mass destruction. Darkover offers many gifts, asked for and unexpected. Those who come here, ignorant of what they will find, discover gifts outside themselves and within themselves. The door to magic swings both ways, however, and many a visitor leaves the people he encounters equally transformed.

Gifts of Darkover is available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and other venues.

Here Jeremy Erman talks about his story, "The Tower."

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us about your introduction to Darkover. What about the world drew you in?

Jeremy Erman: I started reading Darkover novels in the late '90s when I took off a few years between high school and college. I loved the combination of fantasy and science fiction, and the fact that I could read the novels in any order I wanted. The Ages of Chaos especially appealed to me because they were more "fantasy" than "science fiction," but I was also fascinated by the origins of humans on Darkover, and wanted to know what happened to the original settlers. I searched for months until I found a copy of Darkover Landfall. It answered some of my questions, but not all of them!

DJR: What inspired your story in Gifts of Darkover?

JE: Ever since reading Darkover Landfall, I was fascinated by how quickly the original settlers abandoned Earth technology, and wondered if any of them tried to hold on to it even after most people decided it couldn’t be done. It occurred to me that decades after landfall there might still be people who remembered Earth, and their memories would essentially be the only records of Earth technology and culture on Darkover. What would such a survivor do with this knowledge, and how would someone born and raised solely on Darkover react to such an “alien” mindset?

Horse story reprint sale

My short story, "The Hero of Abarxia," (When The Hero Comes Home 2), will appear in the For Want of a Horse. The editor is Evey Brett.

forthcoming anthology from Lethe Press,

Here's the Table of Contents:

Gentle Horse, by Cynthia Seelhammer
Griffen, The High Flye, byJames Baldwin
The Black Horse, a Celtic Folk Tale
The Rocking-Horse Winner, by D.H. Lawrence
The Horse of Brass, by James Baldwin
The Goose Girl, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
The Winged Horse of the Muses, by James Baldwin
Horseman, by Renee Carter Hall
Jack Pumpkinhead and the Sawhorse, by L. Frank Baum
The Eight-Footed Slipper, by James Baldwin
Dapplegrim, a Norwegian Fairy Tale
The Horseman in the Sky, by Ambrose Bierce
Sensitive, by Evey Brett
The Fox and the Horse, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Al Borak, by James Baldwin
A Horse Story, by Kate Chopin
Ivan and the Chestnut Horse, a Russian Fairy Tale
The Goblin Pony, a French Folk Tale
Red Dust and Dancing Horses, by Beth Cato
The Dun Horse a Pawnee Folk Tale
The Magician's Horse, a Greek Fairy Tale
The Devil and Tom Walke, by Washington Irving
The Hero of Abarxia, by Deborah J. Ross

I'll post the release date when I know it.

[archives] Blackberry Writing

I'll be head down into revisions of Thunderlord for a while, but on my morning walk, I noticed the blackberries are ripening. So here's a post from  a few years ago, Enjoy!

It's blackberry season, and as is my custom at this time, I went out this morning to pick from the brambles along our little country road. (We have our own patch, but the berries ripen later because it's in a shadier place.) I try to do this early, when it's cool and I'm not having to squint into the sun for the higher branches. As I picked, I thought about the story I'm working on (and currently stalled on 2 scenes-that-need-more), and also writing in general.

Blackberries are tricksy things. They can look ripe from where I stand, but turn out to be all red at the base. Sometimes I can tell the moment I touch the berry -- it's too firm and too tightly attached to the stem. I have to be ready to give up on what looked like a great prospect and move on. When I'm in the flow of picking, it seems I don't even have to think about this. Isn't this like a story that seems promising but doesn't yet have the necessary depth? Occasionally -- well, more than occasionally -- my mind gets set on "this berry gets picked" and I force the issue. I'll glare at the red parts and either pop the berry into my mouth ("for private reading only"). Berries that are almost-ready go well in oatmeal. I freeze quarts and quarts of them for winter breakfasts. They're too sour on their own, but they blend well, adding pleasantly tart notes. That's not unlike taking several different story idea, none of which can stand on their own, and setting them at cross-purposes to make a much more interesting tale.

Thunderlord Progress - First Draft Done!

First draft of Thunderlord is done! That's the good news. The um, challenging news is that it's 220,000 words long. Way too long, even for DAW. I have embarked upon the excision of flabby prose, tedious subplots, and extraneous characters.

Down to 208,000 and counting....

Thunderlord Progress Report

It's been a while since I've posted about my writing progress on the next Darkover novel, a sequel to Stormqueen. I'm currently fine-tuning the penultimate chapter and embarking upon what I presume will be the final one. It's turning out much better than I hoped, but perhaps that it because the "how I feel about the work in progress" swings like a pendulum from "the worst drek ever penned" to "wow, this is really good!"

I should have time to do another pass, making sure that a character who can't knit in chapter 25 isn't teaching someone else in chapter 13. Then it goes off to the MZB Literary Works Trust for approval while I am out of commission during my cataract surgery (one eye, then the other 2 weeks later).

I'm still on track for turning it in to DAW in the fall.