Authors Electric

Wild Hunt by Peter Nicolai Arbo However you celebrate this season, midwinter feels like a magical time. It's a turning point of the year, the shortest day and longest night, after which light returns to the world. To mark this solstice, the ancient festival of Yule is still celebrated in many places, particularly where days are shortest in the northern hemisphere. It is a time for the dead to rejoin the living, for supernatural forces to awaken, and it is the traditional time for the Wild Hunt to ride. The Wild Hunt appears in many European folk tales. In Scandinavia, it is associated with Odin and the Norse legends. In Germany, it involves dragons and werewolves. Here in Britain, it features hounds, evil spirits, fairies and King Arthur... an irresistible combination for a fantasy author. In the first book of my Pendragon Legacy series, King Arthur's daughter Rhianna confronts the leader of the Wild Hunt, who in my version of the legend is Lord Avallach, fairy king of mystica...

King Arthur's daughter... Rhianna Pendragon Four Lights stand against the Dark: The Sword Excalibur that was forged in Avalon, The Lance of Truth made by the hands of men, The Crown of Dreams that hides the Jewel of Annwn, And the Grail said to hold all the stars in Heaven. This series for young readers begins with a famous sword named Excalibur, which according to legend was thrown into a lake at King Arthur's request while he lies dying of wounds gained in battle against his evil nephew Mordred. It would have been a lot easier if he'd told his knights to keep the sword safe for his daughter Rhianna, but she's hiding in Fairyland and they aren't supposed to know anything about her. Besides, if they just gave her the sword there wouldn't be much of a story, and then we wouldn't get to meet Nimue, mermaid of the lake (who is not quite as sweet as you might think). Mordred, crippled in the duel with Arthur and plotting his revenge, soon finds out where the gir...

According to legend, when King Arthur fell in battle fighting the dark knight Mordred, his body was taken to the mystical Isle of Avalon, where he sleeps under enchantment until Britain needs him again... and considering the current situation here in the UK, this seems the perfect time to raise him from his slumbers! My Pendragon Legacy series for young readers, featuring King Arthur's daughter Rhianna and her friends, 'died' in book terms when it went out of print last year, which means the books have been similarly slumbering ever since. Templar (now part of Bonnier) sadly no longer publishes fiction, so I reverted the rights and am using this period of house arrest to resurrect all four titles digitally in the form of ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks. I loved Templar's covers with artwork by the talented Scott Altmann, but these are the publisher's covers so cannot be reused - at least not without negotiating the proper permissions. I decided it would be ...

Since last month's post started out as an intro to this one that grew in the telling , let's just jump right in to my selection for this month's great self-published book. Jump in like Holmes and Moriarty over Reichenbach Falls The Swithen  by Scott Telek I have been a fan of the King Arthur legends since I was old enough to read, so much so that  I am writing my own version of them .  This series, then, is of particular interest to me. It is certainly the most ambitious. As anyone who has studied Arthurian myth knows, what we tend to think of as "Arthurian" legend really comes from one book: Thomas Malory's  Le Mort D'Arthur   and one or two other related texts, usually  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  and sometimes Geoffrey of Monmouth's  History of the King's of Britain   or  Chretien de Troyes' Arthurian poems . However, Arthurian legends are much more than three or four texts. There are literally hundreds, maybe ...

This month I continue to count down the ten most important books and/or series in my life. If you haven't seen the first four you can see numbers 10 & 9 here and numbers 8 & 7 here . Last month I looked at two books that changed the way I look at life. This month I look at two books that changed the way I look at writing. 6. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman This may well be the first book I ever bought based solely on the cover and author. I didn't read the summary until I was standing in line to pay. As you may be able to tell from the previous two entries, I've always been a fan of fantasy. After discovering Tolkien (see last month's entry), I delved into other fantasy series: I read Terry Brooks' Shannara trilogy , Marvel comics' run of the Elfquest series , anything about King Arthur I could get my hands on (more on that later), and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (see September's entry). However, in 1996, while wasting ti...

'Writers Block' strikes us all at times.  As a fantasy and Science Fiction writer, I often find reading old myths and legends will get the creative juices flowing again, and wake up the muse.  Reworking old legends to a modern setting is a good way to start, and I usually find a story will evolve in my mind which is completely different to the original idea that sparked it  and, while going off in a totally different direction, provides the 'starting point' and sometimes even a character, to build on. My native Wales is a land full of myths and legends, with  its fair share of ghosts, and is a rich source of ideas.  Usually, it is the beautiful landscape itself, and the many pools, waterfalls and mountains that provide the settings for these stories, rather than old houses or castles. Here are just a few tales of hauntings from various parts of the Principality. (Apologies in advance for some of the 'hard to pronounce Welsh names!) the Short Bridge, Lla...