Image from Golemchik by Will Exley (Nobrow, 2015)

All this week I have been guest blogging at the Jewish Book Council as part of their Visiting Scribe series. Today’s entry is on golems in popular culture. From Rabbi Loew’s 16th century golem, to Frankenstein’s monster, to Hal 9000 and Skynet, to Elon Musk’s warning that artificial intelligence is “summoning the demon,” the golem myth is rife in modern culture. You can read today’s essay here.

My previous posts are:

Shortening the Way – How Frank Herbert’s Dune was influence by Eastern European Hasidic tales of rabbis who could travel vast distances in little time.

Surviving Leonard Nimoy’s Superhuman Salute – The Cohen Priestly Blessing and Star Trek.

Source Article from www.matthewkressel.net/2016/04/01/guest-blogging-at-the-jewish-book-council/

In case anyone was wondering.

It’s been almost six months since I last posted (and then about Rising Tide coming out). Since then jobs have been worked, crises have been navigated, and my brain has been allowed to settle back into something resembling a creative state.

But I’ve started to emerge from my coccoon and I am greeted by this news:

Lockeheed Sells New Airships for $480M

The idea of modern airships is a key part of what helped shape the world of Falling Sky and Rising Tide, but I haven’t seen much movement of late, so this is exciting, particularly the heavier-than-light technology that allows them to hover (something I’ve used in the books, without necessarily explaining it).

Helps to invigorate me as I work on the last novel…

Source Article from www.rajankhanna.com/2016/03/31/still-here-with-bonus-modern-airships/

So it went like this: my sister sent me a link to someone who had given a great review of King of Shards on Goodreads, and while there I noticed another book was listed besides mine: Queen of Static, the next book in the Worldmender trilogy. So then I went over to Amazon and Queen of Static was there as well, and then I thought, Well if it’s up on Amazon and Goodreads there is no reason whatsoever not to share it publicly with my readers! 

So, voila. I present to you the cover to Queen of Static.

The art is by the super-talented Leon Tukker. I worked closely with him to create this image, which depicts the palace of Abbadon in Sheol and the surrounding city. The synopsis of the book is below the image.

Nu???? What do you think? I always appreciate feedback!

Queen of Static by Matthew Kressel

Following the events of King of Shards, both humans and demons continue their quest to control the Lamed Vavnik, the thirty-six righteous men who sustain the Earth against the persistent hunger of the twisted creatures who inhabit the Shards, the broken remains of shattered universes. Daniel Fisher, both cursed and empowered by his acceptance of his role as Earth’s protectors, seeks to warn the righteous men of the coming demonic attack, while Mashit—the Queen of all demonkind—forces a quartet of captive Lamed Vavnik to her will, bringing new growth to her burning realm.

Meanwhile, Daphna, Mashit’s daughter, visits Earth and adopts the guise of a liberated Ukrainian slave girl cum pop superstar in order to bring all of humanity under her control. As humanity rushes to embrace the new celebrity and worship at her feet, Daniel struggles to convince the scattered Lamed Vavnik of the threat which faces them all, but they refuse to accept their true nature.

Queen of Static continues the Worldmender Trilogy, a series that The Huffington Post has referred to as a “unique fantasy cosmos” and one that NPR has called a “feast for hardcore fantasy fans.”

Source Article from www.matthewkressel.net/2016/03/30/queen-of-static-cover-reveal/

Over at Fran Wilde’s Cooking the Books, Ellen Datlow and I share inside secrets about the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series, the esoteric art of anthology editing, and the black divination of novel writing. Fran has a Patreon to support the podcast, and if you donate she’ll send you some of our outtakes! Why would you want to hear those outtakes? Well, because Ellen doesn’t want you to!

@fran_wilde @mattkressel And if you support the program via Patreon you can hear me getting very embarrassed in an outtake. DON’T DO IT!!!

— Ellen Datlow (@EllenDatlow) March 28, 2016

Also, this week I’ll be writing a series of essays for the Jewish Book Council. In “The Shortening of the Way” I speak about about Dune, the Baal Shem Tov, the Kwisatz Haderach, and genre shibboleths. 

Give a listen! Give a read! And leave a comment, so I know there are people out there who are interested in this stuff.

Source Article from www.matthewkressel.net/2016/03/29/podcast-and-essay/

I have a new short story out! You can read “One Spring in Cherryville” on your Kindle through Amazon. Here’s the synopsis:

Cherryville was a booming factory town in the ’50s. But now all the factories have turned to rust. The once plentiful manufacturing jobs have moved overseas, and Mitch and his friends in the small town of Cherryville have few prospects for their future. So when Mitch and his friends discover a valuable secret left behind in an old factory, he hopes his luck may have finally changed. But in a town where everyone knows you by name, secrets are hard to keep. And the greatest secret of all, a dark secret from Cherryville’s past, might be waiting for them to uncover. 

And here’s the opener:

We were four fools, Don, Vic, Lisa and me, smoking grass down by the old Newmann Furniture factory one Sunday afternoon. It was late May and the sweet lilacs and honeysuckle perfumed the air. They promised the deep glories of summer, soft cooling rains, languid days in Lisa’s arms, blissful skinny-dips in the lake under the holy glow of the Milky Way. Newman Furniture was the pride of Cherryville in the ’50s, or so my mom liked to say when she drank too much gin, which was always. But nature had since reclaimed it. Newman Furniture had become a rusted out shell, like dozens of factories in Cherryville, each a tombstone marking our nation’s slow descent into irrelevance. Weeds poked up from cracks in cement poured half a century ago. In a few decades there’d be nothing here but forest.

I don’t know why we crawled through the fence. What was another empty factory? We’d all grown up in Cherryville. We’d cut school together and hid in the shadows of a million rusted walls and smoked Luckies and swigged cans of piss, a.k.a. Meister Brau, we’d smuggled in. Maybe we were just stoned, but I like to believe the factory was calling us.

You can read the rest of the story here.

Q&A

In which I answer some questions you may or may not have.

Is this a self-published short story?
Why, yes, yes it is.

Is it an original or a reprint?
This story has never before been in print or online.

How long is this story?
7800 words, give or take. In other terms, a 15-20 minute read.

Why did you self-publish? Why not send to a traditional market?
This story isn’t quite right for the usual genre markets I submit to. But it’s too genre-y for the lit markets, so…voila.

Wait, are you saying those markets rejected this story?
Actually, I sold this story once to a crossover lit/genre market, but it never appeared. The publisher accepted the story for publication and held on to it for three long years before they ran out of money and the story never saw the light of day. Rather than do that again with this story, which is neither this nor that, and so hard to place in a market, I decided to self-publish.

Where is the short story available?
Exclusively on Amazon through on their Kindle platform and Kindle Select.

Wait, did you say, Amazon?!?! I thought you felt _______ about them.
I’m still concerned about having only one company dominate the publishing marketplace. However, as an author it’s important, especially in this climate of changing models, to take advantage of all opportunities to get my work before readers, and it would be foolish to avoid such a large market as Amazon. In other words, it’s low-hanging fruit.

So you’re self-publishing now?
For now, I’m only self-publishing “One Spring in Cherryville.” This is ultimately an experiment. If it’s successful, I may self-publish more.

Great cover! Who designed it?
Thanks! I designed it myself.

Anything else you want to add?
Only that it’s getting kind of weird talking to myself.

Yeah, it kind of is.
[awkward silence]

Um, see you later?
Not if I see you first!

Source Article from www.matthewkressel.net/2016/03/28/one-spring-in-cherryville-a-short-story/

This is me

I feel like a whale who has just come up for air or the hermit who has reentered civilization after months of seclusion. The reason? I just turned in the manuscript for Queen of Static, the follow-up to last year’s King of Shards. Queen of Static picks up where Shards left off, and follows Daniel as he seeks a route back to Sheol. More characters are introduced (many in fact) but some familiar ones, like Mashit, Ashmedai, Kokabiel and others return.

And I know I am biased, but I feel Queen of Static is a damn fine book. It goes much further than Shards, and as I was writing I kept discovering synchronicities in the text. Connections I didn’t consciously intend to make kept happening. It seemed, at points, as if the book was writing itself. I also noticed a new fluency in my writing. I’m not sure exactly where it has come from, but I suspect when you spend many hours every day, month after month, year after year, eventually you level up. Something clicked into place, I think. The result is, as you will see, an extraordinary book.

But, as I said, I’m biased of course.

Anyway, it’s good to breathe. Hello. How are you? My, the sun is bright.

Source Article from www.matthewkressel.net/2016/03/24/coming-up-for-air/

I’m happy to announce my story “The Garden Beyond Her Infinite Skies” now appears in the Czech magazine XB-1. I share the TOC with Jason Sanford, Mercurio D. Rivera, and Will McIntosh, among others. This marks my third appearance in the magazine. Also, the cover is amazing!

Source Article from www.matthewkressel.net/2016/03/24/the-garden-beyond-her-infinite-skies-in-xb-1/

King of Shards has just been released as an audiobook in the United Kingdom and the European Union, which is great news, because some people had contacted me who wanted to download the audiobook, only to find the audiobook wasn’t available in their country. Well, that has changed! Here is the link to download audiobook from Audible. And the first one to comment here gets a code to download the free audiobook (available in the UK and EU only).

King of Shards Audible Audiobook (UK & EU version)

Source Article from www.matthewkressel.net/2016/03/10/king-of-shards-available-as-audiobook-in-uk-and-eu/

A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers:

“There was nothing phoenix-like in my sister’s immolation. Just the scent of charred skin, unbearable heat, the inharmonious sound of her last, grief-raw scream as she evaporated, leaving glass footprints seared into the desert sand.”

MY NEW STORY IS LIVE ON TOR.COM!!!! Go check it out!!!! 

Source Article from crashwong.net/post/140338626473

Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don’t know that I’ve ever enjoyed books so much that I have so many problems with. I’ve rarely been so lost as to what was going on with the plot as I was initially with these books. At the same time, it didn’t phase me as the characters and the pace of action more than made up for it. It’s not a combination that’ll work for everyone, but it did for me. Cook has a great reputation as a fantasy writer, so this style must work for a lot of people.

In the Black Company series, Glen Cook shuns almost all of the common themes and tropes of fantasy novels. There are no intricate histories read as if from a text book, no detailed descriptions of what people look like, no pages of descriptions of meals, nor involved descriptions of what the world looks like. There’s nothing other than what you glean from the dialogue of the characters and the occasional observation from Croaker, the POV character. While I love this in concept, at times it’s problematic. Honestly, I had no idea what was going on with the plot for most of the first 80 pages of THE BLACK COMPANY; the author’s throwing out names like Limper and Soulcatcher and titles like Taken and eras like The Domination, and I had no idea what any of it meant. Honestly, at first, with the nicknames of the men in the Black Company being Croaker and Goblin and the like, I wasn’t entirely sure that the characters I was reading about were even human. Then, around page 80, it all clicked, somehow, and I then was along for the ride.

Cook writes from the perspective of low-level officers and enlisted men of a mercenary military organization, The Black Company. As I was enlisted myself while in the Navy, and I write from that same perspective, this viewpoint of the “common” soldier really worked for me. The limited use of magic in the first book is really well done, utilizing wizards sparingly and viewed as, I would assume, a grunt would view the use of air power. In the third book the parallels between magic and air power got a little too on the nose, with flying carpets outfitted with ballista weapons and fire bombs, but otherwise the analogy worked.

As the books go on and you figure out what’s happening, and what has happened over the previous centuries, the world really comes alive and became quite relatable. The concept of a not-quite-dead evil trying to break the confines of the grave to return, and the revelation that one of the main characters, the Lady, actually DID do that at one point, really built the world for me. All of the characters are richly drawn with a minimum of dialogue and almost no description. Everything we know is based upon what these characters do and little else, and it’s extremely effective.

As I said, the first 80 pages of THE BLACK COMPANY lost me, and I very nearly walked away from the books, but I’m glad I stuck with it. The second book, SHADOWS LINGER was easier to follow with all of the work of establishing the world already taken care of. The third book, THE WHITE ROSE, lost me again for a while. The story jumps between the first person account of the main character, a third person account of a wizard set a century in the past, and another third person account of a person who’s actually a character from the other two books but in disguise. It got really confusing for a while, but then, again, around 80 pages in, I figured out what was going on and really enjoyed it.

If you need to be spoon-fed your world building and characterization, then these books will frustrate the hell out of you. But if you want to read about the day-to-day of grunt-level soldiers who just happen to be serving in a company that’s first helping stop the apocalypse, then maybe helping it happen, and then trying again to stop it, then these books are just the thing.

View all my reviews

Source Article from www.devinjpoore.com/blog/?p=1622