#booksworn

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All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

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Elspeth Cooper's nove, The Raven's Shadow, is book three of The Wild Hunt ...

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At BookSworn, author Helen Lowe talks about Mother's Day and great mom's of SFF ...

Today is Mother’s Day— and that got me thinking about mothers in SFF.

By which I mean, SFF stories that feature women specifically as mothers, and that capture, just a little, what it means to be a Mom— not just as a “bit part”, but as a central character in a novel-length work?

Who immediately springs to mind for you?

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The members of BookSworn have donated signed copies of their books for Brenda Novak's auction to raise money for diabetes research. Check out how you can bid ...

[tfrohock]

Moonwrought Pendant at BookSworn

Betsy Dornbusch brings us inside her debut fantasy, Exile, and tells us more about the moonwrought pendant:

Moonwrought is the Akrasian term for a variety of platinum mined in a lower region of Brîn in the Rhial coastal hills. It’s called moonwrought for the enslaved Moonling tribes who mined and worked the metal, and for its likeness to the Seven Eyes, the moons representing the gods. It has notable properties: it can hold spellcasts indefinitely, it makes the finest edged weapons, and it is valued around the world because of its rarity. There are few large moonwrought items: Queen Elena’s throne is one and Draken’s sword is another. Most are trinkets like wedding cuffs or rings, and the occasional knife. As the mines are depleted, all new items must be forged from existing items; there’s a healthy black market trade around moonwrought scraps. [Click here to read more ...]

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At BookSworn, the outrider's best friend ...

At BookSworn, Courtney Schafer talks about the outrider's best friend inside her stories:

A pack llama! No, I’m kidding. (Though in a very early draft of The Whitefire Crossing, there was indeed a reference to llamas – which are far more nimble than mules and thus make much better pack animals when traveling off-trail in the mountains! My husband has always been sad I took that out. ”But where are the llamas?” he asks, mournfully, whenever he finishes reading my latest book.)

But no, an outrider’s best friend isn’t a llama, or a horse, or even a pack mule. The climbing outriders who guide convoys over the steep, snowy passes of the Whitefire Mountains in my Shattered Sigil novels treasure one simple and yet utterly vital mountaineering tool ... [Click here to read more ...]

[tfrohock]

Games often reflect the mindset of a particular society. For example Monopoly is considered a quintessentially American game, as focused as it is on acquiring wealth and land. The way to win is to bankrupt everyone else, leaving yourself as the lone robber baron. Believe it or not many other cultures consider it an odd game, with odd goals, and not very much fun at all. As children we don’t think about the game all that much, but in fact it reflects and reinforces our capitalist culture.

In Cerana, one of the two greatest empires of the known world in Tower & Knife, the game that most closely reflects the mindset of the people is Settu. Settu is best described as a combination of falling dominoes and chess. The pieces are called tiles and there are many different kinds, as in chess. There are the Fort, the Rock, the Assassin, the River(s), the Emperor, the Tower, and so on – all with their own particular strengths. Then there are tiles best described as pawns (soldier tiles).

Click the link above to read more ...