A WALK IN THE ABYSS RELEASED!

"I’ve already read Paul Genesse’s story, "No Tusks," and it is awesome. It is possibly one of the grossest, nastiest, funniest stories ever, so of course it's about Orcs."--New York Times' Bestselling Author Larry Correia (full review here)


That's the first review of my story, and I personally believe that "No-Tusks" is the most important orc love story of the 21st century. There's toe sucking, bog wine, diabolical plans, bumbling giants, and orc style revenge.

Here's the introduction to the book:

Orcs! Greyshalks! And Giants!

Prepare yourselves, intrepid reader, for three complete novelettes set in the Abyss Walker world of author Shane Moore. In this anthology you shall read “No Tusks” by Paul Genesse, the disgustingly graphic orc story—not for children—(You have been warned!); then a tale about a young Sasquatch, or more accurately, a greyshalk trying to find his place in the world in: “A Kudekah to Remember” by Paul Genesse and Shane Moore; and finally, a truly hilarious story about a bumbling giant in: “Mungo the Undying” by Patrick M. Tracy. You’ll also be treated to a short story from a very unique point of view—an arrow in flight: “Unerring” by Patrick S. Tomlinson; and as a bonus, an excerpt from the novella, “The Wererat’s Tale III: The Collar of Perdition” by Patrick S. Tomlinson, which was written from an outline penned by the creator of the Abyss Walker World, Shane Moore himself. Orcs, greyshalks, and giants (and wererats) will never be the same!

View the book on Amazon.com

The video below is the reason why neither Patrick Tracy nor myself will ever hold public office. We read from "No-Tusks" at the CONDuit convention in 2011.

No Tusks Dramatic Reading from Patrick Tracy on Vimeo.

The World As a Character Presentation from LDS Storymakers

(These are just a few notes, not really what's on my note cards, and I'm not posting the 50 slides).

"The World as a Character," a few notes from my presentation. Most of this is in the world building book Eighth Day Genesis edited by Sabrina Klein. The book has been nominated for a 2013 Origins Award.

*Think of some of the most iconic fantasy or science fiction settings: Frank Herbert’s Arrakis, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Land, James Cameron’s Pandora. You can imagine each of those worlds as a character with distinct personalities.

*Reactions are much more interesting than a boring description about a place. They show the character of the setting, and also the main character’s thoughts, which accomplishes the two major goals of character development at once.

*Your job is to show us which face the world takes wherever the characters go.

*Consider very carefully what kind of story, or stories, you want to explore before you craft your world. You don’t want your story to clash with the world and make what you are trying to do seem unbelievable or inconsistent. Think about the common descriptions of plot before your proceed with the world-building.

*Write a bio from the point of view of the world. Just a couple of paragraphs.

*Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch is credited with coming up with a famous list of plots I’ve often heard at writing seminars and are considered the basic type of literary plots: Man against Nature, Man against Himself, Man against God, Man against Society, Man caught in the Middle, and Man & Woman. Make sure your world and your story are compatible. Some plots seem to fit better with certain types of worlds.

*Don’t info dump about the world and expect the readers to keep reading.

*Basic Questions to answer during world creation:
• Stable agriculture?
• Navigable rivers?
• Mountains, deserts, or bodies of water that close it off from other areas?
• Plants that are easily domesticated?
• Animals that are easily domesticated?
• A mild or harsh climate?
• Deadly diseases that are endemic to the area?
• A human population that has been there a long or short period of time?
• Natural resources that benefit the local population?

These questions are huge and if you want to understand the significance of them more read anthropologist Jared Diamond’s incredible book, Guns, Germs and Steel, and also Collapse. The answers to those basic questions above will determine a lot about the people who live in the world, and your bio about certain parts of the setting will answer the rest.

Check out Eighth Day Genesis on Amazon.com and check out all 21 essays on world building.

Review of Allied Zombies for Peace by Craig Nybo

(Allied Zombies for Peace display at Night Flight Comics in Salt Lake City)

Review: I loved reading Allied Zombies for Peace by the hilarious author Craig Nybo. I had no idea that a riot involving zombies, WWI veterans, cops, and the vile KKK at a peace rally in 1967 could be so entertaining. It's written like a screenplay with short, punchy chapters, and told from many different point of views, and covers only 42 minutes of mayhem. If you're looking for a fun read, check out this book.

Here's the awesome book trailer video--errr, I mean news cast about the riot.

Reading about zombies clawing and munching on some vile KKK jerkwads was awesome. There just can't be enough of that in the world. Nybo is a great comedic writer and a rising talent. I can't wait to read what he writes next.

Check it out on Amazon.

Paul Genesse
Author of the Iron Dragon Series
Editor of the Crimson Pact Series

REVIEW OF AT THE MOUTH OF THE RIVER OF BEES BY KIJ JOHNSON

AT THE MOUTH OF THE RIVER OF BEES (short story collection) by Kij Johnson

This is an incredible collection of stories by one of the best short story writers on the planet. She’s won practically every major fantasy and science fiction award and been nominated for all of them multiple times. If you want to read some amazing short fiction, this is a collection you must have. Her work is often featured in the years best collections and her skill at crafting beautiful and thought provoking stories is second to none.

I’ve been a fan of Kij Johnson since I attended one of her writing seminars at Gen Con in 1998 and have read many of these stories before, but I found a lot that I hadn’t read. Having them all in one perfectly packaged book was awesome. Small Beer Press did a great job.

It’s hard for me to describe all eighteen stories in the collection, but I’ll go over a few of my favorites.

26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in 2008 and if you haven’t read this Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy award winning short story, you’re in for a treat. The premise is crazy: a woman buys a traveling monkey show . . . because she must. It’s deep, amazing, and will get in your head for a long time. It’s still in mine years after first reading it.





Spar, originally published in Clarksworld in 2009, won the Nebula for best short story, and this one will blow your mind. It’s a science fiction nightmare about a woman who is trapped with an alien for a very long time. It’s a chilling story. I hear people talking about this one at writer gatherings all the time. It’s that good.




Fox Magic, originally published in 1993 in Asimov’s, and won the Sturgeon Award. It became the basis for the award winning novel, Fox Woman from Tor, which I fell in love with. This is the legend of kitsune, the magical fox who became a woman and seduced a Japanese samurai lord. I loved this story and especially the novel. Fox Magic is incredibly beautiful and poignant. If you love it, read the novel for sure.

Wolf Trapping first appeared in Twilight Zone magazine in 1989, and I’d never read it before. The story is about a wolf researcher who meets a strange, feral woman who is trying to become part of a pack of wolves. The ending will leave you sick and in shock.

The Empress Jingu Fishes is a great story about a woman who can see the future, and goes through the years ahead with the bitter knowledge of what’s going to happen to the people she loves. Fascinating.



The Man Who Bridged the Mist won the Hugo and Nubula award for best novella, and I found it to be beautifully crafted. It reminded me of the world I created for my Iron Dragon series a little, with the mists surrounding the land, so I loved that aspect, and was captivated all the way through.

The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change, won the World Fantasy Award, and I can see why. I hadn’t read it before and loved it. The story is about a woman who becomes close to a pack of dogs after “the Change.” Dogs (and all the mammals) gain the ability to speak and it throws off the whole world. Dog lovers will be very touched by this one, I think. I know I was.




Ponies, won the 2010 Nebula award for best short story, and I was fortunate enough to hear Kij read it at World Fantasy soon after it came out on Tor.com. This tale is an allegory about growing up, although this one is in a world where all the little girls get pretty winged, talking ponies, but if the girls want to be part of the popular crowd they have to, shall we say, make some changes to their beloved ponies. This is such an awesome story and when I read it in this collection, I heard Kij, in my mind reading it like she did back at World Fantasy, like she was reading a sweet story to kids, when in truth it’s a nightmare.

There are a lot of other great stories in this collection, and I’ve savored them, letting the beauty of the words, and the expertise of the writing wash over me. The technical brilliance is one thing, but the way some of the stories stick with me is uncanny.

The title story, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, was a new one for me as well, and I saved it for last. It was about a woman (the same one from the Trickster stories) who is on a journey across the country with her old German Shepherd dog, who is dying. They run into a roadblock, the Bee River is flooding, but it's unlike any flood you've ever heard of, and the main character is drawn to find the source of the flooding. It's a journey of the heart and the mind.

Kij Johnson has a way of getting you to believe 100% in whatever world she creates, and then slips in some fantastical concept, like a river of bees stopping traffic, and it makes perfect sense.



Learn more about this amazing writer here or find this collection on Amazon.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED 5/5 STARS
Paul Genesse, Author of the Iron Dragon Series and Editor of The Crimson Pact Series

FUN YOUNG ADULT SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL

Fire Season by David Weber and Jane Lindskold


(very minor spoilers)

This is the second novel about Stephanie Harrington and her treecat companion, Lionheart, set on the fascinating treecat home world. I hadn’t read the award winning first book, A Beautiful Friendship by David Weber, and came to this novel as I’m a fan of author Jane Lindskold’s short fiction and her novels (Through Wolf’s Eyes, Thirteen Orphans). You don’t need to read the first book in this series, A Beautiful Friendship, to understand this one, as I was never lost, but I’m sure it would be good to start at the beginning.


A Beautiful Friendship on Amazon


If you’re a reader of David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels, I think you’ll enjoy this prequel novel series. Fire Season is set a few hundred years before Honor was born, and this is not a space opera with lots of the big battles Mr. Weber is famous for. It’s a coming of age novel, mostly written to appeal to teenaged readers (12 and older), about a brilliant young woman growing up on an alien planet, who just happens to be the first person to ever bond with a treecat. The telepathic, empathic, six-legged (hexapedal) catlike creatures with long tails—two of their six legs have actual hands on them—are the stars of the book.

I found the most fascinating aspect of Fire Season to be the relationship between fifteen-year-old Stephanie and the treecat who adopted her. Lionheart is what Stephanie calls him, but his true name among the People (the treecats think of themselves as The People), is Climbs Quickly.

The treecats are telepathic with each other and empathic with humans, so communicating with humans is quite difficult for them, though they can read human emotions very easily and affect them in some minor ways. The treecats think that humans make all sorts of funny mouth sounds, use hand gestures, and isn’t it sad they can’t speak to each other with their minds and have to rely on such poor communication methods?

It was hilarious and awesome when two treecats were communicating telepathically with each other and one treecat noted how well the human (Stephanie Harrington) had been trained by Climbs Quickly. The big question in this book is if the treecats are intelligent enough to be considered sentient by the human scientists.

Climbs Quickly can read Stephanie’s emotions and enjoys her “mind-glow” very much. I loved reading the chapters from Climb’s Quickly’s point of view, and it was fascinating how the human scientists are trying to determine if the treecats are a sentient race, while the treecats are trying to understand if they should avoid the humans who have come to their world, or if they should interact with them more.

The book has the feel of an un-contacted tribe of native Americans first coming into contact with a highly civilized group of Europeans. That would be Europeans who are not trying to enslave or destroy them. What a concept. There are a lot of great messages in this book that will get younger and older readers thinking.

Fire Season is naturally set during the dry season when forest fires often rage across the mostly tree-covered world. Stephanie Harrington, and her big brother friend Karl, are provisional rangers with the forestry service, and they participate in watching out for fires and sometimes fighting them, and of course rescuing animals caught in the path of the flames.

Much of the book is dedicated to Stephanie becoming an adult. She has to learn to interact with kids her own age, a very difficult thing for a genius introvert, and of course deal with her well-meaning but socially clumsy parents. I think teens will easily connect with Stephanie, as she’s a very well drawn character.

I highly recommend this book to teen animal lovers—especially young women—and to fans of the Honor Harrington series who want to see where the treecats came from. This is a good starting point for younger readers, and I think this would be a great gift to a friend or relative that you wanted to expose to science fiction. It kept my interest throughout, had a good conclusion that wrapped up nicely, and I’m excited to read the sequel, Treecat Wars.

View it on Amazon: Fire Season by David Weber and Jane Lindskold
Highly Recommended, 4.5 out of 5 Stars

Paul Genesse
Author of the Iron Dragon Series

LTUE 2013 Schedule

Life, The Universe, and Everything
Provo, Marriott Hotel Conference Center
http://ltue.net/

My Schedule:

Thursday February 14

9:00 AM
Tolkien's "The Hobbit"
The Book and the Movies
Paul Genesse, Blake Casselman, David Farland, Tracy Hickman

Lunch with friends

1:00 PM
What is "Punk" Literature and Its Many Genres?
Aneeka Richins, Paul Genesse, David Butler, Steve Diamond, Larry Correia

Take my beautiful wife, Tammy to see Ballet West's "Cinderella" for Valentines Day. Fun times.


Friday February 15

Lunch with friends

3:00 PM
Characterization that Isn’t Overwrought or Uneven
Tristi Pinkston, Paul Genesse, Clint Johnson, Deren Hansen, J. Scott Savage

8:00 PM
Mass Autograph Signing

Saturday
11:00 AM
Main Address: I'm attending, not giving it.

The Next Big Thing Blog Hop Tour

I was tagged by awesome author, Sherry Brinkerhoff Taylor  who sent me these ten questions. She also answered them on her blog, so check out her answers. I've updated question 7 on this post, as I've done these ten questions recently, but I've got news on finishing my current draft of Medusa's Daughter.


1) What is the working title of your next book?

Medusa’s Daughter, Book 1 in the Medusa’s Curse trilogy.


2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

I’ve always been fascinated in the Medusa myth, in which the god Poseidon is supposed to have raped Medusa, and then the goddess Athena curses vain Medusa (her own priestess!) with the power of the gorgon. I decided to spin the story in my own way, taking a more realistic approach, similar to what author Mary Renault did. Renault is the J.R.R. Tolkien of historical fantasies set in ancient Greece and I’m a huge fan. Medusa’s Daughter is quite a bit different though, as I didn’t write in the first person like Renault, nor did I take out all the supernatural magic. A Medusa story has to have magic.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

Mainstream or fantasy, depending on how it’s marketed.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Medusa: Angelina Jolie or Kate Beckinsale



Nerissa (Medusa’s Daughter): Jessica Alba or Alexis Bledel

Nikandros (Nerissa’s love interest): Jake Gyllenhaal or Liam Hemsworth




5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Medusa’s daughter has inherited her mother’s terrible curse and longs to escape her lonely life on the shattered island where her mother and aunts have been exiled, but when a mysterious sailor washes ashore she falls in love, then discovers there might be a way for the curse to be broken, she must look into the eyes of her true love, but if he’s not, she will kill the only man she ever loved.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It will be represented by an agency if all goes according to plan.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

One year, but I shelved the first draft to work on other projects, and dabbled with it off and on for six years, not touching it for years at a time. Finally, it’s almost ready as of January 2013. I finished rewriting/editing 481 of 481 pages a few days ago, and now I'm going to polish for a while, but I'm feeling really good about this draft. Anyway, during those six years I worked full-time as a cardiac nurse at a big hospital, wrote and published three novels in my Iron Dragon series, wrote a dozen short stories, and served as the editor of the first four volumes in the Crimson Pact anthology series, which is made up of eighty-something stories, and clocks in at over half a million words. Medusa’s Daughter is finally my main focus again.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

New York Times’ bestseller, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (2012), which is set partially during the Trojan War, and is told in the point of view of Patroclus, the companion of Achilles.



9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Medusa, the evil gorgon who haunts my dreams.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?

Paul Genesse

I visited Greece in 2006 to do some research, and have read a lot on the subject over the past years, fiction and non-fiction. I’ve tried my best to imagine what it was actually like to live in ancient Greece, and create realistic characters and a compelling story. The main reason is to read about Prince Nikandros, and of course Nerissa, who has one of the most diabolical mothers of all time.

Read the opening chapter of the current draft of Medusa’s Daughter here,  or view the first novel in my Iron Dragon series here, here.