After five books, Brent Weeks's Lightbringer series concluded with The Burning White, which I reviewed in the previous post. Since it is the end of a series, I wanted to do a review of the series as a whole, to accompany the review of the final book.
The Burning White Review
I will fully admit that I devoured The Burning White after my re-read of the Lightbringer series, by Brent Weeks. I'll be posting a review of that book, specifically, here, and will also make a later post reviewing the series as a whole. Now, I'm not some kind of literary critic, but I have read a lot of genre fiction, and I have a good idea of what I like to see. That being said, what I like to see may not be the same as what you like to see.
DUNE Review
Ultra-tough, misunderstood desert cultures can be a slightly overused trope in fantasy writing, especially alternative world fantasy. They often crop up as the much-needed army for the beset hero, at just the right time, after the hero properly impresses them and meets some ancient prophecy. It might be that the origin of this tendency lies with DUNE.
Genre Jargon
Speculative fiction, broadly, includes the stories that are typically classified as science fiction and fantasy, but if you've written in the genre realm for long, you may have noticed that the terminology employed by libraries and other sources to classify genre fiction is somewhat limited. Maybe we genre writers aren't as "serious" as the "real" authors, but that hasn't stopped us from developing our own terminology to help describe our works. Since I think that many of these terms would be useful for both readers and writers to know, I've sought to describe some of them below.
Cartography
One of the distinguishing features of the speculative fiction genre in its published form is the maps. Avid readers of fantasy and science fiction are known to pour over the maps included in the books they read, maps describing fantastical worlds and universes in vivid detail. It was perhaps inevitable, therefore, that I would at some point be obliged to create maps to go along with the stories I've written or am in the process of writing.
The Grounds Warden Release!
It is now available for purchase, exclusively at igcpublishing.com, as a digital download. For only $1.99, you too can own a PDF copy of The Grounds Warden, readable from your phone, your tablet, your computer, your Amazon Kindle, or any other devices that support PDFs.
The Grounds Warden Cover
For now, everything here at IGC publishing is done by me. Writing, revising, formatting, publishing, copyrighting, website maintenance and setup...everything. That includes cover design. Now, I'm an engineer, not an artist, and I don't have a marketing background. I know what I like in other covers in my genre, so I work from there with what I have. So I'm proud to share with you the final cover design for The Grounds Warden:
Front Matter, Back Matter, Does it Matter?
You probably don't think about it - I hadn't given it more than cursory consideration - but there is a lot that goes into a book beyond the simple writing of the story. Front and back covers have to be designed. ISBNs have to be purchased. Copyrights have to be obtained. Fonts have to be chosen, and sizes: page sizes, font sizes, margin sizes. Pages have to be numbered, prefaces and acknowledgements have to be written...I could go on.
A Place to Start
Maybe, if I were some kind of amazing author, a writing protege, with nothing to do but labor lovingly over my works of fiction, I could think about doing this the "normal" way, if such a thing even exists. There's something attractive about traditional publishing, mostly that the publisher usually takes care of all of the logistics, advertising, and social media outreach. In other words, the traditional publishing route (at least as I imagine it) would allow me to hide in a cave and write, without worrying about all of this publicity and business.
IGC Publishing 