Juliet McKenna
- Website: www.julietemckenna.com
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
The Tales of Einarinn should still be in print the US, The Aldabreshin Compass is currently only available in ebook or second hand. I do have a few US hardbacks of Southern Fire and would be happy to donate one...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
Sounds interesting - you can find my contact details via my website....
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
As far as I am concerned, they are - the violence is uncompromising but not exploitative/gratuitous and the sex is implicit rather than explicit. (Mostly because I cannot take writing 'Tab A into Slot B' soft-pr0n-type stuff seriously...) They're in...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
I didn't say they're all good ideas - just that there's no shortage :) Hence Rule Two, to sort out the lousy from the ones worthwhile pursuing...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
And of course, those who might like to get an idea of my writing, style etc can check out the Free Stories page on my website. http://www.julietemckenna.com/?page_id=1390...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
Okay... so, if The First Rule of Ideas is there's never a shortage, the Second Rule of Ideas - for me, anyway - is they have to be tested hard to see which ones will go the distance. I think...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
... and the author needs to be very careful not to go down the rabbit hole of a far too obvious analogy/personal bugbear. I speak as the one who spent most of a day writing a long conversation between two...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
Number Ten Ox! I know I've come across him in short stories in crime fiction anthologies! Great stories as I recall, and as with epic fantasy, it's so refreshing to find crime fiction drawing on other traditions....
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
All my four series are complete in themselves now, so you should have no issues there. The first book of each one serves as a starting point for new readers to my fiction. That said, there is an underlying chronology,...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
Yes, that looks very promising - and neatly addresses the persistent problem of limiting magic so you don't just end up with a world where logically, wizards rule* and everyone else is a peasant in the mud. *until the wizards...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
Ah yes, horses... another area where epic fantasy writers really, really need to learn a whole lot more than they think they know from what they've read in other fiction and seen on the screen... Judith Tarr has tackled this...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
it's sounding more and more interesting! It's this sort of thing which makes me wonder why anyone ever asks a writer where they get their ideas from. Shortage of ideas is never the problem......
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
a whole variety, some working better than others, drawn from a wide range of historical models....
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
there are a whole range of social/political systems that aren't monarchies in my fiction. It's one of the most interesting elements of world building for me....
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
the reworking the system is historically the most difficult bit...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
thank you for that!...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
ah right, now I understand. Essentially yes, a Roman pater familias had absolute power, up to rights over life and death, over his familia - and means the entire household including slaves. Though I don't know if 'ownership' necessarily conveys...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
... and are the ten serfs who are to be hanged the leaders of the peasants' revolt (captured in battle? betrayed? self-sacrificing?) or ten hapless innocents condemned as a warning to the rest...?...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
the same goes for my Irish forebears, who were living in Co.Monaghan through the 19th and early 20th Centuries, so would have had plenty of epic events going on around them and affecting them, without any need to leave their...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
sounds promising to me....
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
you'll need to expand on that a bit before I grasp your meaning....
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
Another instance of the wealth of history and societies there are for epic fantasy writers to use as a source of inspiration. As to what 'peasants' can teach us 'advanced' types, I'm reminded of a news report after the Indonesian...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
Or getting sued... :)...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
My father was a butler before he retired, so I know some very good stories about what unnoticed servants get to see... Though servant and peasant are rather different. The various rationales behind using eunuchs in different roles in different...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
The most common mistake is taking one form of slavery, most usually the plantation-based slavery of the Caribbean and the Americas in the 17th/18th century and assuming that was universal - and so presenting that in a fantasy world where...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
I ended up with six viewpoint character in the Lescari Revolution series, for pretty much this reason. The reader really needed to see a bigger picture than any individual drawn from a particular group. Otherwise I did feel I risked...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
Precisely!...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
It could be. On the other hand, it could not be - if momentous events were sweeping across whatever muddy field that peasant happened to live in. I'm very wary of ever accepting 'this particular story couldn't be told'. Someone,...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
Slavery in the Classical World is a very complex subject. The Romans were mostly concerned about money and purely utilitarian concerns, rather than the slaves' point of view. Treat slaves so badly that they died and you'd be put to...
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Commented on Warlords and eunuchs and slaves, oh my! Picking the problematic for The Aldabreshin Compass
Stories are almost always about the exceptional individual, so I don't see why taking a peasant as a starting point is necessarily impossible. Also historically, even in those societies where peasants' lives were incredibly restricted and repressed, information and ideas...