Science Fiction Book Club Video Interview
The lost SFBC video interview from last year’s New York ComicCon has finally surfaced. Check it out:
Blog
France Contest
At the end of May, Peat will be making the voyage to France to attend Imaginales. He’ll be on some panels, meet some fans and stuff himself with wonderful French food. Overall, a fun time will be had.
During his visit, Bragelonne will be releasing L’Or de Brayan, a special edition translation combining the two novellas Brayan’s Gold and The Great Bazaar, including the Krasian Dictionary, Ward Grimoire, Deleted Scenes and Author Commentary, etc. The cover will be a beautiful black with gold lettering and wards:
This exciting news, coupled with the coming visit, brings us to our next contest: France Photos!
To enter this contest, please send a picture of any of Peter’s books (preferably with you in it!) somewhere in France that Peat should consider visiting while he is there. Make sure to include in your email where it is and why he should go there. The reason could be a simple as “It’s a beautiful place that you must see” or it could be “You must go here because it is the best comic book store in all of France”. It’s up to you. If you are a bookseller and want to invite Peat to sign, by all means, send a picture of your store!
Rules
1. Take a picture of one of Peter’s books (and hopefully yourself) somewhere in France and e-mail it along with a brief description to pa@www.petervbrett.com before May 17, 2011.
2. The grand prize winner will receive L’Homme Rune, La Lance du Desert, and L’Or de Brayan, all signed. These are the French versions of all of Peat’s books.
3. The first prize winners will receive a signed copy of L’Or de Brayan.
Disclaimer: Winning the contest doesn’t necessarily mean that Peat will visit the place you suggest. He will likely be traveling with baby Cassie, so time and distance from his planned visits to Paris and Epinal may interfere. He will be posting an entry after he returns from the trip talking about where he went and what he did there.
Good luck everyone! Or should I say bonne chance?
P.S.
We did not steal this idea from Pat Rothfuss. He just got his up first. 🙂
Posted by Rebecca
Art by Fans
The fan art just keeps accumulating so Peat wanted me to post some of it, so that everyone can enjoy the awesomeness.
The first piece is a little different than usual. Birte actually composed some music inspired by the books. Here are her own words explaining it.
About a year ago, I read “The Painted Man”. The story fascinated me and while reading and even weeks and months after I had finished the book it still haunted me. Being a synesthete and a composer in the making I put all the emotions into improvisations which later became compositions. There are two for the first book: “Dance of the Demons” and “Deserthunt”. I put them together under the title of “Impressions of an Epic – the Painted Man”… The Composition is for violin, flute and piano. Originally there also was a cello, which I later took out.
The two parts (part1: “Deserthunt”; part2: “Dance of the Demons”) of the piece are my third and fourth composition after composing for only about one and a half years.
I really like both of the pieces, and while Birte laments the sound quality I think it’s pretty good.
Deserthunt – Birte Widmann by rebeccacbast
Dance of the Demons – Birte Widmann by rebeccacbast
First off, I must say that this is one of the best titles for artwork that I have seen in quite a while. It’s called Spicy Pleasure of the Hunt by Holymain. As you might guess, it’s a mind demon. I think it looks really creepy (in a good way).
This sketch is called Arlen vs. One Arm and was drawn by Wirrer. I must say, this is one of my favorite pics of One Arm to date; he’s so clear; I know exactly what he looks like (so I will have no problem staying away). I also really like the perspective of this one.
Here are a couple of fun things by the ever lovely Margherita, who you may remember from previous post. In this one, we have a small Arlen, wards included. He looks a little bit like Aang from Avatar:The Last Airbender. But, you know, not happy.
And here is a picture of Leesha. Let’s just say that I can see why all the guys are nuts about her if this is what she looks like. I really like her clothing in this one.
Ryan Otero wrote this poem and even put it in this nice design. I like that it’s poetry but it has a hard and even tough edge to it. (I guess Arlen will do that to everything, given enough time.)
This piece was sent to us via twitter by Samuel Perrett. On Twitter he’s @SamuelPerrett. These are pictures of a sculpture that he made of Ragen’s head. Not only do we get a different type of art than we usually see as fanart, but it’s of a character that we don’t see much either. That makes it doubly cool.
Post by Rebecca
The Eyes of the Dragon
My buddy Jay has edited the Stephen King Library Desk Calendar for the past couple of years. It is essentially a weekly planner, but each year’s edition has a theme, original cover, and 52 essays from fans—often publishing pros themselves—discussing how King’s work has influenced them over the years.
I have fallen off in the last decade or so, but I was an avid King reader through most of my formative years. A quick glance at my shelf shows 18 King books, nine paperback and nine hardcover. Pretty sure most if not all are first editions. King’s work meant a lot to me as I struggled to find my own writer’s voice.
So when Jay asked me back in 2009 to start contributing, I took it as an honor. I’ve had entries in the last two calendars, and am working today on my third, for the 2012 edition. The theme will be The Dark Tower, and I am writing a short piece on Roland’s coming of age in The Gunslinger. If you have never read it, you should. Even if you don’t go on to finish the series (I myself dropped out around book 6).
This got me thinking about my first piece for the 2010 Calendar, that one about a favorite of mine, The Eyes of the Dragon. Since it’s over a year out of date, I thought I’d post it here:
The Eyes of the Dragon
Peter V. Brett
When I was growing up, there were only two kinds of books I liked to read: horror and fantasy. I think the result is pretty apparent in my own work, which is in many ways a blend of the two. For fantasy, I had authors like Tolkien and Brooks to guide my way, and for horror, I had King.
I remember reading The Cycle of the Werewolf on a hot summer night not unlike the one on which Marty throws his Fourth of July firecrackers at the wolf, an image I will never forget, beautifully illustrated by Berni Wrightson. I stayed up all night on a ski trip, despite having to get up early, just to finish Thinner. Every creak in that old chalet had me jumping until dawn came. And Pet Cemetery… let’s just say that at night I stayed far away from the small plot in our backyard where I buried the various small animals our cat killed on a regular basis.
So when Stephen King wrote a fantasy novel, I thought that was jut about the coolest thing in the world, and when I saw that the protagonist was named Peter, just like me, well.
The Eyes of the Dragon isn’t the book that comes to most folks’ minds when they think of Stephen King, but it is for me. Told in that straight, simple prose that King makes seem so effortless, he weaves a fairy tale that is in may ways more tale than fairy, with magic playing a very small part, and the characters taking center stage over the setting, as they should.
And one can’t talk about TEotD without mentioning the terrifying court magician, Randall Flagg. Long before he was torturing Roland Deschain in the Dark Tower books, Flagg was murdering Roland, King of Delain, and having Prince Peter framed for it and imprisoned in the tiny cell atop the Needle for long years.
But though Peter was the main protagonist and my namesake, it was really the story of his younger brother Thomas that I was drawn to, and sympathized with. I too had an older brother that left me cast in his shadow as he lit up whatever room he was in for better or for worse. I know what it’s like to be young and the second son, and to be lonely and sad sometimes because of it.
And so my heart went out to Thomas, even when he was weak and did bad things. Thomas was often a confused boy, often a sadly unlucky boy, but he was never a bad boy, not really. No matter how many times I’ve read it over the last twenty years, I still get chills when he takes up his father’s bow and let’s fly the arrow Foe Hammer (a nod to The Lord of the Rings if ever I saw one, for this was the nickname of Gandalf’s sword Glamdring).
I think there’s something of Peter and Thomas in each of us, the paragon we long to be, and the flawed person we truly are. Sometimes that paragon becomes too hard to look at, and we imprison it away out of sight, but like the greatness within each of us, it is never truly gone, and is always seeking a way to come back to the fore and forgive our failings even as it spurs us to better ourselves.
Portuguese Interview
I forget if I ever posted this great interview I did for the Portuguese website Sapo on my visit to Portugal in November 2010. I’m sure I twitterfaced the link, but not sure I embedded it on the blog. Just found it while cleaning out my bookmarks.