JoZebwrites

A DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEW When I first started writing my main character was male. I didn't think much about it, or question why, I just wrote about him. The idea of writing a female main character didn't occur to me. So many of the books I'd read, especially in sff, had male main characters - Paul Atreides, Sparhawk, Aragorn.... Sure, I'd read books with great female characters - Scout, and Scarlett O'Hara and their ilk - but very few in genre. So, setting out to write my book, my main character was a genre character - a bloke. To be fair, not a terribly macho bloke, but still he had all his bits in appropriate places and he had a male voice with a male outlook. Somewhere in the long line of early beta readers one suggested that I should have had my main character's sister as the focus of the book, as my female point of view was stronger, and I pooh-poohed the notion. I didn't write females. I didn't know how to, despite being female. Books in my ge...

I’m a bit like Hong-Kong-Phooey. In fact, most writers I know are the same: mild-mannered by day, clandestine scribblers of something weird and wonderful by night. (Admittedly almost all the writers I know write science fiction and fantasy, so that perhaps explains a lot about the weird, but hey-ho.) Most of the time I worry about fitting my work around my children, or what to make for tea. I’m known as Joanne rather than this odd Jo creature, and I’m shockingly normal. If you met me in the street, we’d say hi, walk on and you’d think nothing of the encounter. A perfectly ordinary person going about their day… In my screwy mind, other things are happening, though. I might have smiled at you while thinking about someone else. Someone who doesn’t exist, who isn’t of our world, our planet, our time. If they are of our world, they’re seeing fairies, or fighting aliens, or stuck in a forest with a crashed UFO, 10,000 words written, and no resolution in sight. I might be thinking abou...

In which the Reader is Respectfully Advised to invest in a Good reading light. Goblin Moon, recently re-released by Tickety-boo press, is unlike any fantasy book I’ve read. Its swashbuckling setting gives a vibrancy and unique feel, and the light handling of the scope of the story and intertwined storylines, makes for a book that’s easy to read and keeps the pages turning long after lights-out. We start on a river under a Goblin Moon, with the discovery of a coffin and the body it contains, and follow a story that stays intimate to its characters but expands to fill a richly created world, where fae, dwarves, goblins and humans intermingle in polite society. The descriptions of the world are lush, with details of the clothes, food and manners all adding up to a convincing world that fully pulled me in. The plot follows several strands: what happens to the body found in the coffin; Sera’s tale as the impoverished companion to a sickly heiress; Lord Skelbrooke’s derr...