JoZebwrites

FIRST ROLL OF THE DIE             "Wait for me!" Averrine ran round the battlement, hair falling into her eyes, but stopped to catch her breath. Simon had hidden and it wasn’t fair.                 "Slow snake!"   His words echoed around the red-stone courtyard, the walls bloody where struck by the low sunlight of the dying day. She straightened, each breath burning her chest, and cast her eyes over the courtyard. She wished there was someone else to play with. The pilots’ kids, over by Bendau’s space port, had let her join their shoot-‘em-ups until Mama had found out and stopped the game, claiming the children were Space Roamers and dirty, and odd. She stamped her foot; for now, she was stuck with Simon. “Where are you?”             "Got to find me!" He wasn't being nice. She was only six to ...

Here I am a couple of days before Christmas and am I wrapping, or shopping, or singing carols? No, I've got a shiny new facebook page - thanks, Gary! - and I thought I'd write about Christmas in the world of Abendau. Then I had an oh-no moment when I realised there was no mention of a Christmas in that world. No Winter solstice. And it came to me that, by and large, in all my books the matter of religion isn't cut and dried. Don't get me wrong; religion features. When I'm not writing Abendau I write a lot about Ulster and there are many things you can get away without mentioning, but religion isn't one of them. It's never a main theme, though. So, is there religion in my Abendauii world? Yes. The main characters aren't believers - they grew up on a rebel base with no defined religion. In the marriage ceremony I show, the prayer is to a non-named force. It was written, as it happens, with the help of a sf loving Parson of my acquaintance and I hope ...

Some fantasy writers like to write about elves, others prefer werewolves, vampires, or zombies. I have a penchant for goblins. In folklore, the word "goblin" has been applied in myriad ways. A goblin might be a mischievous sprite like Puck, a hideous, vengeful ghost, or even a beneficient house spirit such as a brownie. Sometimes it was used as a synonym for fairy, sometimes applied to a separate race: small, ugly, and malicious. I've taken advantage of this ambiguity, and in each series of books I've written where goblins appear, I've reinvented them. In the second Celydonn series (sequels to The Green Lion Trilogy) they are fuathan, bad fairies if you will. I like writing about fairies. Even the best of them are not nice; they are not benevolent. On occasion they may be extravagently generous. Grateful for small favors, they return them with magnificent gifts and spectacular rewards. But you cannot trust them. Their morality is not our morality, their l...

SPACE AND BREATHING AND ALL THAT JAZZ Like most women I know I’m juggling. I have kids and all their myriad bits and pieces they need from me – support, and clean clothes, and food, and taxi-ing, and more support, and reading their stories, and tidying their rooms, and checking homeworks, and buying Munchy seeds and chocolate doughnuts and the list goes on and on. I have a dog to see to, and fish to remember to feed, and a cat to occasionally say hello to (we’re not sure where he now resides, but it’s not here. Unless he decides it is. And then he goes again. I like the cat…) I have my house and the need for it to be at least hygeinic and have the beds made, and some sort of attempt at dusting, and the recycling cleared, and the bins emptied. I have a weekend trip to plan for and dogs to get to kennels and injections had so the kennels will take the dog. At the house I have the garden (and until recently an allotment) – with onions to be weeded and broccoli to be nette...

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...