New Beginnings

(Art by Alexandra V. Bach)

By the Seven, what have I done? May R'hllor's light shine upon me and save me from this crazy idea. Or may the Great Other take me and draw me into the Long Night.

No Gods have heeded my call, so I better get started. This here blog is a new project of mine that will hopefully catch a spark and spread like wildfire. I read a lot, and I write a lot less than I should. Books, blogs, short stories... Mainly, fantasy, but also science fiction, historical fiction, the occasional comedy-romance, anything really. Sometimes I find myself skipping through Google+, looking at bloggers and their sites, reading what's interesting, saving stuff to look at later. That kind of thing. Today when I did this I found myself wondering how many of these bloggers find themselves searching for more readers and how great it would be if they could share their readership with each other.

So that's what I'm going to be doing with this new project. With every post I'm going to give other writers a shout-out. Let everyone know about the cool things others are writing about out there in the web. As mentioned before and as you can tell by the title of this blog, I'll be focusing on fantasy writers. I'll also be adding some great art to every post. Always giving credit to whom it is due.

And of course, as the title of the blog also implies I will ramble on a bit about the occasional book or movie that I have just read/seen. So lets get started with that right away. For Christmas I got the second book of Brandon Sanderson's 'The Reckoners' series, "Firefght". I devoured that book in no less than 5 days and I'd love to talk about it, but I won't. I'm a stickler for chronological order. So if I'm going to talk about The Reckoners series, then I'm going to start with the first book, "Steelheart".

When I started reading "Steelheart" I thought this idea is great. Superheroes have emerged with the simultaneous ascension of a red star called Calamity. However, it turns out that even though the powers they have are pretty super, their personalities could really use a makeover, because none of the gifted are heroes, they're all villains and they've taken over. It's up to a band of rebels, called the Reckoners, to try and make life better by studying and assassinating these Epics. David is the main character who has a personal grudge against the Epic reigning over Newcago, Steelheart, and wants nothing more that to join the Reckoners and kill this tyrant.

Cool abilities, fast paced action, a true page-turner. I was expecting something in the lines of the TV show "Heroes", but I got so much more. And now that I've read the sequel I can't wait to read the final book of the series coming out mid-February.

And now, as the finishing touch, I'll give a shout-out to The Prediction a fun blog with a weekly contest. You are prompted 3 words and have to write a short flash fiction of 100 words. Many regulars to the site tend to write serials, so it's fun to get to know the characters as the weeks progress. The genres of choice are horror, fantasy, science fiction or noir. It's a friendly group of talented people and I'm glad I found them. I have my own serial that I post every week so why don't you fantasy lovers go and check it out.