Hello, and happy spring!

After weeks of snow and ice, it’s now pushing 80 here. No one, including the trees, knows what to make of this madness.

I recently revisited an adolescent fantasy favorite, so of course I had to share. But first, speaking of sharing, I wanted to share that I’m working on a Kickstarter for my other pen name, and it will feature a kind of…well, scifi is the wrong word, but a story set in the near future with some futuristic elements. To make things more exciting and different, the story will be available as as series of physical letters in the mail! If you’d like to check out that upcoming campaign, plus a bunch more (largely fantasy/romantasy) campaigns, you can find them all in this Bookfunnel promo collection here. 

Now, about that adolescent fantasy favorite. Perhaps the first ever urban fantasy books I ever read was the duology Knight of Ghosts and Shadows and Summoned to Tourney by Mercedes Lackey and Ellen Guon. 

The concept–of elves hiding out in urban California–appealed to my teenage self, who was sure that there were magical creatures around every corner. (Actually, I still feel that way). And a street busker as the human hero was also mind-blowing. The story combines fiction and magic with real songs, so I got a crash course in classical and Celtic music while I was at it. (This was probably a major part of the appeal). 

This time around, I realized that due to the magic of music streaming, I could listen to each song as it appeared in the story. I’d listened to as many of the songs as I could back when I first read the books (“Danse Macabre” features prominently and was easy to find, even back then), but this time I was able to listen to each song as it was first mentioned. 

It was a fun, multi-media experience, and also made me appreciate just how solid those stories are. (Don’t you love it when your adolescent taste is justified decades later?). I’ll be perfectly honest: I’ve been having a hard time tolerating a lot of the fantasy, especially the YA romantasy, that’s popular right now. Yes, yes, I hate to be that person, but I’ve had a hard time not going around moaning, “Why can’t people write good books anymore?!?”

Of course, an obvious problem might be me, not the books. Maybe I’m not longer capable of enjoying fantasy or YA romantasy. But while I wouldn’t exactly call Knight of Ghosts and Shadows and Summoned to Tourney YA romantasy, it’s certainly a forerunner to it, including a male-male romance back when most fantasy authors weren’t doing that kind of thing, and I have to be honest: I still LOVED it! 

To make things even better, I discovered that there are several more books in the series now, AND the audiobooks are currently on deep discount on Chirp! 

So, my key takeaways are 1) Go read/listen to the Bedlam’s Bard books, and 2) People were writing some straight-up awesome fantasy back in the 90s. Lots of other people are currently saying this on social media, so if you have an opinion on this and why that might be, let me know!

Oh, and this doesn’t mean I think all current literature is bad, obviously, since I’m producing it myself. If you want to check out the Kickstarter campaigns, the link is here.

Happy reading!

E.P. Clark