How empty is the glass?

 

No profundity on offer here, but I was once again struck by the backlash against GRRM, evidenced in every comment chain ever on posts about A Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire.

Yes, very likely he won't finish the series. Yes, even the ultimate delivery of The Winds of Winter is uncertain.

Yes, from the perspective of an eager reader this is difficult to understand.

But. And it's one of those big buts I cannot lie about: some of my greatest moments in many decades of reading fantasy have been down to Mr George RR Martin. Many of my greatest moments in many decades of watching fantasy have been down to that same GRRM and the people who brought his story to the screen.

The landscape of my imagination would be a flatter, less exciting one without the contributions from this one series of books, finished or unfinished. My glass may not be full to the brim, but what there is in the occupied section is of such quality that to complain about the open space above it would be churlish.

And you don't want to be a churl, do you?

It's a strange and wonderful thing to hand out packets of your imagination to strangers and see them enjoying it. It's traditionally a scary business because you might be found wanting - the reader might complain, or worse: yawn. But there's a flip side to that terror-coin. It's also scary when the readers go all in and invest emotionally, not just until the final page, but past that into their broader lives and identities. Some of them start to feel an ownership of the thing that the author created.

There are analogies to be made with the end of a lunch date being considered by the 'deserted' party as the author bailing on a love affair. Obviously, the vast majority of readers miffed at the failure to complete a series do not fall into this category. But some of those venting on GRRM comment chains are sure doing a good impression of it.

You might expect me to be smug because I have 1+ books a year published. Or jealous because GRRM's 10+ year old books sell way more than any of mine. But it's more like watching two people you really like lay into each other, with heavy words being thrown, and just wishing it didn't have to be like this.

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SPFBO Champions' League!

After 10 years we have 10 champions. So, the only logical thing to do is to line them up on a board and have a champions' league!

All 10 champions have been great sports and volunteered to take part.

The book that comes 10th in this contest will be 10th out of the 3,000 books to have entered the SPFBO. So don't feel bad for them. It's an extraordinary accomplishment.

Here they are in the order they won, from The Thief Who Pulled On Trouble's Braids (2015) to By Blood, By Salt (2025).

The judges / judging teams are shown and linked on the orderboard further down the page. 

They are free to work to any timescale within the 6 months alloted (June 1st - December 20th), and can review individually or in batches.

There will be no scores!

The only requirement is that as they review each book they must place it on the ordered list they're compiling and say where it fits among the books they have already placed.

The 10 orderings will be combined into an overall ordering and the book at the top of that ordering at the end of the contest will be the champion of champions!

There will be a trophy - possibly trophies - we're working on that.

For more about the contest in general and for info on SPFBO 11 - check the main page. 

 Ten Years!

The Matrix!

(click on any cover for the judge's review)

Fantasy-Faction	Fantasy Book Critic	The Weatherwax Report	Before We Go Blog	Queen's Book Asylum	Philip Chase	Captured in Words	Bookborn	Hello Future Me	2ToRamble

                   

The Current Order!

Initially Chronological

Updated as results come in.

This will be highly volatile - expect change!

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SPFBO 10 has a winner!

The 10th annual Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off is over!  #SPFBO #SPFBOX

After 11 months of hard labour by ten wonderful blogs, 300 books were whittled down to 10 finalists and then to 1 champion. 

And here it is!

And here it is in with the Selfie-Stick award prior to shipping to J.L Odom in the States.

I've now read the book and it 5* all the way. You can read my review on Goodreads.

Do check it out. The book has had very few readers, so it's exactly what this contest was set up to find - a wonderful fantasy book that might well have been entirely overlooked without some way to focus attention on it and get the ball rolling!

Please check out the finalists' score-board. It was the tightest contest we've ever had and there will be something you'll enjoy here.

And if you have a self-published fantasy book of your own, the next contest - the 11th annual SPFBO (SPFBOXI), opens its doors to contestants in January 2026. Take a look!

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Best Bestseller?

I'm told that THE BOOK THAT HELD HER HEART will appear in 6th place on the upcoming Sunday Times bestseller list!

Which ain't bad on a partial week's sales and competing with books from subscription boxes.

Well done Harper Voyager UK for getting it out there.

The graphic shows my previous efforts. And whilst The Library Trilogy definitely isn't my bestselling work (that's The Broken Empire trilogy), it certainly has potential to do well.

The books don't have a tremendously high average score on Goodreads, but I feel that's because they're more literary than my previous work, and that always leads to lower scores. Moreover, as with The Broken Empire, the people who like these books REALLY LIKE these books. The storyline drew in a number of readers because of the romance elements, but these were never romance books and I hope they leave the readers with more enduring memories along with questions that they will return to.

If I had to guess which of my books people will still be talking about at some point a decade or two in the future, it would be these ones.

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The Locked Library

The Locked Library are a part of my UK editor, Voyager, that produces fancy editions to give away in subscription boxes. For the boxes, these will be book 1s if they are from series. But for my Library Trilogy, they made follow-ups for book 2 and book 3 that could be ordered from them (all sold out now).

Here they are, with the excellent covers and book end art by Tom Roberts.

The only thing not shown are the author letters in each.

 

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The Book That Held Her Heart is out!

 

Book 3 of The Library Trilogy is in the shops on both sides of the Atlantic now!

I've sent out the news letter, saturated my social media, signed a ton of books, don't The Big Idea on Scalzi.com - in short, I've pulled all the levers available to me, and it's in the gods hands now.

A lot of the burden of marketting falls on authors these days, but in the end there's only so much to be done. The publishers get it on bookshop shelves, and the primary engine of book sales after that initial push is readers recommending the book to readers. Readers talking about the book. Readers putting it on their social media.

Books need a ramp to take off - the best book in the world can die if it doesn't get that critical mass behind it to make the readership start taking notice. But after that, whether it will fly far depends entirely on the public.

I've launched the last of the trilogy, and I'm on to the next!

2026, 2027, and 2028 will see the release of the Academy of Kindness trilogy, starting with Daughter of Crows. A dark tale that veers closer to vibe of The Broken Empire than any of my trilogies since we waved Jorg a fond farewell.

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Elves, dwarves, & orcs, oh my!

I'm a huge Tolkien fan, by which I don't mean that I can write elvish or remember the family trees implicit in the Silmarillion, though I can recite some of the songs from Lord of the Rings...

I'm a huge fan in that the story of JRR told owns a significant chunk of my heart and that the landscape of my imagination will always be mapped, at least in part, with Tolkien's iconic mountains, trees, and hills.

So, I'm in complete sympathy with those readers who want MORE. The ones who want more of that sense of awe and gravitas and scale, sprinkled with individual lives that matter.

My mother read me Lord of The Rings when I was 7 and I've read quite a few attempts to rebottle that lightning over the course of my lifetime. I read Terry Brook's homage (The Sword of Shannara) when I was 13 and it scratched at the itch without relieving it. I did enjoy the book at the time.

Many of the books that I've read which appear to want to build on / exploit / honour The Lord of the Rings do so simply by throwing in elves, dwarves, and renamed orcs into a similarly open and conflicted world that shares the bucolic farmlands of Southern England along with the wild forests of Germany and the white-toothed Alps of France.

It's here where the attempts to recapture LotRishness fail for me. What brought elves and dwarves (and to some degree orcs) to life for me wasn't the pointy-eared handsome of the elf or the gruff practicality of the dwarf, it was that they were products of cultures that were in turn products of a history, and that it was a history that wasn't merely complex (a broken plate is complex). Tolkien's history for the world he created was a work of love, a work for its own sake, built over the course of many years and not to support a story. The story fell out of it as a by-product.

It feels (from the books I've read - which are only a small fraction of the elf/dwarf/orc fiction out there) that in pulling these races from the shelf for your novel you are then either forced to build your own history which will immediately be in competition with JRRT's in the reader's head, or to make vague swipes at a similar history/culture, these brush strokes being broad enough to avoid copyright/plagiarism whilst fine enough to benefit from riding the LotR wave.

To truly revisit the territory LotR opened up, I feel you would need to abandon elves, dwarves, and faux-orcs entirely and to construct something equally grand and deep using wholly new devices. Though this would of course limit your ability to stand on the bedrock of western myth.

I know that this has been done to some extent by various authors. But the ones I've visited have never really worked for me. Perhaps I need to be seven again in order to incorporate any book as deeply into my own personal mythology as I did The Lord of the Rings.

But, (and this is entirely personal), I don't think elves and dwarves and awks in anyone else's hands will ever light up the page for me.

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