My five year-old daughter really likes this piece (played by a real orchestra, of course).
“Better to be a slave…”
Better to be a slave with the opportunity to rise than to live a comfortable life without it.
Queen of the Falconstar by Joe Vasicek
How I Would Vote Now: 2013 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)
The Nominees
Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold
Blackout by Mira Grant
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Redshirts by John Scalzi
The Actual Results
- Redshirts by John Scalzi
- Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold
- 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
- Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
- Blackout by Mira Grant
How I Would Have Voted
- Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
Explanation
None of the books this year were super woke or objectionable to me, so I wouldn’t put any of them below No Award. But the only one that I actually finished was Throne of the Crescent Moon, which I found to be an enjoyable debut fantasy novel. It’s got some flaws, but it makes up for that with heart, just like many good debut novels. It’s also got a real Islamic / Middle Eastern flair to it, which made it fun and unique. And while these days, there’s an association between Islamism and the Left (the “red-green alliance”), Throne of the Crescent Moon isn’t woke at all—which I suspect was one of the reasons it didn’t win.
I hope Saladin Ahmed writes a sequel to this book. The world is interesting, the characters are good people, and the first book is clearly setting things up for other books. But I’ve heard rumors that the reason Saladin hasn’t written the next book yet is because the whole Hugo Awards process was such an emotional rollercoaster that it burned him out and killed his desire to go through all that again. Plus, when you experience a surprising degree of success too early in your career, there’s a danger that the pressure to perform will kill your subsequent efforts. Which is too bad, because I definitely want to read the next book!
As for the other books this year, none of them were all that great. I DNFed Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series with the first book, so I didn’t bother reading Blackout. Redshirts is basically a space opera retelling of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which I thoroughly hated (not to mention, I haven’t liked anything Scalzi has written since Old Man’s War, for reasons I’ve explained previously). And 2312 was more of a hard SF slice-of-life novel about all the wonderful things Kim Stanley Robinson would like us to build as we expand humanity’s presence across the Solar System—all with the correct neoliberal politics, of course. A little too heavy on the vision, and a little too weak on the plot.
I wanted to like Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, and I’ve enjoyed most (if not all) of the other Vorkosigan novels by Bujold… but after the first few chapters, I just started to feel as if the series has run too long for me. One of the biggest obstacles to reading the Vorkosigan Saga has been figuring out a proper reading order, since the chronologically first few books have virtually none of the important recurring characters, and every other book seems to refer to the events of half a dozen other previous books, sometimes including books that haven’t been written yet. And trying to read them in publication order doesn’t help either, since Bujold tends to jump all over the place in her own timeline. But in general, I think all the best books are the ones she wrote earlier, because the later-written books are mostly just about the feelings and relationships of the side characters in the series.
When I was a younger writer, I thought it would be wonderful to have a career like Bujolds, with a popular long-running, open-ended series that I could add new books to as the muse tended to strike me. But now, I tend to think that every good series has a definitive arc, with a beginning and an end. I might end up eating these words, of course, especially if one of my series becomes popular enough that that’s all my readers want to read more of. But I would rather have multiple popular series, each with a distinct arc, than one never-ending series where the later books just don’t quite measure up to the first ones.
Is Queen of the Falconstar for You?
Queen of the Falconstar is a character-driven space opera about captivity, survival, ambition, and the dangerous opportunities that can open when your old life is stripped away. If you like science fiction that combines starships and interstellar raiders with sharp psychological conflict, high-stakes power struggles, and a heroine who refuses to stay powerless, this book may be for you.
What Kind of Reader Will Love This Book?
If you love…
- space opera with frontier-colony danger, raiders, and starfaring clan politics
- character-driven science fiction about survival, adaptation, and rising through a hostile system
- intelligent, pragmatic heroines who think their way through impossible situations
- morally complicated stories where safety, loyalty, love, and ambition collide
- tense emotional dynamics involving captivity, power imbalance, and hard choices
…then Queen of the Falconstar is probably your kind of story.
What You’ll Find Inside
At the center of the story is Zlata, a restless young woman trapped in a dead-end life on an isolated mining station, who is suddenly carried away captive when raiders attack her home. What follows is a tense emotional journey through fear, culture shock, survival, and ruthless self-reinvention, as she realizes that if she wants any future at all, she will have to make herself indispensable. The tone is intense, intimate, and often morally thorny, with a style that is fast-moving, psychologically focused, and grounded more in strategy, character tension, and social maneuvering than in large-scale battlefield spectacle.
What Makes It Different
Fans of space opera will recognize the appeal of starships, frontier colonies, and interstellar conflict, but Queen of the Falconstar takes those elements in a more intimate and socially dangerous direction. Where many science fiction adventure stories focus on external missions or military campaigns, this one leans into captivity, hierarchy, cultural assimilation, and the question of how much of yourself you can surrender without losing your soul. It also stands apart through Zlata herself: she is not a conventional idealist or rebel, but a pragmatic realist whose strength comes from clear-eyed adaptation. The result is a space opera that feels personal, volatile, and psychologically charged.
What You Won’t Find
You won’t find a lighthearted or clean-edged adventure here. This book deals with slavery, sexual threat, coercive power structures, and polygamy-adjacent marriage politics, though it aims to handle those elements seriously rather than gratuitously. You also won’t find a simple good-versus-evil story, since much of the tension comes from navigating a brutal world where survival often depends on morally compromised choices.
Why I Think You Might Love It
This story mattered to me because I could never quite let it go. Zlata especially stayed with me: she’s crafty, pragmatic, resourceful, slightly pessimistic, and ruthless when she needs to be, but she’s also trying to face reality as it is and survive it on purpose. I think this book will connect most strongly with readers who are drawn to stories about what a person becomes under pressure, and about the strange, dangerous line between being conquered and choosing to rise.
Where to Get the Book
Related Posts and Pages
Explore the series index for the Falconstar Trilogy.
Return to the book page for Queen of the Falconstar.
Sorry
Wow, it’s been a while since I posted to this blog. I was just about to get back in the saddle, after finishing the rough human draft of Captive of the Falconstar, but then things got a little crazy and I dropped the ball.
What happened? Well, I got into a minor accident where I bent the family car’s door out of shape, and that took about a week and $1500ish to solve. Our 6 month-old also came down with croup (again) and an ear infection, so that wasn’t fun—he’s much better now, though, fortunately. Classes ended for my wife, and now she has to grade a bazillion papers. And finally, we had taxes, which were so complicated this year that we found the limit of what Free Fillable Forms can and can’t do. So that was crazy.
On the writing end of things, I tried and failed to juggle four different projects at the same time, so that threw things off a ton. So instead of trying to keep that up, I decided to focus on Captive of the Falconstar and all the prewriting/outlining for The People of the Last Harvest. Both of those projects went really well, actually, and I’m back at a place where I think I can start doing some token work on the other two WIPs as well.
Basically, the plan is to cut the daily workload for Captive in half, and put off Last Harvest until Captive is done and off to the editor. At that point, I’ll turn my focus to The Soulbond and the Sling and The Soulbond and the Lady. Until then, I’ll just do token work on those two—just the minimum amount to keep my writing skills warm enough that I can hit the ground running once Captive is well and truly done.
I guess I just thought I could do all the revisions and polishing work for Captive of the Falconstar in two short weeks. I’ve done it before, for some of the Sea Mage Cycle books, but those were super short and I also didn’t have nearly as much family stuff going on at the time.
So yeah, underestimating the workload was probably what led to crashing out. But I’ve got a much better handle on it now, and I think I can finish Captive before the end of the month, even while doing token work on the other WIPs. And I also need to catch up on some publishing things, like writing and sending out another author newsletter, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. Just an hour a day should catch up with that in about a week.
As a side note, I am SUPER excited to work on The People of the Last Harvest. I’ve got all the Sudowrite fields filled out (except the outline, which won’t take long), so now all I have to do is go through and write the scene prompts to generate each chapter. Once I’ve got a rough AI draft, I plan to run it through a bunch of the Author Media Patrol Toolbox tools, like the Zeitgeist Vibe Checker, the Not A Developmental Editor, and the Roast Engine to figure out which changes to make. With that, I’ll go through and make the necessary changes to generate a better AI draft, and go from there.
Also, I should probably mention that I’m planning to attend the 2027 Novel Marketing Conference in Austin this coming January. Just bought the tickets for that. And of course, I’ll be at Writers Cantina in July, as a panelist.
The kids are screaming, so I’d better go check on that and make sure my wife isn’t too overwhelmed. Take care! I’ll start posting regularly again next week, probably.
How I Would Vote Now: 1979 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)
The Nominees
The Faded Sun: Kesrith by C.J. Cherryh
The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
Blind Voices by Tom Reamy
The Actual Results
- Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
- The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey
- The Faded Sun: Kesrith by C.J. Cherryh
- Blind Voices by Tom Reamy
How I Would Have Voted
- No Award
- The Faded Sun: Kesrith by C.J. Cherryh
- The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey
Explanation
Science fiction is so woke, it was woke before “woke” was a thing. It started in the 60s, with the organization of SFWA (which was an ideologically captured institution from its very founding—seriously, go read about the Futurians and their communist sympathies) and it reached a peak in the 70s. Then the Reagan-Thatcher era and the fall of the Soviet Union pushed the genre to moderate for a couple of decades, but after it went dark & gritty with cyberpunk and grimdark, the wokeness rose up and took over all the institutions of the genre. Which is why, today, most of the award winning science fiction is pink haired butch lesbian cat ladies going where no gender identity has gone before, with a few token minorities thrown in for good measure.
The late 70s was when the pre-woke era really hit its peak, which is probably why 1979 was the year when we got the worst book to ever win a Hugo: Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre. Seriously, it is terrible—not for being woke (it isn’t especially political), but just for being BAD. It’s based on a short story McIntyre wrote that won the Hugo the previous year, and the novel seriously reads like bad fanfic… of her own story… so because it assumes that you already know and love the story, the book never actually tells the story in a meaningful way. And of course, the writing is absolutely terrible—almost as terrible as the original first edition cover art:
McIntyre went on to write some writing books, with terrible advice like “never say ‘he screwed up his eyes in thought!’ Who even does that?” Later, she even founded the writing workshop Clarion West, which seriously makes me wonder about the quality of instruction. But from what I can tell, the whole Clarion / Clarion West / Odyssey workshop network is less about teaching good writing and more about serving as a feeder system for traditional publishing, making sure that the new authors are sufficiently diverse and woke.
I used ChatGPT to screen Blind Voices by Tom Reamy, and based on what it told me, I decided not to read it. Apparently, the book is about a bunch of naive, innocent midwestern girls who get corrupted (and one of them gets raped) by a supernatural traveling circus. Lots of nihilism and weird sexual content, so I’m gonna pass.
I wanted to like Kesrith, and actually got several chapters into it, but the book ultimately bored me too much to finish it—which I’ve found is true of most of C.J. Cherryh’s books. Maybe I’ve just become too impatient as a reader, since I did enjoy Merchanter’s Luck and Voyager in Night back when I read them in college, but I don’t have much tolerance for boredom anymore.
As for McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, I DNFed the series after the second book. I know it’s super well beloved by the older generation of readers, but the dragons are just so OP that I couldn’t really get into it. Seriously… if your characters can magically teleport through time AND space, is there anything they can’t do? So where is the conflict? Apparently in lots of interpersonal relationship drama, which is why I checked out.
Love Beyond the Grave in Bloodfire Legacy
At the heart of Bloodfire Legacy is a haunting question: can love still protect us after death has already taken everything else? This epic fantasy novel begins with murder, grief, and the lure of vengeance, but underneath all of that runs a deeper current—the enduring love of a father who refuses to abandon his daughter, even from beyond the veil. Lord Arion’s death is not the end of his care for Lyra. In many ways, it is the beginning of the book’s deepest emotional conflict.
Where the Idea Came From
Part of the spark for Bloodfire Legacy came from wanting to write the kind of fantasy story my wife especially loves, including some sea-story elements that naturally found their way into the book. But this novel also came from persistence. I actually wrote an earlier version of this story years ago, set it aside, and eventually came back to it because I still felt there was something powerful and worth saving at its core. In a strange way, that fits this theme: some things are too deep to simply let go of.
How Love Beyond the Grave Shapes the Story
Lord Arion’s love for Lyra is not just an emotional detail in the background. It is one of the forces that drives the whole story. The moment he dies, his first thought is not for himself, but for his daughter. He realizes that she will wake up fatherless, alone in a court full of danger, and he cannot bear to leave her. Even when he is called toward the peace of the Immortal Realm and reunion with his wife, he chooses to remain behind and watch over Lyra instead. That choice tells you something essential about the book: in this story, death is real, grief is real, loss is real—but love is real too, and it does not simply vanish when life ends.
That love keeps shaping the novel long after Arion’s death. He watches Lyra grieve him. He watches her longing for justice begin to harden into a thirst for vengeance. He sees the Dark Brotherhood exploit her pain and try to pull her into darkness. Because he cannot touch the physical world directly, he searches for another way to reach her, and that is what leads him to Corin. In other words, one of the book’s most important relationships only exists because a dead father still loves his daughter enough to fight for her. Arion’s love becomes an unseen force in the story—guiding, warning, grieving, and resisting the darkness that wants to consume Lyra.
What Love Beyond the Grave Says About Us
I think this theme speaks to one of the deepest human hopes we have: that death does not truly destroy the bonds that matter most. We know loss is real. We know death takes people from us. But we still hunger to believe that love means something more than temporary closeness. In Bloodfire Legacy, love beyond the grave is not just about memory or sentiment. It becomes sacrifice, protection, warning, and moral responsibility. Arion does not remain because he cannot let go in a selfish sense. He remains because he still wants what is good for his daughter, even when he can no longer control her choices. That kind of love is powerful precisely because it is enduring without becoming possessive.
Why This Theme Matters to Me
This theme matters to me because I do not think the strongest love is fragile. I think real love endures. Lord Arion’s love for Lyra is moving to me because it costs him something. He gives up rest, peace, and reunion because he cannot bear to leave his daughter alone in her hour of danger. That kind of love feels both emotionally true and spiritually meaningful to me. And maybe that is one reason I kept coming back to this story myself. Even after earlier attempts failed, I knew there was something alive at its center that was worth returning to and worth finishing.
Where to Get the Book
Related Posts and Pages
Is Bloodfire Legacy for You?
Bloodfire Legacy is a fast-moving epic fantasy about grief, temptation, loyalty, and the choice between vengeance and justice. It blends court intrigue, sea-crossing adventure, forbidden magic, and a ghostly father’s desperate effort to save his daughter before darkness consumes her.
What Kind of Reader Will Love Bloodfire Legacy?
If you love …
- fantasy with court intrigue, secret conspiracies, and looming war
- stories about forbidden magic, moral temptation, and the fight to stay in the light
- emotional character arcs built around grief, justice, loyalty, and redemption
- unlikely partnerships, especially between a highborn heroine and a streetwise outsider
- adventurous fantasy that feels tense and dramatic but ultimately hopeful
…then Bloodfire Legacy is probably your kind of story.
What You’ll Find Inside
Bloodfire Legacy follows Lyra Arion, the gifted daughter of a murdered court magician, as her hunt for her father’s killer draws her toward the Dark Brotherhood and the seductive power of forbidden magic. Alongside her is Corin, a street thief with the rare ability to see and speak with the dead, who becomes both her guide and her lifeline. The result is a fantasy adventure that is suspenseful, emotionally driven, and ultimately uplifting, with a brisk pace, clear stakes, and a strong undercurrent of hope.
What Makes It Different
Fans of classic secondary-world fantasy will recognize the royal courts, magical orders, dark conspiracies, and gathering war, but Bloodfire Legacy takes those familiar elements in a more intimate and emotionally immediate direction. Where many epic fantasies focus first on armies and kingdoms, this one begins with a daughter’s grief, a father’s love, and a thief who can hear the dead. It also stands apart through its combination of court fantasy and sea-story energy, plus a strong emphasis on moral struggle: not just whether evil can be defeated, but whether the heroine can resist becoming like the darkness she fights.
What You Won’t Find
You won’t find grimdark nihilism, explicit content, or a story that wallows in despair. While the book deals with murder, dark magic, and spiritual peril, it draws clear lines between justice and vengeance and keeps moving toward mercy, courage, and the possibility of redemption.
Why I Think You Might Love It
I think this story will especially connect with readers who want fantasy to be both exciting and heartening. In the author’s note, I talk about writing this series to be entertaining, uplifting, and good clean fantasy, with sea-story elements shaped in part by my wife’s reading tastes. That spirit comes through in Bloodfire Legacy: it gives you danger, mystery, magic, and high stakes, but it never loses sight of love, loyalty, and the hope that people can turn back from darkness before it’s too late.
Where to Get the Book
Related Posts and Pages
Playing Catch-up
It’s been a crazy week. On Tuesday, I had a minor accident with the family car, where I tried to step out while the car was in reverse, and the front door impacted a wall and got bent out of shape. So that threw off the whole day, and put us out more than a grand, which is why I haven’t gotten back to blogging daily. But hopefully that will change as I catch up on things.
Right now, I’m juggling three WIPs, which is a little crazy. Fortunately, two of them are in the same series/world, which makes it a little easier, but not by much.
I was hoping to finish this WIP completely by the end of the week, but now that’s obviously not going to happen. With my wife busy finishing up her classes for the semester, leaving me to watch the kids most of the day, it’s realistically going to take the rest of the month to finish this book. Which is fine, but a little frustrating.
First, I need to finish the revised human draft. I’m currently in chapter 2 out of 12, but if I push I can probably finish that next week. Then, I need to do a final polish, cutting the word count down by about 10%. That might take longer, but it will probably require less brainspace, since it’s mostly just looking for unnecessary words and cutting them.
This book is currently up for preorder, so it needs to get done soon enough that I can send it out to my editor for a copy edit. It is set to release in July, which gives me three months, but the sooner it’s done, the better. For that reason, this book needs to be my priority.
This is a quick cover mock-up I made for The Soulbond and the Sling using ChatGPT. I will probably make this a J.M. Wight book, but it’s good enough for now. Definitely captures the tone and genre.
I’m working on the rough human draft for this one, which is probably going to be the most difficult draft. My hope is to finish it by June, leaving another month to do the revision draft and the final polish. So far, it’s going well, but juggling this one with the other projects is starting to get a little difficult.
I’m going to be on the Blasters and Blades podcast soon, talking about this new series, so I want to get the first four chapters to a state where I can put them into a sample excerpt, hopefully before the end of the month. That way, people who hear the podcast (or find out about it in other ways) can download the sample and sign up for my email list to be informed when the full book comes out.
I am very excited for this book, and hopeful that it will turn out well! The AI draft is already done, so I just need to translate that into the actual human draft and make it shine.
I’m also working on the AI draft for The Soulbond and the Lady, book 2 of the series, though this is a much lower priority. Basically, I’m doing just enough to keep my AI writing skills honed, and when I start the human draft of this book, after finishing The Soulbond and the Sling, I’ll focus more on finishing the AI draft for this one. But I am very excited to finish this WIP as well, since I hope to release the first three books in this series all at roughly the same time. So the sooner I can finish this one, the soon I can publish the first book.
As if that’s not enough, I’m also working on an outline for another fantasy trilogy, which I hope to generate in Sudowrite before the end of the month. Gotta use those credits before I lose them. But that’s more of a fun side project at this point—something to do after the work has been done on everything else.
At some point, I’m probably going to drop the ball on one of these WIPs. That, or I’ll put everything else on hold to finish Captive of the Falconstar, but I don’t want to do that until I have a good stretch of time and know that I can finish it quickly. In the meantime, I’m backed up on all of the regular publishing tasks, which is why I haven’t posted a new short story for the Vasicek Free Library for this month yet, but that’s coming soon. And hopefully I can get caught up on this blog too.