Tag: David Gemmell

Fantasy from A to Z: H is for Heroes

When David Gemmell, my favorite fantasy author, broke into the field in the 1980s, his books were considered to be part of the “heroic fantasy” subgenre. If the two major divisions of fantasy were epic fantasy (sometimes also known as “high fantasy”) and sword & sorcery (sometimes known as “low fantasy”), heroic fantasy was very much in the sword & sorcery vein. Then the stars of George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie began to rise, and heroic fantasy gave way to what we now know as “grimdark.” 

On a superficial level, both grimdark and heroic fantasy appear to have much in common. Both subgenres tend to feature morally gray characters, worlds that are dark and brutal, and a great deal of graphic violence. George R.R. Martin is famous for killing off his characters, and David Gemmell likewise tends to kill off about half of his starting characters in every book. 

But if you spend enough time with both subgenres to get past the superficialities, you’ll see that they are totally different—and in some key ways, diametrically opposed. Not all grimdark descends into total nihilism, but much of it unfortunately does. But heroic fantasy is defined by the fact that it is not utterly nihilistic. Which isn’t to say that all heroes are noble and bright—gray morality is still very much a trope of the subgenre—but the very fact that heroes exist is enough to keep heroic fantasy from delving too deep into nihilism.

This is why I love practically everything that David Gemmell has written, but I couldn’t get past the first book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. I acknowledge that Martin is a brilliant and gifted writer. There were parts of A Game of Thrones where I felt more immersed in Martin’s fantasy world than in almost any other book I’d read. But by the end of the book, I hated all of the characters and was rooting for Danaerys to come with her dragons and burn them all to cinders (which was apparently the plan all along, if season 8 of the show followed Martin’s outline).

The thing is, George R.R. Martin is obsessed with the idea of victimhood. All of the characters in A Song of Ice and Fire are either victims or victimizers, or both. That is, apparently, the most interesting aspect that Martin finds about them. Which explains why his series did so well in the 00s and the 10s, when intersectionality was on the rise and critical theory came to dominate so many aspects of our culture. In any other time, Martin’s obsession with victimhood would not have gained such a following—which explains why it took him nearly five decades to hit his big break.

But where Martin is obsessed with victimhood, Gemmell was obsessed with heroism. He had a penchant for taking the most despicable and morally bankrupt characters, putting them in circumstances that demanded something more of them, and showing them rise to the occasion, making a heel-face turn and becoming the hero that the story demanded. It’s so immensely satisfying for me, every single time. Even the villains will sometimes turn into heroes by the end—though when they don’t, you can always expect them to have creative and satisfying deaths. No “creative subversion” of reader expectations there!

For Gemmell, there’s nothing very complicated about being a hero. There’s no list of defining characteristics or attributes. There’s also nothing particularly complex that a character has to do. For Gemmell, a hero is simply a person who does something heroic. Nothing more, and nothing less.

At this point, I’d usually give examples, but since all of them are spoilers, all I can say is go and read David Gemmell’s books! Some of the best heel-face turns are in Winter Warriors and Hero in the Shadows. I also really loved the protagonist’s redemption in The Swords of Night and Day. And of course, if you really want a great example of an unlikely hero, read Morningstar. That’s basically the whole plot of the book.

Like Gemmell, I prefer to write stories with heroes rather than anti-heroes. My Sea Mage Cycle books are generally more light on violence than a typical Gemmell book, but in The Widow’s Child and The Winds of Desolation, I put the main characters into some tough circumstances that forced them to step up and play the part. Same with The Sword Keeper, my first fantasy novel. And of course, with the Soulbond King books that I’m currently writing, where the main character is patterned after King David, there will be lots of opportunities for him to do heroic things, even if he is a more complicated character.

Heroes are so important to me that I honestly cannot read any fantasy book that doesn’t have one. When I look back on all of the big-name fantasy books that I’ve DNFed, that honestly is the major defining factor. Fortunately, the fantasy genre is full of excellent heroes—and with the way trends are shifting, I think we are going to see a lot more of them soon.

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Fantasy from A to Z: G is for Gemmell

I love Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien, but my favorite fantasy writer of all time is David Gemmell.

David Gemmell had a rough life. He was born and raised in a lower-class region of the UK to a single mother and an absent father. According to his bio, he was kicked out of school for setting up a “gambling syndicate” on the playground, whatever that’s supposed to mean, and eventually came to support himself by becoming a bouncer. Looking for something a little more stable, he eventually became a writer for the local newspaper, though from what I understand he was ultimately fired from that job as well.

His fiction writing career began when he went to get some nagging ache checked out by a doctor, and learned that he had terminal cancer. They estimated that he had only months to live, and scheduled a follow-up visit about two weeks later to find out exactly how much time he had left. Stunned, he decided to chase his childhood dream of writing a fantasy novel, and Legend was the result.

Legend is an absolute masterpiece, not because the prose is perfect or the story is totally original or the worldbuilding is super deep, but because it has so much heart. It poses a question that Gemmell found extremely urgent: what is it that makes life worth living? And then, unlike many more flowery and pretentious novels, it answers the question with raw, direct honesty: the thing that makes life worth living is to give it up for a worthy cause.

The story follows a cast of unlikely characters who are all drawn to a hopeless siege that everyone knows will ultimately result in defeat. The Khan has united the tribes and amassed an army of half a million soldiers, but to invade the southern kingdom he must lead them through a narrow pass that is held by an ancient fortress. However, the fortress is woefully understaffed, with only ten thousand defenders, most of whom are untrained farmers. Everyone who goes to fight there knows that they will die.

The story is about why they decide to fight anyway. There’s the proud daughter of the ailing duke commanding the fortress, who fights to preserve her family’s honor. There’s the cowardly berserker who never really wanted to get drawn into the siege, but stays to protect the girl. There’s the Temple of the Thirty, an ancient order of warrior monks who train relentlessly in the martial arts so that when the time comes to fight in the defining conflict of the age, they are ready to fight for the good, the true, and the beautiful. And there is Druss the Legend, an aging warrior who has wandered the land and single-handedly turned the tides of battles, but now fears growing old and senile, and desires more than anything else to go out of this life on his own two feet with his battle-ax in hand.

David Gemmell wrote this novel in the two weeks between his first appointment with the doctor and the second. But when he went back in, the oncologist informed him that the first test was actually a false positive, and that he had no cancer at all. Stunned for a second time, Gemmell took a critical look at the novel he’d written and stuffed it in his trunk, convinced that it wasn’t very good. After all, who was he to think that he could write a novel?

The story would have ended there, except that a friend of his found out about it, asked to read it, and was so impressed by it that he urged David Gemmell to send it off to a publisher. After a lot of nagging, Gemmell eventually decided to humor his friend, and the book became a massive bestseller over in the UK. David Gemmell went on to write some two dozen fantasy novels, all of them in the same vein as Legend, and they are absolutely fantastic. 

I still remember the sinking feeling in my heart when I read the last book in the Drenai Saga, and realized that there wouldn’t be any more. And I also remember the way my mind was blown when I realized that all of Gemmell’s novels are interconnected in an interdimensional “cosmere” of sorts, with a handful of recurring characters who travel across worlds. Yes, he was doing the Sanderson Cosmere thing before Brandon Sanderson published his first book (and unlike Sanderson, he kept it as a genuine easter egg and never advertised it). 

I’ve collected nearly all of Gemmell’s books, including the crime thrillers he originally published under a secret pen name, and both of the graphic novels that go for a couple hundred bucks. Most of his books I own in mass-market paperback, though I still hope to acquire a signed first-edition hardback copy of Legend. But I’m still dragging my feet to read them all, because it really is an awful feeling when you get to the end of your favorite author’s ouvre and realize that’s all there will ever be.

David Gemmell died in the 00s, in the same way that I hope to die: sitting at his keyboard, writing the last book in his final book series. His wife later finished it. From what I understand, he actually did die of cancer, so maybe there was something to that original mis-diagnosis that kick-started his writing career. Can you imagine how different things would be if that had never happened? I don’t even want to think about it. David Gemmell’s books are amazing, and the world is so much richer because of them. If David Gemmell’s books are new to you, you’re in for a real treat!

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Fantasy from A to Z: B is for Battles

One of the things about fantasy that I love the most are the epic battle scenes, where the good guys and the bad guys face off across the field of battle in a conflict that will determine the fate of everything they hold dear. My favorite scene in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy is the ride of the Rohirrim, where Theoden comes to the aid of Gondor and gives his rousing speech before his men charge into the fray, shouting the battle cry “death!”

I feel like the big set-piece battles are more common in older fantasy, which drew a lot more from J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. Many of these older fantasy writers, including C.S. Lewis and Lord Dunsaney, were drawing from history as they told their stories and created their worlds—specifically, the old-fashioned understanding of history, where the things that mattered most were the clash of civilizations and the great men at the head of those civilizations. 

In some ways, it’s good that we’ve moved to a much more holistic view of history, but there really is something to be said about those battles where everything stood on the edge of a knife, and the course of the next thousand years was decided in a single day. When I read about the numerous times the Muslim invaders were turned back by the Theodosian land walls of Constantinople, it takes me back to the siege of Minas Tirith and the Battle of Pelennor Fields. When I rewatch the scene from Gettysburg where Lawrence Chamberlain leads the charge of the 20th Maine, it stirs something deep within me that, outside of historical military fiction, I have only ever found in fantasy.

Tolkien and Howard were both really great at writing epic battle scenes, but the best, in my opinion, is David Gemmell. His debut novel /Legend/ is one of the most soul-stirring depictions of war that I have ever read. More than anything else, it captures the deep sense of meaning, purpose, and love that comes from staring death and the face and deciding which things (or which people) are worth dying for. In the words of Mel Gibson from Braveheart: everybody dies, but not everybody really lives.

The military aspect of fantasy tends to appeal more to male readers, which is probably why it’s more common in old-fashioned fantasy. Some subgenres like grimdark have preserved it, but with the rise of subgenres like romantasy and the increasing gender divide within publishing, it’s been dying out (not the least because of all the other baggage that grimdark brings, which I will discuss in G is for Grimdark vs. Noblebright). 

Call me old-fashioned, but I much prefer the rousing battle scenes from Tolkien, Howard, and Gemmell to much of the stuff that is coming out today. Will the market swing back? If and when it does, I hope to be a part of that. I don’t always put epic battle scenes in my books, but when I do, those are the authors who inspire me.

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Writing and Publishing Plans moving forward

Over the past few months, I’ve been spending a lot of time experimenting with AI writing and finding ways to incorporate it into my writing process. The goal so far has been twofold:

  1. Develop the ability to write one novel per month.
  2. Get to a level where I can write 10k words per day.

I’ve accomplished both of those things, but I can’t hit them consistently without burning out. Writing with AI has proven key to both of them, but I feel like I need a lot more practice with AI-assisted writing before I’ve achieved any level of mastery. Once I have mastered AI-assisted writing, however, I should not only be able to achieve both goals consistently, producing a much higher quantity of work, but should also be able to maintain or exceed the current quality of my writing as well.

However, I was thinking about it from a reader’s perspective on my morning walk last week, wondering what I would think if, say, David Gemmell was still alive and writing Drenai books, or Roger Zelazny was still alive and writing Amber books. What would I think if either of them announced that they had found a way to incorporate AI into their writing process, so that they could produce a new Drenai/Amber book once every month, instead of once every year? Better yet, what if Andrew Klavan—who is both still alive and still writing Cameron Winter books—announced that he would start publishing new books monthly. As a fan of all these writers, what would I think of that?

Assuming that there was no drop-off in the quality of these new, AI-assisted books, I would find this really exciting, and would probably become a much bigger fan, simply from the fact that I’m reading so much new stuff. However, after a while this might become too costly to me to keep up, leading me to fall away and not be quite so current on what they’re producing. I would still love them as authors, but if they published too quickly, I might have to take a break after a while—and if they continued to publish at that rate, I might never catch up. After all, there are lots and lots of authors that I love, and I can’t dedicate more than a fraction of my reading time to any particular one of them.

So there’s probably a sweet spot, between publishing too much and publishing too little. Most authors are probably on the Patrick Rothfuss / George R.R. Martin side of that line, where fans wish they would write more and write more quickly. But at a certain point, it is possible to overwhelm most readers by writing too much. Of course, there will always be a core group of fans who will read everything much faster than you could ever possibly write, even with AI assistance, but if that’s the only group you’re catering to, then you probably won’t ever have more than a cult following, because you won’t be able to convert casual readers into superfans.

With all of that said, I feel like I’ve gotten to a good place right now, where I’m publishing a free short story every month. I think that’s actually been a really effective way to turn casual readers into fans, and to keep my name fresh in the minds of my readers. And if Gemmell, or Zelazny, or Klavan were producing a free short story every month, I would definitely subscribe to their newsletters and drop everything to read it.

So keeping up the free short story per month is probably a good idea. But for novels, it might be better to release a new one every two or three months instead. Free short stories are much less of a time and money burden on the readers, and thus are effective at turning fans into superfans. But with the novels, which do take more time and money to read, it’s probably better to throttle that back a little bit.

The interesting thing to me is what that means for my creativing process, especially once I’ve reached the point where it takes less than a month for me to produce a novel. If I’m only publishing a novel every 2-3 months, that means that I can—and probably should—take a break between each novel WIP. Which means that the thing I should be shooting for isn’t to maintain a writing speed of one novel per month, month after month after month, but to hit that speed in creative bursts, taking some down-time to replenish the creative well and prepare for the next project.

It’s a very different writing paradigm from the one I’ve been following for the past decade. Until now, I’ve basically always had a novel WIP that I’ve actively been working on, and whenever I feel like I need a break, I usually move on to a different novel WIP. From time to time, I’ll “take a month off” to work on short stories, but the goal there has always been to write X number of stories in no more than a month or two, once again making writing the focus instead of recharging the creative well.

How would things be different if instead, I told myself “I’m taking a break in order to prepare myself to write my next novel,” with a plan for books and other media to consume in order to get things ready for it? And then, instead of taking several months or even years to write the project, to produce it in just a few weeks of white-hot creative heat, afterwards necessitating a break for a while just to cool down? Until now, I’ve never tried anything like that, because I haven’t thought myself capable of producing work that quickly. Indeed, the very thought of taking an extended break from having an active writing WIP has struck me as being lazy. But now that I know I can produce that quickly, perhaps this is a new paradigm that I ought to at least explore.

For my current WIP, Captive of the Falconstar, I’m not stressing out about finishing it in less than a month. But I am following all the benchmarks that I developed, and watching closely to see what takes more time to write than I thought, and what takes less. And it may very well turn out that the best way to improve quality is to get into that white-hot creative heat that comes from producing quickly, so that’s something that I’m watching closely as well.

P is for Parenthood

I’m currently in the process of writing the second edition of my newsletter exclusive, Science Fiction from A to Z, adding a bunch of new chapters and rewriting all of the old ones. For a blog post this week, I thought I’d share one of the new chapters. Let me know what you think!

I was going to make this section “P is for Pulp,” rounding out “G is for Golden Age,” “N is for New Wave,” “D is for Dark Age,” and “I is for Indie.” But I have to admit, I’m not as familiar with the pulp era of science fiction as I would like to be. I’ve read all of Robert E. Howard’s Conan and Solomon Kane stories, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (though not the rest of the Barsoom series, unfortunately. It’s on my TBR!) but that’s pretty much it. From what I understand, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and (of course) Mary Shelley all preceded this era, and I’m a little more familiar with them, but all I know about the pulp era is what I’ve heard from other sources, and I’d rather not regurgitate that without first exploring it myself.

Instead, I want to write about a major influence on every writer that gets almost no play whatsoever in public treatment of their work, but is arguably the single most important aspect of their lives: parenthood.

Becoming a parent really changes you. When I held my first child in my arms for the first time, a distinct thought came into my mind, almost like a voice: “this is her story now.” They say that we’re all the hero of our own story, and to a certain extent that’s true, but anyone who has brought a child into the world (or adopted a child as their own) has a much more complex and nuanced understanding and perspective. Even a terrible, abusive parent has still experienced what it’s like to become a link between the generations. That experience reshapes everything you do and are in ways that are impossible to appreciate until you’ve had it for yourself.

There is a subtle but distinct difference between books written by authors who have experienced parenthood vs. authors who are childless. I wasn’t as conscious of it until I became a parent myself, but even back in my days as a bachelor, I think I could still sense it, even though I didn’t know what it was. I suspect it’s why I’m a huge fan of David Gemmell, but not of George R.R. Martin, even though on the surface, they write the same kind of book. Both of them write dark and gritty fantasy, both of them are known for killing off major characters and doing horrible things to the ones who survive, and both of them are written quite well—in fact, on an artistic level, Martin is probably superior. But where Martin tends to obsess over themes of victimhood and victimization, Gemmell focuses more on heroism and what makes a hero. Gemmell had two children; Martin (so far as I can tell) has none.

In 2022, I made a new year’s resolution to read or DNF every novel that has won either a Hugo or a Nebula award. To prep for this resolution, I made a spreadsheet of all the novels, along with other pertinent information that interested me, such as each author’s gender, their approximate age when they won the award, and whether or not they have any children. I found some very interesting patterns. There were 110 novels in all, and fifty of them were written by authors who were childless (or at least did not have any mention of children in their author bios and/or Wikipedia entries). After 2015 and 2016 respectively, every Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelist (not counting the Retro-Hugos) has been childless—more specifically, childless women in their 40s and 50s, with one exception who is transgender (Charlie Jane Anders), one exception who is in her thirties (Arkady Martine), and one whose age I cannot determine (Sarah Pinsker). But all three of them are still childless, at least according to the internet.

Now, this is not to say that not having children makes you a terrible writer. In fact, it may actually make you a better writer, since you have more time and energy to devote to learning and improving the craft. But whether for good or ill, I do think that it gives you a handicap in terms of life experience. That handicap is going to influence both the subjects you choose to write about, and how you choose to write about them. I say this not just from my experience as a reader, but as a writer.

My wife and I married a little late, and by the time we had our first child, I’d already been writing professionally for about ten years. Up until that point, the reader I’d had in my mind was basically a younger version of myself. Bringing Stella Home is not a YA book, but a lot of my Amazon reviews assume that it is, probably because I was in college when I wrote it and was writing the sort of book that I wish I’d discovered back when I was in high school and reading things like Ender’s Game and Dune. After I’d experienced the real world and become sufficiently red-pilled, I wrote books like Gunslinger to the Stars for my naive college self. But since becoming a parent, my perspective has begun to change, and I find myself writing less for myself and more for my daughter—or rather, the kind of person I expect my daughter to grow up to be. I’m a lot more conscious of certain kinds of content, and while that doesn’t mean that I shy away from it, I do find myself asking: “What am I really trying to say here? What purpose does this really serve?”

The Genesis Earth Trilogy is a good example of this evolution in my own work. The first book, Genesis Earth, was my first published novel, and really was written for a young adult version of myself, which is why I chose to categorize it as YA science fiction. The whole story revolves around two young scientists on a mission to an alien planet, and how they come to discover just as much about each other as the planet they’ve been sent to explore. It took me ten years to write the next book, Edenfall, not because I didn’t know what would happen next, but because I didn’t feel like I was ready to write it. Then I got married, and that was the experience I needed to break through the block and finish the book—and it went in a much different direction than it would have, if I had written it while I was still single. But the conclusion to the trilogy, The Stars of Redemption, was the book that I wrote after my daughter was born, and that experience had a very profound impact not just on the story itself, but on the characters, the thematic elements, and the way the last book brought everything together from the first book to a meaningful conclusion. I know for a fact that I would not have been capable of writing such a book without the experience of becoming a father.

#GiveThanks Day Three

(30) My wife posted today that she’s grateful for Tillamook Mudslide ice cream. So am I!

(31) I’m grateful for the original Star Wars series for cultivating within me a deep and lifelong love for science fiction.

(32) I’m grateful for Michael Ende and his magnificent book The Neverending Story, which remains my favorite novel of all time, and showed me as a child just how powerful and moving a book can be.

(33) I’m grateful for Madeline L’Engle and A Wrinkle in Time for helping me to realize that one day, I would be a writer.

(34) I’m grateful for Ursula K. Le Guin and her masterful book The Dispossessed for showing me how the written word can make you feel you understand a fictional character from a completely alien culture better than you understand yourself.

(35) I’m grateful for Orson Scott Card and Ender’s Game for keeping me up until 4am and giving me one of the most incredible reading experiences of my life.

(36) I’m grateful for David Gemmell and his Drenai Series for moving me to tears with the inspiring heroism of his characters.

(37) I’m grateful for my childhood teachers who encouraged me to read and instilled in me a love of reading.

(38) I’m grateful for Terry Pratchett and his wonderfully entertaining Discworld books, which definitely helped me to become a funnier person.

(39) I’m grateful for Paperback Swap, which has been a wonderful tool for swapping books and building my personal library.

(40) I’m grateful for all of the wonderful books I have yet to discover.

(41) I’m grateful for Goodreads for helping me to organize and keep track of the books that I read, and to set reading goals.

(42) I’m grateful for the ability that I have to blog about my writing and my reading, something that didn’t really exist until just a couple of decades ago.

(43) I’m grateful for NaNoWriMo and the encouragement that it gives all of us to write things we didn’t think that we could.

(44) I’m grateful for Brandon Sanderson, his wonderful books, the positive influence that he is on the fantasy genre, and for the class he taught at BYU that both I and my wife were privileged to be able to take (though we didn’t know each other at the time).

Stormrider by David Gemmell

I thoroughly enjoyed the Rigante series. It has everything that I’ve come to love about David Gemmell’s books: scarred but good-hearted people struggling to do the right thing in the face of great hardship and evil, some of which lies within. Every chapter is compelling and filled with conflict, and while you know that most of the characters are going to die, none of them is beyond redemption.

There were a lot of things in particular that I liked about this book. One of them was the early-modern feel and aesthetic to the world-building. A lot of fantasy worlds are locked in a perpetual state of medieval technology, with very little growth or development. In Stormrider, however, Gemmell advances the world of the Rigante a couple of steps up the tech tree, to a tech-level more on par with the 30 years war.

It’s not just window dressing, either, because the introduction of things like gunpowder has a direct effect on things like battle tactics and duels for honor, which directly affect the story. And yet, there’s still the same undercurrent of magic that made the other books in the series so great. The Sidh may have left the world, but their influence remains, and their magic has not yet faded completely.

My one big issue with the book had to do with the climactic battle leading up to the ending. It wasn’t exactly a deus ex machina, but in some ways it felt very much like it came out of left field and wrapped things up in a way that was just a bit too neat and tidy. That said, it wasn’t nearly as unsatisfying on a character-based level—on the contrary, it brought several of the character arcs full circle in a way that I thoroughly enjoyed. It just wasn’t as good as some of Gemmell’s other endings.

For that reason, I’m only giving this book four stars. However, a 4-star Gemmell book is like a 5-star book from anyone else. Stormrider may fall just short of the standard that Gemmell sets with his other books, but it still clears the bar for truly a truly great fantasy novel.

A quick update

If life had a crazy-meter, the needle on mine would be somewhere in the yellow green right now and trending toward the red.

Next week, Future Mrs. Vasicek and I will be traveling to Iowa for my nephew’s baptism. It’s going to be a big family affair. Future Mrs. Vasicek has met everyone already, minus some of the nieces and nephews, but this will be the first time that we’re all in the same place together. Should be fun, but also very busy.

Next month, we’re getting married, and that’s a whole other source of craziness right there. Good craziness, but craziness all the same. Things are coming together one thing at a time, but there’s still a bunch of stuff to figure out, and a bunch of unknown unknowns as well. It will probably take at least a couple of months after we’re married before everything fully shakes out.

As far as writing goes, I’m making slow but steady progress on Edenfall, and should still finish it before the wedding. I’ll share more details on that in the email newsletter that I plan to send out this week, but the short version is that I seem to be over the hump and making good progress. That’s where I’m putting most of my energy, so if the blog falls off for a while, don’t worry—I’m still here.

As for the publishing side of things, I’m figuring out how to get all my books out in print, which was something I thought I’d figured out back in January until I learned just how crappy KDP Paperback really is. That said, it’s the best option for the present time, so I’m trying to figure out how to work within those limitations and design covers that their POD printers won’t mangle too badly. Still, it’s going to be a while.

An area where I’ve really dropped the ball is short stories. It’s been months since I wrote the last one, and I need to put a bunch out on submission again too. Also, marketing is an area that I need to do better in. I’m experimenting a bit with AMS ads, but it is so freakishly complicated that I hardly know where to begin.

But reading is an area that I really need to do better. I try to spend an hour or two each night reading, but the last couple of weeks that hasn’t happened at all. My TBR list is about three shelves long right now, and that’s just the print books. That’s definitely an oversight that needs to be rectified.

At the same time, I’m well on my way toward collecting all of the works of David Gemmell, mostly through Paperback Swap. If everyone has a superpower, mine is the ability to acquire books, so Paperback Swap is a really fantastic way to leverage that. The Neverending Story is my favorite book, but David Gemmell is my favorite author, so I definitely want to have all of his books in my personal library.

That’s pretty much it. Still need to figure out cover work for Edenfall. Still need to assemble my first readers and get stuff figured out for that. All of these are good problems, though. Hopefully, I’ll be trading up for better problems in the very near future.

Plans for My Personal Home Library

If everyone has a weird or quirky super power, mine is the ability to acquire books. Even when I was living out of a suitcase in a remote Caucasian village, or traipsing across the Middle East, I was constantly acquiring books.

With my marriage to Future Mrs. Vasicek coming up, I’ve decided to put this super power to use. Instead of acquiring books randomly, I’m approaching the task of building a personal library with goals and a plan. Part of that plan is to inventory all of the books that I own, with lists of books / ebooks / audiobooks that I want to acquire. Part of it is to find a place in my home where I can shelve them all, instead of keeping them in boxes or the closet. And another part is categorizing all of the books, with goals for each category.

Requirements

After putting some thought into it, here are my basic requirements:

  • The entire library must fit in a single room / device / server.
  • The only books that I’ll keep are ones that:
    • I want to read again,
    • I want to talk about with others, or
    • I want to share with my family.
  • Ebooks and audiobooks must be DRM-free and device agnostic.

A while ago, I did a blog post on the pros and cons between print books, ebooks, and audiobooks. That seems to be a pretty good set of criteria for determining which formats to collect my books in, or whether to collect a particular book in multiple formats.

Ideally, I want to set up my personal library in a shared space in my home, where I can host guests. Future Mrs. Vasicek and I are going to get a set of scriptures, kind of like the tradition of a family bible, and I want this to be the centerpiece of my personal library. Eventually, I also want to get a dedicated ereader (or set of ereaders) that lives in the library, as well as a portable hard drive for all of the audiobooks. I don’t want any of it to depend on the cloud.

Categories

So far, I’ve got eight categories, though I’m sure this will expand. They are:

  1. Science fiction & fantasy
  2. Other fiction
  3. LDS non-fiction
  4. Self-improvement
  5. Writing & publishing
  6. Arabic language
  7. History & current events
  8. Other non-fiction

I have a lot more fiction books than non-fiction (go figure). For now, I’m using Goodreads as a library inventory system, though I may want to find something better in the future. If you check out my Goodreads profile, you can probably see all of them.

I’m working to come up with goals and plans for each category. Here’s what I have so far:

Science Fiction & Fantasy

My main goal here is to collect the complete works of David Gemmell. He is my favorite fantasy writer of all time, and I’ve read all of the Drenai series and most of the Stones of Power and the Rigante series as well. I’m holding off on the Troy books, mostly because I want to savor them. He’s also got a few standalones and duologies, most of which I’ve read.

Other series that I want to collect in print are:

  • Louis McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series
  • All of Heinlein’s juveniles
  • The Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Princess of Mars, etc)
  • Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish cycle
  • All of the books by my writer friends

There are also a bazillion trilogies that I either own or want to collect, but it’s not worth listing them all here. I’m sure this is going to be a very dynamic part of my personal library.

Other Fiction

My main goal for this section right now is to collect all of the Sackett books by Louis L’Amour. There are only two left, both of which I’ve requested on Paperback Swap. Now I get to read them all, without any interruption!

I also plan to focus on collecting Jeff Shaara, especially the Civil War books. I currently have The Killer Angels by his father, as well as Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure. But before that, I need to read Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause, which I also own (those ones cover the Revolutionary War). Depending on how much I enjoy those, I’ll decide whether to collect Shaara’s complete works.

LDS Non-fiction

There are a tone of authors that I want to collect in this section: Nibley, Givens, Gileadi, Groberg, and more. There are also a few key books that I need to acquire and read, mostly biographies and church histories.

One series that I’m really looking forward to is the four book SAINTS series published by the church. The first book was fantastic; I listened to the whole thing on the train, and it was really cool to pick out the people from my own family history and learn how they contributed to the rise of the church. The next book is going to cover the westward migration, and I have a bunch of ancestors who participated in that, including a few in the Willie handcart company. Really looking forward to it!

Here in Utah, it isn’t difficult to collect LDS non-fiction books. You can find most of the older titles in thrift stores, and there are lots of LDS bookstores to choose from. That said, I don’t have any concrete goals for this section yet. The biggest challenge will probably be in refining this section so that I only keep the best books (ha), since it would be very easy to let this section get cluttered with good but mediocre books. That seems to be the general trend.

Self-Improvement

The biggest thing I need to do in this section is reread How to Win Friends and Influence People, preferably once a year. Fantastic book.

I should also probably focus on marriage and relationship books, since y’know, I’m getting married. Personal finance is also huge: I’ve got Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and should probably collect all of Kiyosaki’s books. Stephen Covey is another huge one.

Beyond that, my cowriter Scott Bascom is really into self-improvement, so my plan for now is to build out this section based on his recommendations.

Writing & Publishing

There are a few classics that I need to re-acquire, such as Character and Viewpoint and On Writing. One classic that I will probably skip is Strunk & White’s Elements of Style (can’t stand that pretentious book). Other than that, the biggest thing is to stay current and focus on indie publishing. For that reason, I suspect that I’ll collect mostly ebooks in this section.

Arabic Language

My main goal here is to read The Book of Mormon (كتاب مورمون) in Arabic. I also have plans to study the Qur’an, though that’s not a priority at the moment.

Most of these books are ones that I acquired while studying Arabic in Jordan. I don’t think I’ll acquire many more anytime soon, though if an opportunity arises, I probably won’t turn it down. The big question in my mind is whether to expand this section to Arabic language & culture, since I do have a bunch of English books on the Middle East.

History & Current Events

My biggest goal for this section is to build a collection of monetary & financial books that together make a complete history of the United States. This subject is my current pet interest, much to Future Mrs. Vasicek’s chagrin. I also have plans for a coin collection / history that I’m currently writing, though that’s on the back burner for now.

Other than that, I plan to focus on book recommendations by Ben Shapiro and Glenn Beck.

Other non-fiction

No real goals yet for this section. At some point, I will probably spin off family histories as a separate category, since there are a lot of them in my family.

General Goals

The biggest thing I need to do is read every book that I own. I may be really good at acquiring books, but I’m not as good at actually reading them. Currently, I’ve read only about 20% of them.

When will I have them all read by? Ideally, the end of the year, but I doubt that’s going to happen. Then again, if I can keep my goal to read for an hour or two each night, a year might just be enough.

Since the library is constantly growing, though, I suspect this will be more of an aspirational goal, or a moving target. Even when I manage to hit it, it probably won’t take long before I acquire more books and have more reading to do again.

The next big goal is to find a place for all these books, which probably won’t happen until after Future Mrs. Vasicek and I are married. At which point, all of these plans may change, since she has a bunch of books too—but probably not too much. We’ve talked about it, and it shouldn’t be too hard to merge our books into one family library, if that is what we decide to do.

Aside from that, I’d like to get as many books signed and personalized as I can. Shouldn’t be too hard: just look up the guest list of any convention I’m attending, and bring the books along.

That’s basically the plan as it stands right now. With my quirky super power for acquiring books, it shouldn’t take long to build an epic personal/family library.

Knights of Dark Renown by David Gemmell

If you’ve been following this blog for any time at all, you know I’m a huge fan of David Gemmell. He’s not only my favorite fantasy writer, he’s my favorite writer, period. His first book, Legend, is still one of my favorite books of all time.

The Knights of Dark Renown is a true standalone, something rare in David Gemmell’s sizeable bibliography. And yet, page for page, it stands up to the best of his work. A brutally violent world populated with unlikely heroes and redeemed villains. An ancient order of magical knights fighting back against an even more ancient evil. Characters who leap right off the page and grab you by the heartstrings, making you weep when they die and stand up and cheer when they triumph—sometimes with the very same breath.

Honestly, if I’d written this review right after I read the book, it would be nothing but “squee!” repeated over and over. It’s been a few months, so my excitement has definitely been tempered with the passage of time, and yet looking back I can definitely say that this was an excellent book.

It’s probably the best vampire novel I’ve ever read, which isn’t what I was expecting. There are a million different kinds of vampires out there, most of which I have no interest in, but these vampires strike much closer to the original: charming, blue-blooded monsters who look perfectly normal on the outside, but beneath the facade are as cruel and terrifying as the most competent and accomplished serial killers—which they very often are. But the really awesome part is how the vampires tempt those they deem worthy to join them, which is how they begin the conquest of the world of men. Without ruining the book, I’ll just say that I was impressed.

Gemmell is often accused of writing the same book over and over again. While that isn’t completely fair, I do see how he gets that reputation. Thing is, that book he supposedly keeps rewriting is a damn good one. He’s a lot like Louis L’Amour in that way.

However, Knights of Dark Renown is something of a departure from that vein. The magic system is different from his other books, as is the lore. The usual character archetypes are there, though he combines them in different ways. The bard, for example, follows a very different path from the Drenai books, and is cut from a different cloth. But none of it is a particularly great departure from Gemmell’s usual fare.

With all that said, I really enjoyed this book. It easily earned the five stars I gave it. Highly recommended.