Publishers Weekly on Dragon Queen (23/6/2015)

Posted in News | Temp

Review in full from Publishers Weekly, 2015:

“In prose sometimes as elegant as a gold and glass airship, or as stark as a dragon destroying an entire city, the worlds Deas carefully built in his previous Memories of Flames novels are slowly torn apart. Bellepheros, Grand Master of the alchemists’ Order of the Scales, is kidnapped by Taiytakei slavers so their sea lords can exploit his control over immortal dragons. They need a dragon rider, so they capture the fallen dragon queen Zafir. The Taiytakei have also enslaved Tuuran, former soldier in the Adamantine Order that answered to Zafir, and Berren the Crowntaker, a warrior cast into another’s body through sorcery. Bellepheros is charmed by the compassionate witch Chay-Liang into building a dragon eyrie, Berren seeks to undo his curse with the help of Tuuran’s skills and companionship, and revenge-bent Zafir swears to destroy all Taiytakei everywhere with her dragon, Diamond Eye. All of them race toward a major clash that may appear in future books but is only hinted at in this installment. Deas’s dense tale unfurls a fantastic multiverse where a queen can become a slave but a slave can change worlds.”

It’s been a while since I got excited by a review, but for Publishers Weekly I make an exception.

Dragon Queen Excerpt: Fickle Fortune

Posted in Excerpts

The Taiytakei take their most dangerous prize of all.

Book Giveaway: Dragon Queen (5/8/2013)

Posted in Uncategorized

Nothing Can Hurt Me

Nothing Can Stop Me

Another week and so far I appear to be not dead and, in fact, largely better. The last couple of weeks have been spent largely on SF stuff again. There’s now a whole first draft for Empires: Extraction (working title) which may need reining in a little as I appear to have gone Michael Bay all over Docklands, Limehouse and parts of the City. Never mind, eh? The last few days have been spent making further revisions to the sekkrit project which is due for submission at the end of the month. I’m told I can talk about it next month. Otherwise I’ve been working on a Bulldog Drummond novella (see last week’s announcement), a good chunk of which is set in Docklands, Limehouse and parts of the City. This is confusing. The same pub, for example, appears in both. Captain Drummond keeps getting strange flash-forwards of the scenery of East London a hundred years in the future, ravaged by nuclear fire…

Cold Redemption (Gallow book 2) comes out on Thursday. Dragon Queen comes out in less than two weeks now and I have a few copies, a tiny precious few. Dragon Queen is my attempt to keep all the good stuff from the first series but with vastly more world building and character depth (hopefully sort of like The Black Mausoleum).  So it’s not going to be quite the relentlessly fast roller-coaster of The Adamantine Palace but on the other hand you do get an entire last act that should read like Call of Duty: Dragon Warfare if I’ve done it right. There are some tasters here and here and I’ll put up another one on Thursday – and here it is. . .

You wanted to know more about the Taiytakei: here they are. And possibly they just made a very big mistake.

Dragon Queen lo-res cover

I have two copies to give away. One here and one on Twitter. Usual deal – comment on this post before August 10th  and I’ll randomly select a lucky victim for a free copy of the series.

This week we’re playing Dragon Supermarket. So you need your comment to come up with something to do with fire and dragons and the comments have to be in alphabetical order. So for example, A is for Absolutely Run Like Fuck When You See One, B is for Burn, etc…

Anyway, to enter the competition, you have to play the game. You can enter as may times as you like but I’ll count the first two entries – the rest are just for fun and showing off.  Extra points for humour and originality and just for once I’ll throw in an Angry Dragons mug if you make me laugh, smirk or otherwise amuse me.

Although, though no one has yet complained about how long it takes me to get to the post office and post things, it can take a while and if you live abroad then it can take even longer. Sorry about that, but they do get there eventually. Well, so far.

Dragon Queen (August 2013 UK)

Posted in Books | News

Dragon Queen is now published in the UK and available as an e-book in the US. In principle it should be available in paper form in the US from Trafalgar Square but I don’t see it listed as of the start of September. Maybe that’s changed.

Dragon Queen lo-res cover

Just as The Black Mausoleum was intended largely as a standalone work in the same universe as The Memory of Flames (how well it worked in that regard is something readers can judge better than I), so Dragon Queen rather ambitiously aims to be a both a new point of entry into the world and, to some extent, a continuation of previous stories. it’s definitely NOT a sequel to The Black Mausoleum. Arguably it’s a sequel to The Order of the Scales for at least one character, to The King’s Assassin for another and to The Adamatine Palace for a third. But it’s as much as anything starting anew[1]. In some ways it’s maybe what The Adamantine Palace would have been if I’d paid considerably more time and effort on the characters and gone to town on the world-building. The result is something that isn’t nearly as fast and furious (except for the last act which partially aims to be Call of Duty: Dragon Warfare) but maybe has a bit more weight to it. Or maybe not. For better or worse it’s as long as The Adamantine Palace and The King of the Crags combined.

For anyone who’s been reading the series so far, here’s a teaser: Remember Bellepheros? Remember how he mysteriously disappears half way through The Adamantine Palace? Not so mysterious any more.

And here’s another one: Remember how the Taiytakei get a tiny fleeting mention in The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice. . .  Guess who’s back!

No prizes, by the way, for guessing who the Dragon Queen is.

Dragon Queen’s first review was from Falcatta Times: “If you love a book that has fantasy elements, political double dealing and proceeds to give manipulate the reader then you really have to read Stephen’s work. The story is dark, it has a cracking pace and when you add into this an author who knows how to manipulate not only the reader but also the characters to showcase both their strengths and their weaknesses all round makes this compulsive reading.”

“If you like dragons and subtle story telling, then this is for you.” Fantasy Book Review

“I loved this book and I felt it was refreshing, action packed, destructive. It contains some great dialogue and a finale any author would be proud of.” Slightly Foxed

“The brooding menace of Diamond Eye builds and builds” Walled Kingdoms

“In short, Dragon Queen is a masterpiece of fantasy and easily Deas’ best work to date.” Fixed on Fantasy

Review in full from Publishers Weekly, 2015: “In prose sometimes as elegant as a gold and glass airship, or as stark as a dragon destroying an entire city, the worlds Deas carefully built in his previous Memories of Flames novels are slowly torn apart. Bellepheros, Grand Master of the alchemists’ Order of the Scales, is kidnapped by Taiytakei slavers so their sea lords can exploit his control over immortal dragons. They need a dragon rider, so they capture the fallen dragon queen Zafir. The Taiytakei have also enslaved Tuuran, former soldier in the Adamantine Order that answered to Zafir, and Berren the Crowntaker, a warrior cast into another’s body through sorcery. Bellepheros is charmed by the compassionate witch Chay-Liang into building a dragon eyrie, Berren seeks to undo his curse with the help of Tuuran’s skills and companionship, and revenge-bent Zafir swears to destroy all Taiytakei everywhere with her dragon, Diamond Eye. All of them race toward a major clash that may appear in future books but is only hinted at in this installment. Deas’s dense tale unfurls a fantastic multiverse where a queen can become a slave but a slave can change worlds.”

[1] Or so it was intended. The various reviews suggest maybe this doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped, and in part because of the uncertainty as to what a reader was *supposed* to know. I hadn’t thought of that.

Total Recall (10/10/2012)

Posted in News

A week tomorrow The King’s Assassin officially comes out, although there are places selling it already (or there were at Fantasycon). Anyway, that got me to thinking I should start up the book giveaways again. They seem to be at least slightly popular. Free books? Can’t imagine why. . . And I’m STILL looking at my shelf of books to give away and seeing Altered Carbon and Sharps, and I STILL haven’t read them, and now they have to fight with Wolfhound Century the Fractal Prince too.

So you get one of mine again. A choice this time: The Thief-Taker’s Apprentice or, if you’ve already read that, The Warlock’s Shadow.

warlocks shadow cover - shrunkthieftakers apprentice cover

It’ll probably be a trade paperback edition. Usual deal – comment on this post and I’ll randomly select a lucky victim for a free copy of the book. In order to enter, comment on this post before 14th October. My challenge to you all this time, given that how many  “The xxxx’s Apprentice” books there are, is to come up with the most ridiculous YA book title you can think of (fictional or real, I don’t care).

You can be as rude as you like as long as you’re not libellous. The gods of random don’t care. But if you make me laugh I might send an exciting bonus goody your way[1]. Although, though no one has yet complained about how long it takes me to get to the post office and post things, it can take a while and if you live abroad then it can take even longer. Sorry about that, but they do get there eventually. Well, so far.

The news part of this update is that I recalled the manuscript for Dragon Queen last week and am rewriting again.  I’ve known for a while that I wanted to do some more work on it and decided I couldn’t wait any longer for the editorial comments before I started looking. And then when I looked, I couldn’t leave it alone. So yes, recalled. Provided I get the rewrite done within the month, it still stands a decent chance of coming out when it was supposed to. It’s, ah. . . going to be about twice as long as the others in the series. Sorry about that. . .

There are some nice reviews starting to show up for The Black Mausoleum. More on both next update.

[1] Exciting bonus goody not guaranteed to be exciting

Dragon Queen Completed (3/4/2012)

Posted in News

The last rewriting for Dragon Queen is now finished and the manuscript will be submitted for editing later this week. A few statistics:

Intended Wordcount: 120k

Actual Wordcount: 204k

Intended hours of effort: 300 hours

Actual hours of effort: more like 500 hours (so about two full months more than it was meant to be)

Number of characters inherited from The Adamantine Palace: 2

Number of  dragons inherited from The Order of the Scales: 1

Number of Adamantine Men: 1

Number of characters inherited from The Warlock’s Shadow: 1

Number of unusually polite assasins: 3

Number of people burned by dragons: lots

Number of times the words lightning and/or rocket appear: 172

Number of times the words flower and/or hippy appears: 4

Number of times I had mis-spelled lightning as lighting before I went through and manually checked every single damned instance: 23

Number of primary human characters: 6

Number of primary human characters who are overtly non-Caucasian: 3

Number of primary human characters who are overtly old: 2

Number of primary human characters who are overtly female: 2

Number of primary human characters who are overtly old, female and non-Caucasian: 1

Number of primary human characters who are revealed as shape-shifting sentient lemons from another world: 0

Number of times the word lemon appears: 2

Number of people disintegrated by the wrath of an angry god: 5

Make of that what you will. I am particularly pleased with this one, but then I think I’ve felt that about every book I’ve finished, so perhaps best not to read too much into that.

Back to working on the edits for The King’s Assassin and the proof of The Black Mausoleum.

A Sniff of Sodium Hydride (20/9/2011)

Posted in News

Status update. Haven’t had one of these for a while. Why’s that? Oh, right, because I haven’t been WRITING for a while. Stupid summer holidays. Stupid day-job. Ah well, back to normal soon.

It’s become pretty clear that Dragon Queen is going to need a total rewrite. Which is OK, and for which it will be much improved. Partly this has become clear because of what’s going on with The King’s Assassin, which has made a couple of things obvious, and partly because of the Gazetteer. Mental note: write gazetteer first next time <sigh>

The King’s Assassin is close to being ready to submit. The gazetteer is useable and will come with hyperlinks this time (not that any of you care, but it’s for me, not for you, for MEEEE :-) and some serious shit is about to hit a serious writing fan in a week or so whent he day-job finally goes away FOREVER[1] as I beat Dragon Queen into shape for the end of the year and draft out the first third of … uh … some other thing that we shall call the Sodium Hydride project. More of which later.

And finally, summer saw the publication of what will almost certainly be my best-selling words for a very long time – the introduction to the Gollancz 50th birthday edition of Pat Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind. Rumour has it Pat may be coming to the UK in November. You are all to welcome him in your viking suits.

Er… and then I had a bored moment at some point…

003 - Management Meeting 327

[1] A couple of months