Monthly Roundup – October 2021

Hello, and welcome to my Monthly Roundup post for October, here on Track of Words. At risk of sounding like a broken record, life’s been somewhat up and down recently, and October was definitely more down than up. I’ve had a hard time concentrating on Track of Words, so I only managed seven new posts this month (eight, including this one)…but hopefully that’s seven good posts, at least! All things considered I’m actually very pleased with these, partly because between them they cover quite a lot of ground and partly because I’m just really pleased with how some of them have come out (despite everything). Only time will tell whether I get back to a more productive state next month, but hopefully there’s been at least something you’ve enjoyed in October!

As always, I’ll quickly run through everything that I’ve posted in October, before going on to talk a bit about the month as a whole.

Reviews

Four book reviews this month, three of which I had either been meaning to write or had written and hadn’t got around to publishing for quite some time. There’s some good variety here too, I think, covering a fantasy/crime crossover about stories within stories, a sci-fi adventure set on Mars, a Warhammer 40,000 novel featuring the creepiest of Space Marines, and a queer historical fantasy set in Edwardian England!

The Stitcher and the Mute by D.K. Fields – the second book in the Tales of Fenest trilogy, this picks up where Widow’s Welcome left off and continues to develop both the characters, the world and the ongoing narrative of the series. It also includes another two stories-within-stories (one of which is even more meta than that), featuring an ash beetle breeder and a family called the W’oventrouts (because of course it does!), and if anything is even more interesting and thought-provoking than book one.

In the Shadow of Deimos by Jane Killick – if you enjoy a good sci-fi mystery/adventure story, and especially one set on Mars, then this novel based on the world of Terraforming Mars is worth checking out. It’s pacy and entertaining, with a little bit of interesting science (including the frankly awesome concept of warming up Mars by crashing massive asteroids into the surface) and a mystery involving corporate greed and the possibility of life on Mars.

Silent Hunters by Edoardo Albert – dark, unconventional and wildly imaginative, this is absolutely not your normal Space Marines novel. Instead, it’s a brilliantly fresh take on both the Carcharadrons as a Chapter and 40k stories as a whole, a book which consistently confounds expectations (in a very good way), and another example of why Edoardo Albert is already one of my favourite Black Library authors.

A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske – take a sort of ‘novel of manners’ set in Edwardian England (think dinner parties, class snobbery, and a beautifully-observed sense of society) and add in a wonderful sense of magic and a central queer romance, and you might get somewhere close to this, the first novel in a new fantasy trilogy. It’s warm, evocative and romantic, the magic system is fascinating and its central characters are an absolute delight – I simply adored this book.

Author interviews/articles

All three of these posts are talking about new or upcoming novels from Aconyte Books, who continue to do sterling work publishing some really cool books. I was particularly excited to be able to reveal the cover art for an upcoming Marvel novel that I’m really looking forward to reading!

Cover Reveal: Reign of the Devourer by David Anandale – given how much I loved The Harrowing of Doom, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I’m deeply excited to have been able to exclusively reveal the cover for David’s second Doctor Doom novel – Reign of the Devourer. And it’s a doozy of a cover too, so check this out to see the cover in all of its glory, and hear a few of David’s thoughts on both the artwork and the novel itself.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: David Guymer Talks The Patriot List – if you’ve ever wondered what a Marvel novel would be like if all the superheroes were actually supervillains, then The Patriot List might be the book for you. I spoke to David to get the lowdown on this new instalment in Aconyte Books’ Marvel: Untold range.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Robbie MacNiven Talks The Gates of Thelgrim – I chatted to Robbie about his second book in Aconyte’s range of Descent novels, to find out more about the characters, the convention-defying fantasy world of Terrinoth, and what to expect from this fun-sounding new dungeon crawler.

General Update

October has been quite a difficult month for me, for various reasons. I’ll give you the bare bones of what’s been happening, but I don’t imagine you want too much information. I went into October knowing it was going to be busy as I was starting a new job part way through the month, which would obviously take up a lot of both time and headspace. With that in mind I was looking forward to spending the first few days of the month away from London with my other half, enjoying some peace and quiet in Dorset. In a sense that’s exactly what we got, but finding out early on in the week that my best, oldest friend had passed away really knocked the wind out of my sails.

I met Andy when we were about 5, and over the following 30+ years we grew to be great friends and really bonded over music. We formed a band at school and spent hours rehearsing and gigging, and even when Andy went to live in Germany after university we stayed close – I was best man at his wedding, I joined him on stage as part of the wedding band, I went to his shows when he came over to the UK with his band, I’m godfather to his eldest daughter. His death has hit me really hard to be honest, and even now nearly a month later I still can’t really believe it. I’m grateful that I was able to get over to Germany to be there for his funeral and spend time with his family, even though it doesn’t feel anything like enough.

Between trying to get my head around Andy’s death, travelling to Germany for his funeral, and starting a new job – remotely too, as I’ll be working from home full time – the month has flown by in a total blur. I’ve managed to maintain a little bit of my usual routine and structure amongst everything, albeit not much, and both reading and writing time has been harder to come by than usual, hence the paucity of new content here on Track of Words. I have several book reviews to write if I can get my head in gear, and I’ve fallen way behind on arranging author interviews (although I do have one more or less ready to go…so watch this space), but hopefully I can slowly get back into the swing of things. It may take me a while yet, but fingers crossed I can figure it out.

I mentioned struggling for reading time, but I should probably caveat that. Thankfully I’m a fast reader so I’ve still managed eight books in October, which I appreciate is a pretty good tally really, but it’s considerably fewer than I’m used to! Especially compared to the whopping 18 I read in September. Nevertheless, it takes me up to 118 for the year, which I’m very happy with, and for the most part I thoroughly enjoyed the books I did manage to read. It’s probably not a surprise to know that I prioritised books that were either easy reads or the sort of things that I knew would be good for the soul – I’ll hopefully write reviews of three of the eight (Marc Collins’ Grim Repast, Emma Mieko Candon’s Ronin and A Master of Djinn by P. Djèli Clark – all utterly wonderful), but the remaining five were books I chose purely for reading and enjoying.

Of those five, Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path is a (non-fiction) book I’d had my eye on for a while, but with its themes of dealing with grief, and coming to terms with the difficulties life can present, I think it was exactly what I needed to read in the immediate aftermath of Andy’s death. It’s actually about a couple walking the 600+ miles of England’s South West Coast Path, so it was also appropriate to read a large part of it while in Dorset. I read both Flying Too High by Kerry Greenwood (one of the books that the wonderful TV show Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is based on) and Danger at Dead Man’s Pass by M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman (the fourth in the fantastic middle-grade Adventures on Trains series) while in and travelling through Germany, and while they’re two very different books they both have great characters and share a real sense of fun. Exactly what I needed.

To finish off, I’ll give a quick update on my reading challenge for this year, in terms of reading more books written by non-male authors. Of the 118 I’ve read so far, 60 have been written by non-male authors, with a further 5 written by male/female writing partnerships. I’m pretty happy with how that’s working out, and looking back at my tally with 10 months of the year gone I’m delighted by the variety that I’ve been able to enjoy thus far. I appreciate that a lot of visitors come to Track of Words for the Black Library content and I haven’t been reading much in the way of BL this year, but ultimately I have to make sure I’m enjoying my reading first and foremost. There will be more BL books to come, I’m sure, alongside all the other fascinating SFF titles!

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I’m always keen to hear about what you’ve enjoyed reading or listening to recently, what you think about the interviews and articles I’ve been publishing of late, whether you’ve read and enjoyed any of the books I tackled this month, and whether there’s anything you’d like to see in these roundup articles! Do drop me a line in the comments below, or get in touch on Twitter.

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