Blood of Aenarion, my first new Warhammer novel in more than eight years, has just been released. I had planned a long post for today about the writing of the book, which was something of an epic in itself, involving travel across Europe and Asia, visits to exotic and glamourous locations and my discovery of a shrine to Slaanesh in that most likely of places, Thailand.
I kept a diary of the trip and the process of writing and took photos to document my journey. Unfortunately, in one of those clear demonstrations of the law of unintended consequences, I upgraded my computers hard drive and operating system and for some reason the files I need access to don’t show up in Spotlight on my Mac anymore. I am sure I will find them soon, but the only way I can think of doing this is to boot from my old hard-drive and then find and copy the files. That is all going to take some time. Anyway, please accept this excuse in the “dog ate my homework” or “a poltergeist reached out of the screen and grabbed my blog post” spirit in which it is intended.
To keep you busy in the meantime I have compiled a list of all my previous posts about Blood of Aenarion. These are Elves and Imagery, Aenarion, the Archmage Caledor, Malekith, Morathi and N’Kari.
True story: almost exactly twenty years ago today, in a bar in a less than salubrious corner of Bangkok, Fergus Bannon introduced me to a group of English tourists as the illegitimate son of a Golden Triangle opium warlord. (I can be certain of the date because I made the mistake of agreeing to meet him there to celebrate the birthday we almost share.)
Despite the obvious untruth of this assertion, it remains the single best introduction anyone has ever given me and it tells you something about Bannon’s maliciously crazed imagination. It is a tribute to his reality warping powers of persuasion that although I look and sound exactly like the very large Scotsman I, in fact, am, many of these poor people took him quite seriously. I shall draw a discrete veil over the searing odyssey of drunken depravity that followed and I would like to add that I am in no way writing this because Bannon possesses incriminating negatives of the events of that sanity-blasting few days.
Nor does he, as far as I know, possess any incriminating negatives of either of Scottish SF and fantasy legends Gary Gibson and Hal Duncan. Having known this pair for over twenty years now, I very much doubt there is anything he could blackmail them with that they would not be cheerfully prepared to admit to.
The reason I am dropping all these names is that Fergus Bannon’s book Judgement is currently in the Top 100 Kindle US SF novels. It was edited by Gary and has a foreword by Hal. I recommend it to your attention if you have any interest at all in extremely well-written louche SF by one of the genre’s most shadowy and depraved figures.
That’s what you get for having a Mac. Just kissing. Thanks for the stories. I really enjoy your books.
Thanks! I suspect it’s more what I get for thoughtlessly clean-installing an operating system and a new hard-drive and only copying a few folders across from the old one. Did you mean just kidding, by the way :)?
I Just finished “Blood of Aenarion” (read it in 2 days) and I thought it was absolutely fantastic, BRAVO William! What I enjoyed most, I think was the friendly banter between Teclic and Tyrion throughout the book. But I believe that what draws me, and most of your fans to your works is the fact that you create characters that really know how to “kick ass!”. It was refreshing see more of a glimpse into the realm of the Chaos powers as well. I am hoping that in the next two books you elaborate even more on the ruinois power, as I find them and the first ones to be highly intriguing. Sadly though I must now wait another year for the next book, but wait I will for as ever your books are high on my “must read” list.
Thanks Jeff,
Glad you liked it. In terms of kick-ass, Blood is very much Tyrion and Teclis, the very early years. Sword of Caledor shows our heroes getting into their stride and Bane of Malekith sees them pretty much the heroes we know from the background.
Funny that you should mention this I first read your novels in a deckchair staring out over Pattaya beach (I’m not sure if that’s the shrine you speak of of if – maybe more in the order of a full blown cathedral). Anyway I hope we see the location reflected in the writings!
Thanks for the enjoyment over the years.
Thanks Richard :). I wrote one of the Space Wolf books on Koh Samui and in Georgetown, Malaysia. I can remember that. I just can’t remember which one it was! I know I also wrote part of Vampireslayer there. The shrine to Slaanesh to which I refer was a cafe/nightclub on Chaweng Beach. It was actually done out in purple and green, and it had divans on which the customers lay down to eat and drink. (All very Eldar.) It also had a jacuzzi in the middle of the cafe which added to the ambiance. I’ve got some pictures which my wife took. I’ll stick them up when I finally get round to finishing the article I refer to here.