In the final installment in my series on the Top 5 Elements of a Great Epic, I’m focusing on Grand Events – those major conflicts that makes a great epic so breathtaking. Grand events are critical because they are a primary vehicle through which the author shows how huge the stakes are in the story. They…
For this week’s “beginning,” I chose the first three paragraphs of one of my favorite openings, the beginning of Bernard Cornwell’s Agincourt (here’s my review). Here it is after this image of the book’s cover. On a winter’s day in 1413, just before Christmas, Nicholas Hook decided to commit murder. It was a cold…
Great epics are never about a single character’s journey. Even if the stakes are enormous for that one character, rarely would such a story be described as epic. In great epics, many characters must be in peril, and sometimes the fate of whole nations, or even whole worlds, are at issue in the story. The…
For my twenty-eighth “Beginning” of the Week, I’m going back to one of my all-time favorite authors, Bernard Cornwell. Here is the opening passage of The Winter King, the first book in The Warlord Chronicles, his fascinating take on the Arthurian legend. Once upon a time, in a land that was called Britain, these things happened….
For this week’s “beginning” I’m featuring another of Stephen R. Lawhead’s works, the opening passage of his excellent novel Byzantium. (You can read my review here.) I saw Byzantium in a dream, and knew that I would die there. That vast city seemed to me a living thing: a great golden lion, or a crested…
This week’s “beginning” comes from Hood, Stephen R. Lawhead’s reimagination of the Robin Hood myth. For those who haven’t read my post on Legends Reimagined, Hood features “Robin” as a Welsh freedom fighter during the Norman Conquest. Here is how it begins: The pig was young and wary, a yearling boar timidly testing the…
I adore epic fiction. It’s likely the fault of George Lucas and J.R.R. Tolkien. I was eight when Star Wars came out in 1977, and I’ll never forget staring wide-eyed at the opening image of the rebel ship and that star destroyer. Then Darth Vader emerged through that smoke-filled portal and it blew my mind. Later that…
The end of last week’s discussion on the beginning of Deryni Checkmate and openings that start with the weather had me thinking about the opening passage of one of my favorite novels, The Arcanum by Thomas Wheeler (you can read my review here). I think I’m on the side that believes opening with the weather…
For several years now, I’ve been interested in medieval Spain, and about a quarter of my first novel takes place in tenth century Córdoba (which was part of a Moorish caliphate, back when the Iberian Peninsula was called Al-Andalus). Knowing this, it’s astounding (and a bit embarrassing) that I waited so long to read The Lions of…
A year ago today I published my first blog post titled What is Fresh-scraped Vellum? It analogized the medieval art of bookmaking to the task of writing a publishable novel in today’s world. It also promised book reviews and commentary on both classic and recent fiction in the historical and fantasy genres, along with posts…
As part of the Virtual Author Book Tour for the new novel Spartacus the Gladiator, I am fortunate to feature an interview with the book’s author, Ben Kane! You can check out my review of Spartacus the Gladiator here. Ben Kane, author of Spartacus the Gladiator Your novel is coming out after three successful seasons…