Courtney Schafer

The Greatest Adventure

2012-03-01T11:52:00.000-08:00

So this week's excuse for bailing on blog posts is that I've been busy organizing my son's birthday party (coming up this weekend: 18 toddlers bouncing around a gymnastics gym full of trampolines. The energy in the room should be enough to power a small country or two, eek!). At not-quite-3 years old, he's an old hand at the climbing gym, the skating rink, the swimming pool, and our local trails. Sadly he's never been much of a backpack baby - too energetic to sit still for more than a few minutes! - so unlike some of our friends with young kids, we haven't been able to do serious hikes with him yet. But soon enough, I expect he'll be outhiking me up peaks and beating me down mogul slopes. (I'm also hoping he'll share his parents' taste for science fiction & fantasy! We're off to a good start there, with Jane Yolen picture books and the like...)

So anyway, no official adventure post this week. Instead, here's a few pics to prove that adventures don't have to stop once you have a kid:

Toddlers make great climbers

Hiking near Telluride

My first foreign rights sale!

2012-02-24T15:08:00.000-08:00

Today I got the go-ahead from my agent to share some exciting news: Polish publisher MAG has bought the Polish-language rights to The Whitefire Crossing and The Tainted City! Man, it is both totally cool and a head trip to think of my books being translated into another language. Just...wow! Really, all I can do is bounce around and make incoherent noises of glee. That, and wish I knew Polish, so I could see how the translation comes out! (I love languages and find questions of translation fascinating.) I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed that Russian or German rights sell someday, since those are the two foreign languages I actually know. But in the meantime...yay Poland!

Thursday Adventure: Fourth Recess Lake (Sierra Nevada, CA)

2012-02-23T08:58:00.001-08:00

You may have noticed that I'm better about posting these Thursday adventures than I am the Monday book recs. Part of that relates to my day job work schedule (I work a full day on Monday and this year seems like Mondays are always kind of frantic). But really it's because when given a choice between sighing fondly over pictures of mountains vs. doing...well, just about anything else other than actually hiking in them!...I choose the mountains every time.

Today's picture is of a place particularly special to me, because I visited it on my very first backpacking trip to the Sierra Nevada. I was a student at Caltech, working at JPL that summer, and one of the engineers there invited me and my boyfriend of the time on a weekend backpack from the Mosquito Flat trailhead into the Recess Canyons. I've talked elsewhere about the life-changing moment when I first saw the jagged pinnacles of the Sierra looming above the Owens Valley. The beauty of the Recess Canyons only sealed the deal. Gorgeous blue-green lakes, so clear you can see every pebble on the bottom, under shining white cliffs...oh man. (Sadly, pic was taken with teensy little point-and-shoot camera, so doesn't do the area any kind of justice!) Colorado lakes are pretty, but I tell you, it's just not the same. Lakewater here tends to be much murkier and not nearly so blue, and the mountains are far less rugged.

Lake in Fourth Recess Canyon, Sierra Nevada

The pic is actually from a much later trip to the same area, this time with my husband-to-be. I wanted his first experience of the Sierra to be as beautiful as mine, so we backpacked into those same canyons, scrambling up trailless cirques and lazing by the lakes. (Afterward, we climbed Mt. Whitney via the mountaineer's route and spent the night stargazing on the summit, but that's a topic for a different adventure post.)

The picture's also serving as motivation for me right now: it's inspired the setting for a scene very late in The Tainted City. Can't wait to get to that point in the book, and see if I can evoke for readers some of the same beauty that I experienced while camping in the Recesses.

Thursday Adventure: Quandary Peak (Colorado)

2012-02-16T08:54:00.000-08:00

As usual I'm busy, busy, busy writing on The Tainted City, but I thought I'd take a few moments away to share a couple pics from another 14K peak nice and close to Denver: 14,265 ft Quandary Peak, in the Tenmile Range outside Breckenridge. Quandary is a lovely summer hike, only 6.75 mi round trip with 3,450 ft elevation gain.

Me hiking the trail up Quandary, in late June

Of course, on a peak so easy and close to Denver, there's no such thing as solitude on the trail in the summer. But there's a nice little side benefit to that: Quandary is home to quite a few mountain goats, and they've gotten so used to the crowds that they'll practically come right up to you. Hiking in early summer, you even get to see adorably fuzzy babies scampering up the rocks with their mamas.

Mountain goat on the trail

Baby goat playing near Quandary's summit

If you hike the peak in the early season, you can even spice up the trip a bit by glissading down the Cristo Couloir instead of hiking back down the trail. Glissading, for those not in the know, involves sliding down a steep snow slope on your butt, using an ice axe as a combination rudder and brake. Quandary's Cristo Couloir is a classic - you can zoom down to the base of the peak in 5 minutes flat, instead of 2 hours' hike on the trail. But the steeper the slope, the more mandatory the ice axe - you must know how to self-arrest safely, or risk slamming into rocks at the snowfield's bottom. (You don't want to miss the arrest & flail like this guy.) An unfortunate number of people in CO have gotten badly hurt or even died while glissading because they don't take it seriously enough.

I speak from quasi-experience here, having had my own "dumbass glissade" moment on Quandary, many years ago when my husband-to-be and I were first hiking together. He'd never glissaded anything steep and was dying to try the Cristo Couloir. We'd spent a day practicing self-arrest techniques on a much less steep snowfield, and I'd dutifully checked the avalanche conditions for Cristo and found the danger was low, so I thought we were set. At Quandary's summit, I gave Robert a last set of safety instructions, speaking from my oh-so-vast experience (a couple years of peak climbing + having completed the Colorado Mountain Club's mountaineering school). He zoomed off down the slope, whooping all the way, until he passed out of sight.

I followed, a bit more cautiously. The top section of the couloir is quite steep and you need to avoid some rocks poking through the snow. I dug my heels into the snow a bit as I slid, thinking to help keep my speed under control. Big mistake! One foot promptly plunged deep into the snow, and momentum kept me sliding right past it. I spun and ended up dangling upside down on the slope on my back. The snow around my trapped foot had set like cement, and I couldn't get my leg free, even chopping at the snow around it with my ice axe. (Nothing like doing a vertical sit-up while wearing a heavy pack and waving an ice axe.)

I wasn't in any serious danger, but talk about embarrassing. There I was, the so-called experienced one, stuck like a bug in a flytrap. Thankfully, after some twenty minutes, another glissader came by and dug me out - and then braced me on the mountainside while my newly-freed leg cramped up with the mother of all agonizing charley horses. I finally got down to the base to find a very anxious Robert about to start snow-climbing back up to look for me. Moral of the story: when glissading, NEVER dig your heels in - bend your knees and skate your feet on top of the snow! And don't get cocky. ;)

Book Rec: The Daemon Prism (Carol Berg)

2012-02-13T20:27:00.000-08:00

This week’s rec is for The Daemon Prism, released last month, the third (andfinal) novel in Carol Berg’s wonderful Collegia Magica series. So hey, all you epic fantasy fans who areleery of reading series until the final book’s out, run go buy all threeCollegia Magica books: The Spirit Lens, The Soul Mirror, and The Daemon Prism.

I could rave all day about the twisty plotsand wonderfully detailed worldbuilding, but really, it’s Berg's characters thattruly hook me. She does such a stellarjob of writing characters that feel utterly real – and then putting themthrough hell to explore the deepest parts of their psyche. Each of the Collegia Magica books is toldfrom a different primary first-person narrator’s perspective (though in thisthird novel, the primary perspective is mixed with perspectives from previousnarrators as well). The narrators arehugely different people, both in personality and background, and Berg handlestheir different voices with aplomb.

Iwas particularly excited for The Daemon Prism since it’s largely told fromthe POV of a character who’s been a bit of an enigma in the preceding twonovels. It’s a terrific conclusion tothe series, full of adventure and tension and pitch-perfect emotional moments. It kills me that Berg doesn’t have a widerreadership in fantasy circles, especially given her steady output of excellentnovels like this one. If you likefantasy and you haven’t read her novels, you simply must give them a try.

Thursday Adventure: Larry Canyon (Utah)

2012-02-09T10:01:00.000-08:00

My husband first introduced me to canyoneering (or canyoning, as it's called in his home country of Australia), having descended several of the narrow sandstone gorges in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. Of course, the wet, lushly vegetated canyons of the Blue Mountains, full of waterfalls and glow worms, are quite different than the arid, sculpted slots of the American southwest. But the idea is the same: you start at the canyon's head and work your way down, rappelling down any drops too steep to downclimb, squeezing over and under obstacles, and thrashing your way through "potholes" still holding water from the last flash flood. Utah and Arizona have countless remote, beautiful canyons with slots so narrow you have to turn sideways to squeeze through, where the rock has been sculpted by erosion into a fantasia of swirled patterns and knife-edged fins.

For today's adventure I'm sharing a few pictures from a trip my husband and I did with a friend to Larry Canyon, deep in the remote Robber's Roost area of eastern Utah. (One of the wonderful things about southwest canyoneering is how remote and wild many of these canyons still are. You can stand under a fiery sunset looking out over a twisting maze of canyons, and know yourself the only human for miles; feel the vast, ancient silence of the desert, that's as inspiring as it is humbling.) Larry is one of those canyons with a wonderfully surprising start: one minute you're slogging along a broad, sandy wash, wondering when it's going to get interesting; and all at once, the ground drops away into a deep, narrow slot.

Me rappelling into the slot of Larry Canyon

Then you've got a whole series of mini-rappels, downclimbs, and chockstones to chimney over.

My husband Robert setting up a rappel

Eventually the canyon widens out into a cathedral-style, sandy-bottomed slot with towering walls.

Deep in Larry Canyon

There's one last optional set of rappels before the canyon broadens out to become a simple hike.

Robert and our friend Jason setting the final rappel

Once in the broad section, you get to climb out the slickrock back up to the plateau above, and find your car again. (I used to mock people who used GPSs. Navigation just isn't that hard in the mountains. But oh man, a GPS is so useful for finding your car again in the undulating maze of slickrock country.)

Me and Robert climbing out of Larry Canyon

If you want to see any more pics from the trip, you can visit my photo gallery at http://www.courtneyschafer.com/2006_larrycanyon/index.htm

How Real Coloradoans Spend Superbowl Sunday

2012-02-06T13:32:00.000-08:00

Want to know one of Colorado's skiing secrets? Superbowl Sunday is one of the best days of the year to ski at the resorts close to Denver. Usually Sundays mean crowded slopes and skier traffic on I-70 so horrific it turns the 1.5-hour drive home into 4 or more. But not Superbowl Sunday! Like magic, the crowds disappear by noon, leaving the skiing to those of us smart enough to enjoy it. (It helps that my husband and I have zero interest in football. As an Aussie, he thinks US "gridiron" is for wusses - "what's with all the padding? And why do they stop all the time, are they too fat to keep playing?" he says. Me, I just prefer to DO sports, not watch them.)

This Superbowl Sunday was particularly awesome, because for the first time ever, we put our 2yo in ski school and my husband and I skied together, instead of taking turns. Let me say it again: SKIED TOGETHER. OMG it has been 3 years since we last did that. We skied at Beaver Creek and the snow wasn't that great - the front range has been having a dry winter this year, and the so-called extreme terrain was a bit more extreme than usual thanks to all the rocks, stumps, skier-eating log traps, etc - but I did not care. It was awesome.

The couple that skis extreme terrain together, stays together

Because of that skiing, no book rec post today - I'm behind on my writing schedule and must forge onward! But oh, it was well worth it. Because there's no better way to spend a Superbowl Sunday than this:

I've got the mogul slope ALL TO MYSELF, wheee!

Thursday Adventure: Skiing Aspen Highlands

2012-02-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

Sorry there wasn't a book rec post this week - I just returned to work after taking some time off (so I could squeeze a few precious full days of writing in during the 3 days a week my son is in preschool), and that's always a recipe for an insanely long task list. Looking out the window at work, I can see the snow-covered high peaks of the Rockies...and oh, how I long to ski them! In my pre-baby days, I used to rack up 30 ski days a season. Right now I'm lucky if I manage 5. (Believe me, that will change soon as my son is old enough to be enrolled in ski school.) But since it's the heart of ski season and I'm jonesing for a day on the slopes, this week's adventure showcases pics from a ski trip I did a few years back to Aspen Highlands in central Colorado.

View of Pyramid Peak (left) and the Maroon Bells (right) from Aspen Highlands

Aspen Highlands is one of the four major resorts near Aspen, CO (Ajax, Snowmass, and Buttermilk are the other three). The views of the Elk Range are spectacular, especially of the famous Maroon Bells peaks that often are used to symbolize Colorado (they're on the CO state quarter). For a skier like myself that loves the steeps, Highlands offers a great opportunity for what they call "in-bounds backcountry skiing" (how's that for an oxymoron!). Basically, the resort provides avalanche control and allows skiers to hike to the summit of 12,392 Highlands Bowl to ski wholly ungroomed natural terrain. The hike is steep but short (only about 30 minutes, though it feels longer when you're kickstepping in ski boots and hauling skis on your back!), and the steep, powdery north-facing slopes are well worth the effort. The steepest run has a pitch of 48 degrees - steep enough you can touch the slope with your hand while standing up straight.

Me (in front), my husband (next), and friends hiking to the summit of Highlands Bowl

Aspen Highlands isn't my favorite Colorado ski resort (that honor goes to Telluride) or even the steepest (that would be Crested Butte), but the terrain and views are both excellent and the mountain is far less crowded than the resorts closer to Denver. Soon as our son is old enough to really enjoy a ski trip, my husband and I plan on going back.

My husband Robert charging down a slope

Authorial Update

2012-01-27T12:38:00.000-08:00

While I've been slaving away on The Tainted City, some nifty things have been going on for The Whitefire Crossing, and I've been a bit remiss about spreading the news.

1) The Whitefire Crossing was nominated for the David Gemmell Morningstar award (for best fantasy debut in 2011)! Voting is open through March 31st, and it's super easy: just click here and select your favorite novel on the list (whether that's Whitefire or one of the other excellent books nominated).

2) I'll be doing a group book signing at Who Else Books in Denver on February 11 at 3pm, along with Rob Ziegler, Robin Owens, and Alastair Mayer. It's gonna be super fun, so if you're in Denver, come on by!

3) Whitefire's also gotten some very nice reviews this month from Nethspace, Fantasy Book Cafe, and I Will Read Books, as well as making #5 on Mihir Wanchoo of Fantasy Book Critic's Best Debuts of 2011 list. Woo hoo!

Thursday Adventure: Mt. Bierstadt in Winter

2012-01-26T09:14:00.000-08:00

I'm so buried in writing The Tainted City that I haven't been able to get into the mountains this winter nearly as much as I'd like. But I'm an addict, I confess it: if I go too long without a mountain fix, I turn into this mopey, cranky, snarly, horribly negative person. So to preserve my own sanity (and that of everyone else around me), this past weekend I ditched the computer for a day and headed into the high country for an attempt on Mt. Bierstadt with a few friends.

Snowshoeing toward Mt. Bierstadt from the trailhead at Guanella Pass

Mt. Bierstadt is a 14,060 foot peak that stands beside Guanella Pass, about an hour's drive from Boulder. It's one of the easiest 14ers to climb; only 3 miles one way to the summit from the summer trailhead, along a nice wide well-constructed trail. Summer weekends, the trail is pretty much one continuous line of hikers, the peak is so popular. But winter is a different story, especially now the road to the Guanella Pass trailhead is no longer plowed all the way. (Used to be they plowed the road all the way and Bierstadt was by far the easiest winter 14er climb, but these days the road is closed 1.8 miles short of the pass). Go in winter, and you can have the peak nearly to yourself.

High on the wind-scoured west slope of Mt. Bierstadt

As winter climbs go, Mt. Bierstadt is about as easy as it gets: due to the high winds that scour Guanella Pass, the avalanche danger is pretty much nonexistent (snow simply doesn't build up enough), and the route is straightforward and not at all technical. But the aforementioned high winds mean you must bring enough clothes to cover every inch of skin, or risk frostbite in moments; not to mention the difficulty of hiking in wind strong enough to knock a person flat. (To give you an idea what's needed to combat the windchill factor, here's what I wore on our trip: capilene long underwear, heavy fleece pants + top, waterproof snow pants, gore-tex jacket, wool hat, snow gaiters, facemask, ski goggles, gauntlet-style waterproof mittens. And I needed every scrap of it when the wind was blowing full force!)

Snowshoeing along the closed road

I've summited Mt. Bierstadt five times before, twice in winter and three times in summer, and it's the winter hikes that are my favorites. Last weekend's trip was similarly fun, even though we didn't make the summit this time. (A storm the day before had left enough fresh snow to make snowshoeing up to the pass and then through the willows to the mountain's west slopes a time-consuming chore; and higher on the mountain, the winds made for slow travel. We turned around at about 13K, worried we might run out of daylight. Always better to be safe than sorry on a winter trip!)

Me and Molly Tanzer, in the willow fields of Guanella Pass

The trip did its job: I came back refreshed and ready to dive back into The Tainted City, no longer feeling overwhelmed by juggling day job, parenthood, and writing deadlines. Thank God for the mountains! I'm pretty sure I'd go mad if I lived in a flat state.

Book Rec: The Wood Wife (Terri Windling)

2012-01-23T21:35:00.000-08:00

This week's recommendation is for one of my all-time favorite urban fantasy novels: Terri Windling's The Wood Wife. These days when you say urban fantasy people think of ass-kicking tattooed chicks and noir detectives, but The Wood Wife is old-school urban fantasy: a beautifully written, mythic novel in the vein of Charles De Lint and Emma Bull. It's set in Tucson, and Windling does a superb job of bringing the Sonoran Desert to life, to the point the landscape is as much a character as the people in the novel. She uses southwestern myths to wonderful effect; her nonhuman characters feel both wholly real and convincingly alien, giving the story a lovely sense of awe and mystery. The human characters are great, too - flawed, passionate, and interesting; the sort of people you'd love to meet in real life.

Windling is far better known for her work as an editor, particularly of short stories (I'm not much of a short story reader, but even I used to devour the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies that Windling edited with Ellen Datlow). But since first reading The Wood Wife, I feel it's almost a crime she hasn't written more novels. (Okay, okay, I wouldn't force anyone to write, but still...The Wood Wife is so good, I can't help but want more.) As it is, I cling to my copy, and re-read it at least once a year. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes contemporary fantasy - and especially, to anyone weary of the current emphasis on paranormal romance in urban fantasy.

Thursday Adventure: Chasm Lake (Colorado)

2012-01-19T09:07:00.000-08:00

I haven't been around the internets much recently, and that's not likely to change in the next weeks - I am writing, writing, writing on The Tainted City, wholly immersed in the story to the point where the "real" world feels a lot less real than the one in my head. (This is good for the story, bad for, um, everything else in life...) Anyway, for today's adventure I'll just share a couple pics taken on a hike to one of my favorite mountain spots close to Boulder: Chasm Lake, beneath the towering east face of 14,259 ft. Longs Peak (the east face is known in climbing circles as the Diamond, and is the site of many excellent alpine rock routes).

Chasm Lake

But you don't need anything more than a sturdy pair of hiking boots to visit Chasm Lake - though in the early season when snowfields still cover the trail, a trekking pole or ice axe can be quite handy!

Early season on the Chasm Lake trail

The lake is lovely; my camera totally doesn't do it justice. It's actually one of the spots I was thinking of when writing the lakeside confrontation between Kiran and Pello in The Whitefire Crossing. Perhaps I'll go back this spring and get a few shots of the fascinating ice formations that happen as the winter ice sheet melts. I know I've got some pics of that already somewhere, but I failed at finding them. Instead, have a marmot picture, taken in the boulders beside Chasm Lake:

Marmot chilling out beside the lake

Book Rec: Howl's Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones)

2012-01-16T16:32:00.000-08:00

This week's rec is for one of my perennial favorites: Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones. HMC is one of those comfort books I read when I'm miserable and feverish and sick, because I find the story so charming it can't fail to lift my mood. (And miserably sick certainly described me this last week, sigh. I still have this horrible lingering cough that won't let me sleep, despite Robitussin, humidifier, and more.)

I would rhapsodize about Jones's ability to mix the ordinary and the extraordinary to produce a story that feels utterly grounded in the midst of wild flights of imagination, but I don't think I'm coherent enough. Instead I'll say: how can you resist a book with a chapter entitled "In Which Sophie Expresses Her Feelings With Weedkiller"? Not to mention this passage, which - going with the sick theme here - so perfectly encapsulates the sort of person who insists they're dying when they've got the common cold:

"Meanwhile a certain amount of moaning and groaning was coming from upstairs. Sophie kept muttering to the dog and ignored it. A loud, hollow coughing followed, dying away into more moaning. Sophie ignored that too. Crashing sneezes followed the coughing, each one rattling the window and all the doors. Sophie found those harder to ignore, but she managed. Pooot-pooooooot! went a blown nose, like a bassoon in a tunnel. The coughing started again, mingled with moans. Sneezes mixed with the moans and the coughs, and the sounds rose to a crescendo in which Howl seemed to be managing to cough, groan, sneeze, blow his nose, and wail gently all at the same time."

If you haven't read Howl's Moving Castle: do. Don't think that seeing the Miyazaki movie counts. The movie was beautiful and entrancing as all Miyazaki movies are, but it's not at all the same story as the book. And the book's story is genuinely wonderful.

Thursday Adventure: Mt. of the Holy Cross

2012-01-12T09:33:00.000-08:00

With the week o' sickness we're having here at Casa Schafer (flu for me, pinkeye for my son, and now my husband's throat is sore...), it's nice to think of healthier, happier times tromping the mountains. So for this Thursday's adventure, I offer up Mt. of the Holy Cross:

Mt. of the Holy Cross (Sawatch Range, Colorado)

One of Colorado's 54 peaks above 14,000 feet, Holy Cross is in the Sawatch range of central Colorado, not too far away from the town of Vail. I climbed it a few years back via the Halo Ridge route, which circles the Bowl of Tears basin beneath the peak and gives an excellent view of the Cross Couloir that gives the peak its name. (The standard route up Holy Cross approaches from a different side and so you never get to see the couloir.) Halo Ridge isn't technically difficult - it's just a lot of class 2 talus walking - but it's a hefty day trip, since you climb over three different unnamed 13K peaks along the way, and there's no easy retreat in the event of a summer thunderstorm. If you ascend via Halo Ridge and descend via the standard route as we did, the hike is 15 miles with 5,400 feet of elevation gain along the way.

Me on the summit of Holy Cross

Beautiful as the hike was, I also cringe a little when I recall it, since my Holy Cross trip also included my Most Embarassing Trailhead Moment. Knowing the length of the route and the inevitability of afternoon thunderstorms in Colorado, my hiking partner and I wanted to start right at dawn. Not wanting to get up at 3am to do the drive, we drove down the night before and slept at the trailhead. The Holy Cross trailhead doesn't have much in the way of official camping, so I slept in the back of my Subaru Outback, and my friend climbed the steep, forested slope above the road and found a spot for his bivy sack. Now, we were far from the only people snoozing at the trailhead. Hiking 14ers is a hugely popular activity in Colorado, so there were about 30 other Subarus and SUVs parked along the road with mine, all with folks sleeping in them.

Having spent my formative years in cities like D.C. and L.A., I dutifully locked my car doors before settling down inside to sleep. At about 2am, I woke up, drowsily thinking I'd like to crack a window and get more fresh air in the car. Since the Subaru has power windows, that meant turning on the car. Too bad I forgot that locking the doors arms the car's security system. The moment I stuck my key in the ignition, the car alarm went off: blaring siren, flashing lights, and all. And the shock left me so discombobulated I couldn't remember how to turn the damn thing off. I think I actually dug out the manual from the glove compartment; meanwhile, I could see annoyed, shadowed figures sitting bolt upright in all the other cars.

Finally, I got the alarm shut off. Sadly, my hiking partner and I had agreed to meet at the car at first light, which meant I couldn't creep away so early none of the other trailhead campers would see me. When I slunk out of the car at 5am, my friend stomped out of the forest and announced, "God, I hate trailhead camping. Did you hear that racket last night? Some utter moron set off their car alarm!" I cringed deeper into my goretex and muttered, "Yeah...what a loser," and prayed none of the other car-campers stuffing gear into their packs would point and give me away.

Thankfully, nobody did. And embarassment soon faded in the beauty of the day and the determination needed to scramble over acres of ass-kicking talus. But I confess I've never slept in my car at a trailhead again (I find nearby spots where a tent can be pitched, instead).

Book Rec: The Emperor's Knife (Mazarkis Williams)

2012-01-09T14:40:00.000-08:00

After reading several good reviews for Mazarkis Williams's The Emperor's Knife (e.g. at Staffer's Musings and Bibliotropic), not to mention the Halloween guest post Mazarkis did for us at the Night Bazaar, I was really looking forward to giving Emperor's Knife a try. So much so, in fact, that I decided to use it as my reward for reaching the 100K mark on my draft of The Tainted City.

So last night, with 100K reached, and an evening's break needed before plunging into a 3-week writing marathon, I settled down with The Emperor's Knife and found it to be a very nice reward indeed. Epic fantasy just the way I like it, with plenty of intrigue, characters in shades of gray, and interesting magic and cultures. In classic epic fantasy fashion, the novel features multiple viewpoint characters: an aging assassin, a vizier seeking glory for himself and his empire, a mad, imprisoned prince, and a windreader girl from the steppes who is meant to be the prince's bride. Each of these felt fully developed as characters, with flaws, passions, and interesting parts to play in the overall story. I particularly liked the fever-dream feel of some of Sarmin (the imprisoned prince)'s sections - the prose had me wholly convinced I was in the head of someone whose lifelong captivity had driven him more than half-mad. I also appreciated that Mazarkis refrains from infodumping or spoonfeeding the reader, both for worldbuilding and for secondary character motivations. (I much prefer novels that slowly reveal the world as the story progresses, and require me to engage my brain a bit.) And of course, it's always nice to read something set outside the traditional quasi-western-european setting so common in fantasy - I loved the desert descriptions, which were spare but lovely in their economy.

If you like classic epic fantasy combined with more modern shades of gray, then by all means, run go read The Emperor's Knife. For those leery of unfinished trilogies, I found that The Emperor's Knife came to a satisfying conclusion on its own, so you needn't fear some nail-biting cliffhanger. But I'm very much looking forward to the second book in the trilogy, Knife-Sworn - I can't wait to see where Mazarkis goes with the world and characters.

Thursday Adventure: LeConte Canyon, Sierra Nevada

2012-01-05T09:29:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knows me won't be surprised if I start off my "Thursday Adventure" series with a pic from my very favorite mountain range: the Sierra Nevada of California. The Sierra are beautiful, rugged, blessed with extremely mild summer weather, and contain a nearly 200-mile swath of wilderness without a single road (dirt or otherwise). If you're willing to venture off the big popular trails and do a little trail-less scrambling, it's easy to spend an entire week wandering forbidding cirques and sparkling lakes without seeing another soul.

The geology and topography of the Whitefire Mountains in my novel The Whitefire Crossing are loosely based on the Sierra Nevada (I made them a bit higher and even more rugged, just for fun). Sometimes I even worked off my memories of specific locations in the Sierra. For instance, the canyon that my two protagonists struggle to reach when they abandon their trade convoy (Garnet Canyon, in the book), is based on LeConte Canyon, a deep, beautiful canyon in the middle of the Sierra. My husband and I visited LeConte while on our Sierra High Route trip back in 2003:

Standing at the edge of LeConte Canyon

I still remember standing at LeConte's edge going, "Oh jeez, we have to scramble all the way down there and lose all our hard-won elevation?" But the aching thigh muscles were worth it: the canyon bottom was a lovely paradise of pine forest and stream-laced meadows under towering cliffs. We actually didn't climb straight out the other side, as Dev and Kiran do in The Whitefire Crossing - we cheated and used a trail to access Muir Pass to the north. But one day I want to go back and do a little more off-trail exploring in the area!)

View on the descent into LeConte

Book Rec: The Exordium Series (Sherwood Smith & Dave Trowbridge)

2012-01-02T13:51:00.000-08:00

What's better than reading a book you love? Sharing it with other people so they can enjoy it too. I thought I'd start a little series here highlighting books both old and new that I've particularly liked. Seems like these days I've become more and more reliant on recommendations for my reading (alas, I no longer have scads of free time to haunt the SFF shelves of bookstores and libraries picking up every book that catches my eye), and so I'd like to give a little love to my own favorite reads in return.

This week's rec: the Exordium series, by Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge. Five volumes of rip roaring yet intelligent space opera (The Phoenix in Flight, The Ruler of Naught, A Prison Unsought, The Rifter's Covenant, The Thrones of Kronos), originally published by Tor in the 90s. I myself didn't stumble across the series until long after the books were out of print. I was poking around the archives of a Dorothy Dunnett discussion group (having just finished and been blown away by her Lymond Chronicles), and found people talking about characters in other novels that reminded them of her protagonist Lymond. Brandon vlith-Arkad from Exordium was mentioned as being "Lymond in space." Well, since I'd adored Lymond, and loved SF, I thought: what could be better? I promptly hunted down all five volumes of the series via Alibris - and found myself delighted by the read.

Brandon indeed bears a certain resemblance to Lymond (frighteningly intelligent yet wounded character skilled at getting people to underestimate him). Some aspects of the narrative style are also reminiscent of Dunnett, like the use of viewpoint characters who intensely dislike the protagonist & misinterpret his motives. But Exordium is all its own creation: jam-packed with nifty SF technologies, great space battles, fascinating alien races (it reminded me a bit of Brin's Uplift books in that regard), and a hefty dose of humor to leaven out the characters' angst. The characters are terrific, by the way - Smith & Trowbridge do a great job balancing viewpoints and including a pretty hefty cast of folks while making them all feel real and distinct, no easy task. Maybe the best thing about the series, though, is that the ending felt truly satisfying. I find that pretty rare among series longer than trilogies: kudos to Smith & Trowbridge for pulling it off.

Used to be that I'd recommend the series to friends and then hedge with, "But you'll need to find them in used bookstores...", all because I was so loath to part with my precious paperback copies. What if someone lost one? Or dumped coffee on it? The horror! But joy of joys, Smith & Trowbridge are re-publishing the entire series in e-book form. I can't tell you how excited I am about that: the books deserve to be better known, and I'm certainly hoping they reach a whole new set of fans. So hey, if you've been hankering for an exuberant, sweeping space opera complete with great action and characters - give Exordium #1 (Phoenix in Flight) a try. It's only 99 cents right now at Book View Cafe - a steal. You can even read a free excerpt.

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T12:47:00.000-08:00

As 2011 came to a close, it was pretty cool to see that The Whitefire Crossing made it onto a few "Best of 2011" lists:

Along with a mention as a notable debut in Barnes & Noble's Best Fantasy Releases of 2011, an honorable mention in Staffer's Musings' Best SFF Debut of the Year, and a recommendation in Adventures Fantastic's Four Publishers You Should Be Reading.

So yeah, a great year for Whitefire! My writing goal for 2012 is simple: make Whitefire's sequel The Tainted City as awesome as I possibly can, in hopes readers who enjoyed Whitefire have just as much fun (if not more!) reading the continuation of Dev and Kiran's story.

Of course, I've got other goals, too:

Climb a new 14K peak in Colorado (I've already climbed all the 14ers within a day's drive of Boulder about 5 times over, so I'll need to roam a bit further afield this summer to manage it!)
Ski the fall line of the Spiral Staircase mogul run at Telluride top to bottom without wussing out or stopping. (My husband and I have plans in the works for a ski trip with friends to Telluride sometime in Feb. It's my favorite place to ski in Colorado - and best of all, they have childcare at the base, so perhaps my husband and I can ski together for the first time since our son was born.)
Return to competition in figure skating, with an eye toward Adult Nationals in 2013. I've been in maintenance mode for the last 2.5 years, and I miss serious training! But first I'll have to finish The Tainted City.

Firing up the engines...

2011-12-26T18:45:00.000-08:00

Hard to believe my year posting at the Night Bazaar has come to a close! Instead, I'll be hanging out here, at least until I upgrade my author website to include an integrated blog. Since I'm currently slaving away on The Tainted City in advance of a rapidly approaching deadline, I fear you can't expect any deep, thoughtful posts anytime soon...but I plan to do a "Monday Book Recommendation" series to spotlight SFF books I've read and loved, and a "Wilderness Pic of the Week" to show off my favorite places for hiking/skiing/climbing.

Come visit me over at The Night Bazaar!

2010-11-02T21:00:00.000-07:00

So originally I intended to do a personal author blog - but then I thought, hey, a group author blog would be more fun! So I organized a round-robin style group blog with a group of other debut sf&f authors for 2011, called The Night Bazaar - I'll be posting every Monday there. Come on over and check us out! I may end up doing my own personal blog as well, but for now, this one's just a placeholder.

You can also visit me at my author website: http://www.courtneyschafer.com/