Sunday 30 October 2016

SERIES PROMOTION & INTERVIEW - A PLAGUE OF SWORDS - THE TRAITOR SON CYCLE BY MILES CAMERON

Title: A Plague Of Swords
Series: The Traitor Son Cycle
Author: Miles Cameron
Publisher: Gollancz
Release Date: 25th October 2016

BLURB from Goodreads
One enemy has fallen ... a greater one remains ... now it's war The Red Knight withstood the full might of his enemy and won the day. In a victory which will be remembered through the ages, he brought disparate factions together and turned them into allies against a more powerful foe than they had ever seen. Now, he will need his allies more than ever. Because behind one adversary hid another--one with allies of their own--whose goal was never to destroy Alba, but to distract the Kingdom while achieving his true aim. And whatever it is, it's probably not in the Red Knight's interest. With one army defeated, now the Red Knight must fight again--and for every one of his allies there is a corresponding enemy. Spread out in different lands, and on sea, it will all come down to one last gamble. And to whether or not the Red Knight has guessed their foe's true intentions. With each throw of the dice, everything could be lost.


PURCHASE LINKS

REST IN THE SERIES



Please click on the covers to be taken to Goodreads

AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Goodreads places the books that make up your The Traitor Son Cycle Series into the Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Dragons, what genre/genres would you place The Traitor Son Cycle Series into?
I don't really follow Fantasy.  By that I mean it's all one to me; I don't like the sub-genre titels and pay no attention to them.

Is this a genre/genres you enjoy writing and why? Do you also enjoy reading this genre too?
I enjoy writing fantasy and historical fiction.  I've also written thrillers in the mainstream sense.  I like an intricate plot, strong characters and good world building, but that seems to me about the same across genres.

Could you give us an overview of your The Traitor Son Cycle Series? and what your plans for it? ie. How many books will there be in the whole series? Will there be any novella’s as part of the series?
There will be five book in all.  Plague of Swords is the fourth.
Thematically, the books are about a renaissance of thought; they are about what a 'great king' would necessarily be like; they are an attempt to put a new twist on the Arthurian mythos; and, at some base layer, they are an exporation of what it might be like for people with Late Medieval technology to actually fight dragons and wyverns and trolls and suchlike.

Who did the Cover Designs for the series?
Kerem Beyit does the beautiful covers, at least in the UK.

Did you plan out the whole series or do you plan and write as you go along wherever the plot & characters take you in each individual book?
I planned the whole series from the beginning.  That's not to say that characters didn't run off and change things, but as I'm now writing the last book and it's more than half done, I can say with some confidence that the main story arc is intact and will run to the conclusion I imagined 5 years ago.

Do you already know what happens, right up to the last word of the last book in The Traitor Son Cycle series?
Yes and no.  I know how it ends; I know most of the arcs; once in a while a character does something very surprising, for good character reasons.  I have a hierarchy (borrowed from Aristotle';s Poetics) which is; Characters first, then character motivations and actions, which inform plot.  Plot builds from characters...  sometimes they go off the rails :) But for the most part, yes, I know what's going to happen.

How long did it take you to write The Red Knight, from the original idea to finishing writing it? Did it take longer, shorter or about the same time length to write The Fell Sword, The Dread Wyrm and The Plague Of Swords?
It takes me about 6 months to write 250K words. Red Knight was my first Fantasy novel but was, I think, my 23rd novel.  I kind of have my techniques down now :).  All the books take about the same time to write.

Do you have a favourite book from The Traitor Son Cycle Series? If yes, which one and why?
I think my favorite is Fell Sword; maybe Plague of Swords.  It actually takes me a few years to fully take in a book, however weird that sounds.
Dread Wyrm has the best fight scene I've ever written, but Fell Sword did what I wanted it to do; a complex tale to hold readers of the first book but show them that the world was much, much wider than they had imagined.

Is there anything in The Traitor Son Cycle Series so far that you would change now if you could and what would it be?
Yes.  Much as I loved playing with 50 POVs in the first novel, I'd go back and limit myself to ten, now.  There was a point... but too many readers dislike the effort, which I understand.  Mind you, I'd also like to have had the POV of Pavalo Payam (who, in the printed version, appears in an alley in Dread Wyrm) come up in the first and second books... and I can't tell you who I would cut... so...

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