SFFWorld Members big Blog thread

I've just seen this thread for the first time. I blog mostly about sales and reviews, and I'll start posting my items here. Here's the latest, about a review of a story of mine in SF Crowsnest:

Patrick Mahon reviews "Telltale," the Raffalon tale in the January/February Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction: " I have to admit that whenever I see Matthew Hughes’ name on the contents page of an issue of MF&SF, that’s the story I go to first. I’ve read at least four Raffalon stories over the last couple of years, I think, and each of them has been as enjoyable as the last. The character is an eternal ‘Jack the Lad’, with the style and charisma to carry the role off. Hughes’ prose seems effortless and these stories always provide an interesting and convoluted plot that maintains your interest from beginning to end."

http://sfcrowsnest.org.uk/the-magaz...-janfeb-2016-volume-130-723-magsazine-review/

The prose is effortless, I suppose. I certainly enjoy writing picaresque stories. And I never know, when I start one of those convoluted plots, exactly where it's going to end up, but they always go somewhere interesting.
 
In the March Locus, Gardner Dozois reviews the January/February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and singles out my Raffalon story, "Telltale," as “...the best of the issue’s fantasy stories."

He says, "Matthew Hughes gives us another story of Raffalon the Thief in ‘Telltale’, as Raffalon tries to reason his way out of another of the complex and very sticky magical situations he’s always getting himself entangled in, this one even more difficult to extricate himself from than usual.”
 
as I said elsewhere, I liked that story. :D
...off to read Locus now....thanks for the reminder....
 
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@Jo Zebedee

There's a hell of a lot of it in the biz, but that's mostly because so very many people are desperate to become an author. I've been lucky so far, I've pretty much been able to follow my muse. Also, I'm a total skeptic who don't give a damn... But I'd put a lot of money on GRRM having difficulties finishing his next book because of the immense commercial pressure on him.
 
"Epiphanies," the fourth and probably final Luff Imbry novella from PS Publishing, is now available for pre-order from the publisher.

We'll also be doing a launch of some kind at Mancunicon in Manchester over the Easter weekend. PS is working with concom to find us a good slot in the schedule.

In other news, I've spent the past week editing Door into Faerie, the fifth and concluding volume in the YA fantasy series, Shards of Excalibur, by fellow Canadian author Ed WIllett. It's about two plucky Saskatchewan teens chosen by fate and genetics to find and reforge the shattered pieces of Arthur's magic sword, while the evil, would-be world-ruling sorcerer, Merlin, tries to beat them to it.

If you like YA fantasy quests, or know someone of an age to appreciate them, the Shards series is pretty snappy stuff.

Now that the edit is finished, I'm about to turn my attention to the third draft of my forty-years-in-the-making historical novel about the founding of the Zambo state in 16th-century Ecuador. The working title is: What the Wind Brings.

By the end of this month, I hope to have it in the hands of a major literary agent, to whom I was introduced by the legendary (well, if he isn't, he ought to be) Canadian fantasy author, Dave Duncan.
 
I checked my Goodreads author dashboard a little while ago and was surprised to discover I’ve authored four more books. I went over to Amazon, and there they were, too.

They were Kindle editions so I opened one up and read the first few words. And it was really awful. I don’t know if they were written by a badly coded piece of software or if they're the natural end products of a modern education system in which no one is ever told they’re not doing something right.

The books are so poorly and oddly written, I suspect they’ve been produced solely to fool readers looking for undiscovered works by me into clicking and buying. Though it escapes me why anyone would want to do that through Amazon, since you can instantly return an ebook whose first sentences make you turn green and need to lie down.

Anyway, the titles of these non-books are: The Captive and the Godslayer (ASIN B01BMWHFO8); The Urban Year (ASIN B01BG2KI6G); The Planet of the Stormed Game (ASIN B01BG6JO80); and As I Am (ASIN B01BSU9VFU).

I don’t think there’s much I can to stop Amazon’s algorithms from aligning them with my works, but I’ll send them a note and see what happens.
 
Matthew Hughes said:
I checked my Goodreads author dashboard a little while ago and was surprised to discover I’ve authored four more books. I went over to Amazon, and there they were, too.

They were Kindle editions so I opened one up and read the first few words. And it was really awful. ....
Click to expand...

There have certainly been cases of non-authorized creation of paper copies etc. but I've not seen entirely new books deceptively created. I suspect it's a screwup of Amazon's cataloging and the other someone has the same (or similar name). I had a minor issue with my books all showing up under my name/author name properly simply because I had inadvertently entered my author name differently (middle initial issue).

I suspect it is an author with the same name that has gotten confused with you and if you contact Amazon they can get it straightened out for you or via your publisher if the Amazon versions of your books are through the publisher instead of directly self-published.

Maybe it's This Matthew Hughes

Wow, There are quite a few of you!
 
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Yesterday, I printed out the manuscript – 467 pages – of What the Wind Brings, the historical novel I was “meaning to write” for more than forty years. I sent it off to a top agent in New York. He is not my agent – I’m without representation again – but he will be if he likes the book well enough to represent it.

Here’s how it happened. In my mid-teens, I used to read a lot of historical fiction. I especially liked the novels of Lionel Sprague de Camp. The summer I turned sixteen, I started to write one, but didn’t get far. I’d read somewhere that Alexander the Great, after he’d conquered the world but before he died in Babylon, had ordered someone to take a ship south through the Red Sea and along the east coast of Africa. The idea was to circumnavigate what the ancients thought was a big island, eventually coming up the west coast and back into the Mediterranean at Gibraltar.

I never got beyond a couple of chapters, but from time to time after that I would poke around in libraries, trying to find any more information about the quite possibly mythical voyage. Along the way, I came across Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Expedition, which mentioned a legend about a supposed tribe of white-skinned folks living down near the pointy end of South America. That legend could have played into a scenario explaining why Alexander’s explorers were never heard from again.

It was while I was trying to find more information about this probably apocryphal tribe that I saw a footnote in some book that mentioned that a group of African slaves, shipwrecked on the South American coast, managed to establish an independent polity that survived for generations. I thought, “That would make an interesting historical novel.” Thus began a desultory process of trying to learn more about these self-determining Africans.

I ran into some difficulty because almost all the scholarship about the events was in Spanish and published in academic journals in Latin America. They were hard to get and my Spanish was of the “¿Donde esta la pluma de mi tia?” variety. But I gradually began to get a picture of what had happened and where and when. And against that background I began to think about the characters – historical and fictional – who might figure in a story I would want to tell.

Years went by while I wrote all kinds of other stuff, years that turned into decades. Finally, in 2014, the Canada Council for the Arts awarded me a major grant to write the novel. I did some more focused research, established a proper timeline and got a good sense of what was happening in Ecuador in the middle to late sixteenth century. In 2015 I started writing.

Now it’s done. Three drafts. A big stack of paper. And it’s winging its way to New York.

Now I cross my fingers and wait.

But here’s the thing: I’ve written some thirty books of many different kinds over the years, and sold all but a few of them, so the experience of saying “that’s a wrap” is not new to me. Except this one feels different. I have a sense of having completed a long-running process that has been humming away in the background to my life since I was a very young man. It’s an odd sensation. Mostly, as a result of my strange rootless upbringing, I live in the moment. The past fades as soon as I take my eye off it, and especially now that I’m closer to seventy than sixty. But right now I’m feeling connected to that sixteen year old I left behind on some curve in the highway, long ago. It’s as if there has been a cord that tied us together but it was always slack. Now, suddenly, it’s grown taut. I can feel the me I used to be.

And I’m thinking, that Alexander the Great boat trip might make an interesting novel.
 
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