Glasstown Entertainment

Merlin's Last Quest, the third and final volume of the Mice of the Round Table series, is out today! To celebrate we're hosting several giveaways of Julie Leung's favorite Middle Grade books over on our Twitter, as well as a chance to win the whole Mice of the Round Table series, and we have an interview with the author herself!

You can buy it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, Indiebound, or wherever books are sold. We hope you enjoy the book and the interview with Julie!

What was the Inspiration for Mice of The Round Table?

I wanted to blend everything I loved about Redwall and Arthurian legends into one place, one playground universe where I could reshape the classic tales from a new perspective.

What can readers expect in the last installment?

The various seeds planted in Books 1 and 2 finally blossom. I’ve been building to this final showdown for years, and Camelot’s ultimate fate hangs in the balance.

What journey have you, as an author, experienced while writing this series?

Well, I grew my first gray hairs for one thing. Is that a journey?

Looking back on your writing journey, is there anything you would have done differently?

Gotten more sleep.

What advice would you give aspiring writers?

There is a time for drafting and a time for editing. Don’t try to do both simultaneously.

What characters from the MOTRT series have you grown exceptionally fond of, or that surprised you in some way?

I love my bird characters, especially Thaddeus from the first book which I modeled after Zeus, a real-life blind owl with galaxies in his eyes.

What book recommendations would you give people who loved MOTRT?

I’m going to sound like a broken record, but what else can I say besides the Redwall series by Brian Jacques?

Do you have any new stories you are itching to tell after MOTRT? If so what are they?

My next books are nonfiction. I’m working on picture books about Chinese-Americans, the first one about the artist Tyrus Wong. I’m also writing an anthology about famous firsts in STEM fields.

Is there anything else you want your readers to know about the final installment/the MOTRT series?

Get your tissues ready!

If you could have dinner with any three authors Arthurs, who would they be?

Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, the aardvark Arthur, king of the Britons ;)

If time stopped, which book would you read over and over again?

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, and illustrated by Jules Feiffer.

Which 3 fictional characters would you want to have an adventure with?

Lyra Belacqua, Gandalf, Tyrion Lannister.

Do you want to recommend any books, comic books, podcasts, games, TV shows, anything that you’re enjoying right now?

Books: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin Comic Books: SAGA, Monstress Podcasts: Lore Board Games: Dragoon TV: Glow, Star Trek: Voyager

MERLIN'S LAST QUEST - MICE OF THE ROUND TABLE

The thrilling conclusion to the epic middle grade fantasy series that Booklist called “a charming blend of Arthurian legend and Brian Jacques’ Redwall series.”

Young mouse Calib Christopher is finally a squire to the Knights of the Round Table. But there is no time to celebrate. His best friend, Cecily, and Merlin’s magical treasure are in the clutches of the evil Saxons.

Now Calib and his human companion Galahad must venture into enemy territory to rescue both before it’s too late. But Morgan le Fay’s magic is powerful and treacherous, and it will test all that they have learned in their training—as well as their very allegiance to Camelot.

The stars are aligning for a final battle—one that will require Calib and his friends to harness the magic of Merlin as well as the strength, bravery, and wisdom within themselves to become the mythical heroes they were destined to be.

This week we’d like to welcome Mary Watson, author of The Wren Hunt, to our blog!

What inspired The Wren Hunt?

For a while after moving to Ireland, I was pretty homesick. Eventually I decided I would write a book I could only write here. Writing this book became an act of belonging, a kind of conversation with the landscape and mythology of Ireland. I believe in every day magic, the magic of ordinary things, where enchantment is not so much sparks and smoke, but small and persistent, and I wanted to draw on that.

Your book is set in contemporary Ireland, but ancient traditions are still in play. This is still a kind of world-building, though – what kind of research did you do to create this world? What are your recommendations on bringing magic to our own contemporary world?

I did a lot of research into topics like druids, brehons, augury, Irish folkore and visited dolmens, standing stones, ring forts. Or just walked outside, down in the woods or near the lake to be inspired by the world around me. For me, magic is subtle, like standing down at the bottom of the garden when the sky is tinged with purple and the rooks scream in the rookery and I feel like I’m at the threshold of something. That magic has always been there, but it’s easy to become too distracted to see it.

You’re writing the next book of the series – is there anything you could tell us about it?

The Wickerlight is more a companion book than a sequel, and it picks up two months after the end of The Wren Hunt. It follows the story of Zara who is reeling from a tragedy, and she finds herself increasingly drawn in to the middle of a dangerous feud. It’s a dual POV book.

The Wren Hunt is your first YA book, but not your first book – what is something you have learned along the way that you would like to share with aspiring writers?

I think every book is a learning curve. Everything I write, every deleted paragraph or cut scene is practice and that can only help. My priorities as a reader have changed - before I would have been more interested in books with beautiful sentences and mood, that capture elusive ideas and complex emotions. While a little of that remains, I’m now much more story driven and want to learn as much about this as I can. I think there has to be agreement between one’s reader and writer self: write the books you want to read.

If time stopped, which book would you read over and over again?

When I was eighteen, at university, I discovered a collection of One Thousand and One Nights and it was so utterly magical. I could read that many times.

Which 3 fictional characters would you want to have an adventure with?

Inej from Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, Elias from An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir, and Circe.

Do you want to recommend any books, comic books, podcasts, games, TV shows, anything that you’re enjoying right now?

I am currently reading and loving The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, which will be out next February. I’m listening to the audiobook of Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, which is wonderful, and also the podcast West Cork.

My favourite game remains Witcher 3, and I’m looking forward to watching Westworld 2 when it’s out on DVD at the end of the month.

Every Christmas, Wren is chased through the woods near her isolated village by her family's enemies—the Judges—and there’s nothing that she can do to stop it. Once her people, the Augurs, controlled a powerful magic. But now that power lies with the Judges, who are set on destroying her kind for good.

In a desperate bid to save her family, Wren takes a dangerous undercover assignment—as an intern to an influential Judge named Cassa Harkness. Cassa has spent her life researching a transformative spell, which could bring the war between the factions to its absolute end. Caught in a web of deceit, Wren must decide whether or not to gamble on the spell and seal the Augurs’ fate.

Please welcome Samantha Shannon, the author of The Bone Season series as well as The Priory of the Orange Tree, to our blog!

Our giveaway might be over, but there are still many #YAGlasstownChats interviews to share with you, so keep checking here and on our social media for them!

What can you tell us about your new book, The Priory of the Orange Tree? Were you writing it at the same time as The Bone Season series?

The Priory of the Orange Tree is a re-imagining of the legend of Saint George and the Dragon, intertwined with mythology from around the world and sixteenth and seventeenth-century history. It’s told from the perspective of four characters — Tané, Niclays, Ead and Loth — who are all from very different backgrounds. I started writing it in 2015 while my editor had The Song Rising, the third book in the Bone Season series, which was out of my hands for a long time while she prepared her notes. I'm a full-time author and had nothing to do with myself during this period, so I decided it was high time I wrote a dragon book – a childhood dream of mine. Due to its scope and the amount of research it involved, it took me about three years to write and edit.

What’s it like to plan a seven book series – is the plot fully formed, or do you have a vaguer idea of where it should go?

I know approximately where the story is going, its main twists and turns, and how it will end, but I sometimes change my mind about things. I started writing the septology when I was nineteen and I'm now nearly twenty-seven, so there was always going to be some change to my original vision. I've sometimes talked about what I call the flesh-and-bones plot structure: I know the "bones" of the series, and the "joints” (the key events), but how I get there — the connective tissue — can change, and often does. Sometimes I’ll have planned a scene for ages and it’s worked brilliantly in my head, but when I actually come to write it, it falls flat, or the characters won’t cooperate, so I have to re-approach it from a different angle.

What about world-building, what advice can you give to aspiring writers?

Ask yourself questions about your world and try to come up with answers to them all. Even if those answers never make it to the page, it’s important that you have a decent idea of how your world works behind the scenes, or your readers may sense the gaps in your knowledge. Consider, as well, how your world differs from ours and why. Think outside the box.

In that sense, how did your process differ between a world somewhat based on our own, such as in The Bone Season series, and your new book, The Priory of the Orange Tree?

It was hugely different. Although The Bone Season is based in the real world (albeit a fantastical version of it), it’s been set so far in places I know well, like London and Oxford, and I was able to jump straight in to defamiliarising them so they appear quasi-magical to the reader. The Priory of the Orange Tree was easier in some ways, but more complex in others. Although it’s high fantasy, so I’m not bound by the laws and geographical boundaries of our world in the way I am with The Bone Season, its fictional lands are loosely based on events and legends from real-world countries, which meant I had to do a lot more historical research than I have before. The most challenging aspect of the worldbuilding was devising a naming system. I’m something of a magpie in The Bone Season, stealing slang and names from the Victorian era and sprinkling them where I fancy, but in Priory, it took me much longer to devise a way to weave languages into the fabric of my fantasy realm. I didn’t like the idea of just stirring vowels and consonants together, but I also didn’t want to rely too heavily on languages that are still in use today. Although I do use some modern words, I ended up creating most of the place and personal names from extinct or archaic languages, including Old Chinese, Gothic, Sumerian and Proto-Japanese. I have an etymology document, over 5000 words long, to remind me of where each name originated.

In The Bone Season series music has a heavy presence, and you also create playlists for each book, so it’s safe to say music is important to you. How has it influenced your writing?

I could write without music, but it would be hard. Music helps me tune in to my creativity. My Priory playlist, which I’ll release at some point in the near future, contains 100 songs or instrumental pieces that helped me settle into particular scenes or perspectives, including music from the era that inspired Priory. And of course, in The Bone Season, real music is mentioned. Often the lyrics of songs I mention will contain messages that are pertinent to the scene.

If time stopped, which book would you read over and over again?

Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor or Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft. Both such wonderful, lush, life-affirming books.

Which 3 fictional characters would you want to have an adventure with?

Ósa from A Shiver of Snow and Sky by Lisa Lueddecke, Frey from The Boneless Mercies by April Genevieve Tucholke, and Helene from An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir.

Do you want to recommend any books, comic books, podcasts, games, TV shows, anything that you’re enjoying right now?

I recently finished Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan. It’s wonderful — a sapphic love story that takes place in a Southeast Asian-inspired fantasy world, where young women are forced to serve as concubines to a ruthless Demon King. It's brutal and sumptuous and heart-rending.

Some other brilliant books I've read this year are Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng, State of Sorrow by Melinda Salisbury, A Spark of White Fire by Sangu Mandanna, Nevernight by Jay Kristoff, Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Katherine Webber, Blood and Sand by C. V. Wyk, and The Astonishing Colour of After by Emily X. R. Pan.

As for TV shows, I’d highly recommend Empresses in the Palace, a Chinese drama about a young woman who rises to become a favoured imperial consort during the Qing Dynasty, making friends and enemies as she ascends.

A world divided. A queendom without an heir. An ancient enemy awakens.

The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction—but assassins are getting closer to her door.

Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.

Across the dark sea, Tané has trained all her life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.

Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.

This time we welcome to our blog Alwyn Hamilton, the author of the Rebel of the Sand series!

Don’t forget to check out our previews interviews with Melissa Albert and Louise O’Neill, as well as the giveaway rules at the bottom of this post. Enjoy!

What inspired this mixture between Arabian Nights and the Wild West? The initial idea for REBEL was that I wanted to write about a female sharpshooter. This came as a result of me stumbling across a conversation that argued that it wasn’t realistic for women to be the action hero in fantasy novels because swords are so heavy and girls just aren’t that physically strong. So I decided to make a fantasy action heroine based on skill not strength, an Annie Oakley type. Who clearly belonged in a western. But I didn’t want to write a historical western though. So I kept thinking “Wild West meets… what?”. I was working in Islamic Art at an auction house at the time and the idea occurred to me in the middle of the night “Wild West meets 1001 Nights!” And from that point I was set. What was your process like to create the world and setting in the Rebel of the Sands series, and what advice can you give to people interested in fantasy world-building? Because I was working from two familiar settings combined, my first step was to naturally take what they had in common and include it. Deserts, bandits, getting around on horseback, strong place of religion, etc. And then pick out what made sense from the things they didn’t necessarily share and put them in conflict. In this case rapid industrialization and magic, two things that don’t usually cohabitate naturally. A lot of the conflict came out of there. That is actually advice I give a lot, that a great deal of your conflict and story can come out of the world itself naturally. Another piece of advice I like to give is don’t stress too much about building your whole world before you start writing. That actually can start limiting you. Something that has always worked for me is building the world as I encounter opportunities in the story. e.g if a character goes to put on a dress immediately I have to make a decision what it’s made of and the implications that come with that. Silk? That implies there is a China equivalent country in this world that is trading with my MC’s country. Wool? That implies my civilization is raising sheep as livestock. Etc. And so the world builds. Are you a plotter or a pantser? What’s it like to plan a whole trilogy?

Neither, I’m a daydreamer. I spend months or years daydreaming the plot of a book before I ever set fingers to keyboards. For instance I might be on my commute to work and think “Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a scene where they had to jump off a moving train?” and from there the logic part of my brain has to fill in the gaps. “Why would they have to jump off the train?” “Where are they trying to go on this train?” “What do you do after you jump off a train?” And this will then inevitably link up to the next scene I’ve daydreamed until I have a story in mind.

Then I start writing it. Some things may change or some scenes may get added or cut, but I always know where I’m working towards at least. Planning the whole trilogy was actually something I did a little sideways because when I was initially daydreaming the story I plotted it all the way out to the end of the rebellion as one book. Then realized about halfway through crossing the desert at 40,000 words that that was going to be WAY too long. So I started rethinking things so that it could be constructed into a trilogy. Hero At The Fall is the last volume of this trilogy, congratulations! What’s next for you? We know you’re working on a YA Fantasy… but are there any more hints you could give us? In the same way that REBEL was “Wild West meets 1001 Nights” I’m saying this one is “1920s High Society meets Grimm Fairytales”. It’s set in the same world as REBEL, albeit not the same country or same era. But 1 character from the series will make an appearance, and one of their descendants is a point of view character (and I’m obsessed with her!) What has changed for you in terms of writing and your process throughout the trilogy? What have you learned that you could share with aspiring writers? Hard to say! Because I think each book in a trilogy is totally different. Book 1 you are setting everything up, but also working with all the time in the world. Book 2 you are expanding on an existing set up, and working much more quickly and more sloppily to hit your deadlines, and Book 3 you kind of have to gather up all the threads you flung far and wide in Book 2 and tie them all up. And you feel less freaked out that your editor might fire you for a sloppy draft because you’ve been through the process with Book 2. And then a new series is another totally different ballgame because it’s establishing all over again, but this time on a deadline and with my editor. I’d say the only thing that is something sold I have learned that I can carry across all books is how much will change in edits and how much I enjoy working collaboratively with my editor. If time stopped, which book would you read over and over again? Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. I used to have it on Audiobook and probably listened to it… 30 times. So it’s familiar and I already know I don’t get sick of it apparently. Which 3 fictional characters would you want to have an adventure with? Nina Zenik from Six of Crows, Sophie Mercer from Hex Hall, & Ella from Ella Enchanted. Not necessarily because of any of their particular skills, I just think the 3 of them would be fun. Do you want to recommend any books, comic books, podcasts, games, TV shows, anything that you’re enjoying right now? I drive people crazy by evangelizing about my total obsessions at any given point in time and not letting it go until they try it out. So I could go on forever, but here’s just a few. Podcasts: My Favorite Murder, The Adventure Zone, How Did This Get Made Books: The Winner’s Curse trilogy by Marie Rutkoski, Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, Heist Society by Ally Carter TV Shows: Taskmaster on Dave, GLOW on Netflix, Brooklyn 99 on… somewhere depending where you are ;-)

Mortals rule the desert nation of Miraji, but mythical beasts still roam the wild and remote areas, and rumor has it that somewhere, djinn still perform their magic. For humans, it’s an unforgiving place, especially if you’re poor, orphaned, or female. Amani Al’Hiza is all three. She’s a gifted gunslinger with perfect aim, but she can’t shoot her way out of Dustwalk, the back-country town where she’s destined to wind up wed or dead. Then she meets Jin, a rakish foreigner, in a shooting contest, and sees him as the perfect escape route. But though she’s spent years dreaming of leaving Dustwalk, she never imagined she’d gallop away on mythical horse—or that it would take a foreign fugitive to show her the heart of the desert she thought she knew. Rebel of the Sands reveals what happens when a dream deferred explodes—in the fires of rebellion, of romantic passion, and the all-consuming inferno of a girl finally, at long last, embracing her power.

Giveaway!

To celebrate the relaunch of our blog, we are doing a giveaway! Three lucky readers will win a Glasstown Entertainment book of their choice! There are several ways to enter: - Go to our Twitter and retweet our tweet about this interview, or our previous interviews with Melissa Albert and Louise O'Neill; - Visit our Instagram where you can A) Repost our giveaway image with the hashtag #YAGlasstownChats, and B) Reply to it and tag a friend for extra entries! Don't forget to check out our Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram for more interviews and more opportunities to enter this giveaway! The giveaway ends on September 9th.