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³§²¹±ô²¹»å¾±²Ô’s comments from the THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON Q&A / Discussion Group group.

Ell wrote: "Hi - about halfway through. Dawoud observes the puzzlecloth carpet at the Palace.

What's puzzlecloth? Thanks in advance..."

Thanks for asking, Ell. Puzzlecloth is essentially Arabesque fabric


on steroids - patterns so intricate and mazelike that they are a sort of puzzle to the eye.

Hey all! THRONE has made it to the final round of BEYOND REALITY's Book of the Month poll! If you're willing, you can give it a boost here:

http://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/63...

Thanks!

Hi Francesca

Without getting too spoilery, I'll just say that we'll see lots more of Adoulla before the trilogy is over.

thanks for reading!

AND MORE SPOILERS!!


The greatest difficulty was trying to write it so that readers would actually stand in Adoulla's sandals enough to really consider it a tragedy. In many a fantasy novel such a loss would be considered too minor to even dwell on. A byproduct of readers living in an age of homeowner's insurance and instantly replaceable books?

So I'm glad it was painful to read. Means I didn't screw it up too bad. :)

It's a mix of imagination, experience, and genre convention for me. The bantering friendship stuff, especially, though, is also this weird isolated writer thing of making up fun friends for oneself.

Conrad - Thanks! And hey, one never knows....

Riku - The philosophical answer to 'how long did the first book take?' is 'my whole life.' The more nuts-and-bolts answer is 3.5 years part-time from first notes to final final final version.

Conrad - There's been a bit of chatting with a couple of Hollywood people, but that's all I can say.

Sounds awesome and mysterious, right? Not so much. Pretty much any novel that makes even the smallest splash means the writer will get a Hollywood call or two. 90% of these chats don't end up meaning anything - VERY few even get the book to the option stage, much less actually filmed. So, while 'Hollywood called' sounds sexy, it usually means absolutely zilch.

I'd LOVE a graphic novel version, but that's something that seems to happen only with mega-bestselling authors (Jordan, Martin).

Probably "Bazaar of the Bizarre."

Hi folks!

I've had a number of questions about the sequels to THRONE. This seems like a good place to provide some info:

- Books II and III do not yet have titles

- I am currently writing Book II

- Book II should be out mid-2013

- The djenn - who are only mentioned in THRONE -
will feature prominently in Book II

- The later books will explore a fair amount of the
map included with THRONE. Specifically, Rughal-ba
and the off-map 'Warlands' will become hugely
important.

- Those interested in seeing what happens between
Raseed and Zamia will not be disappointed. :)

- In Book II, Raseed will cross swords with Layla
bas Layla (now called Red Layla), the female
Dervish who goes renegade in this short story:
-
judgment-of-swords-and-souls/

- Book II and especially Book III will move toward
epic fantasy in scale and scope, even as they
maintain a sword-and-sorcery flavor.

- The main conflict of Book III will be a classic
epic fantasy 'clash of the big ol' armies' which
is also a kind of Crusades analogue.

- I cannot promise that ninjas won't appear at some
point. You've been warned!

Sofia!

The Heavenly Chapters (and the Names of God which Adoulla uses in his invocations) are made up. In some cases they're barely-tweaked bits lifted from the Quran or Hadith. In others they're whole-cloth inventions. There's even some Biblical stuff folded in - the prayer the tortured guardsman tries to recall in the prologue is basically the 23rd Psalm.

There's more bits from them in my files, but not a whole text.

Heh. No, I'm speaking of LEAVES OF GRASS. Ismi Shihab is basically Walt Whitman mashed up with the classical poet Abu Nawas. And maybe a dash of Christopher Marlowe.

Good choice. Wetting oneself in Dervish silks is probably not advisable.

You might be ok in a ghul hunter's kaftan, though...

Jaime: Oh, sure. To start with, the 1001 Nights - and Islamic history - are the product of an incredibly diverse range of cultures that stretched from Europe to Africa to Asia over centuries. So there's an incredibly varied set of cultures there to start with.

But there are also plenty of 'western' influences, some of which are almost in there as 'easter eggs' - eg, Adoulla's love of Ismi Shihab's long poem LEAVES OF PALM, a thinly veiled reference to Walt Whitman.

Sofia: Thanks so much! Looking forward to the review.

Travel inspired more specific locations than general cultural/cityscape stuff. Little Square, where Adoulla sees the fake ghul hunter, is basically ripped from Jemaa el-Fnaa in Marrakesh. Much of the Crescent Moon Palace was ripped from Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Etc.

::slow clap::

...aaand LOL the third!

I've never read it, I'm ashamed to say. Lewis is one of the big gaping holes in my epic fantasy reading.

But I've certainly read some of the inheritors of this tradition (say, Robert Jordan's Aiel) and yes, THRONE is a sort of lovingly corrective response to the depiction of quasi/pseudo-Arabs/Muslims in fantasy.

Thoraiya wrote: "Have to be an alchemist. Especially after reading the short story "Alchemy" in Lucy Sussex's "Thief of Lives" collection and being reminded that it was the women and their perfumery that really kic..."


And as a bonus it's probably the most lucrative of the vocations mentioned!

Ilya: Well-played. But you have to do some sick shit to attract the attention of the Dead Gods. You have any idea how many people you need to Rickroll?

...AND MORE MAJOR SPOILERS!!!

Ilya wrote: "MAJOR SPOILER WARNING (mostly end of book)




Just how did Orshado perish so easily? Ignoring the "multi-novel Big Bad" vibes he was giving off, one would think he'd have at least some (non-mook) ..."


Not in hand-to-hand. He comes from a long tradition of S&S evil wizards: his personal *physical* defenses against a warrior of Raseed's essentially divine power are nil. Thus the time-freezey guilt trip spell. When Raseed breaks that spell, the feedback gives Orshado a double motherfucker of a migraine. And then Raseed does what he was trained to do.