Opinicus, the seventh GryphIns book, releases on July 1st! Oh my gosh, that’s not even a month away!
The ebook preorder is up in most stores, and you can use this books2 read link to check most of them: books2read.com/opinicus (a few stores may be a little slow). The hardcover and paperback editions should release at the same time. We’re still catching up on the audiobooks, so Starling should release next month and Blue Eyes soon after. While it’s my hope that Pridelord (GryphIns #8) will see the audiobook release at the same time as the main series, we’ll have to see how long the audio productive takes. James and the audio team is catching up fast, though!
You’d think release day would be the busiest, but there are a lot of final little checks and fixes that happen a few weeks ahead of time, so I’ve been re-reading Opinicus for the tenth time to see if any typos slipped past me or the editors, and I’ve been getting all of the Kindle X-ray articles typed up. I thought I’d be smart and type them all up in Scrivener and then copy and paste them over to Amazon this time.
In the mean time, I thought it was time to do an art share! I’ve had a lot of fan art come in this year, and that’s made me happy. 2022 wasn’t as crazy as the two years before it, but I’ve been continuing on these intense autoimmune treatments, so I’m spending about two days a week getting stabbed with needles and pumped full of healthy antibodies that don’t try to kill me in order to trick my immune system into calming down a bit. All of the fan art has made the needles easier to bear. And now, I share it with everyone else!
First off, Lewis Badger deserves an award for sending in the most fan art. Here’s a taste of some of what Lewis has shared (Xavi+Pink Paw, Younce, Ninox, Triddle, Askel).
Golday41 on DeviantArt has new Hatzel artwork showing her facing off against the monitor lizard from Eyrie.
And then Katie Schultz sent in this amazing Rybalt Reevesbane piece. I tend to put up fan art of characters while I’m writing or editing their scenes, so I’ve had Rybalt and Stripes on the brain recently.
Now it’s time to get back to filling out all of those Kindle X-ray entries. I’ll share more fan art as we get closer to release day. I hope everyone is doing well. I can’t wait until everyone gets to read Opinicus.
My spouse and I really wanted gryphon pride shirts to wear this year, so we reached out to Fleeks a while back and she was happy to put some together for us. I’m sporting the intersectional pride and pan shirts, but ever since getting that RedBubble store up and running, we decided to make some of the others available, too, in case anyone else wants one! (And if your pride colors aren’t available, use the contact form to let me know and we’ll make it happen for you.) Almost all of the designs look great on black, but RedBubble lets you change the fabric color if you want something else. Just make sure the background color doesn’t hide the pride colors.
Also, Shep, who does the Telegram stickers, decided that pride flags should have dragons or gryphons on them like the flag of Wales, and I’m all for it:
In other news, I’m so late to Pride Month because my air conditioning died and we had a week of 99F weather right afterwards. My temperature tolerance has gotten a little better since the higher infusion dose, but that was still too warm for me. Everyone’s AC dies around this time of year, so we had to wait a few weeks. (It really died back in April, to give you an idea of the wait.) My spouse traded in some old travel points from his previous job, and we spent the hottest days in a hotel, where I got a lot of reading done. I finished up the Tensorate series by Neon Yang (excellent novellas of varying length and form) and Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. Orange Tree actually makes me a little mad because the description, cover, and title all made me think this was going to be a long, boring book. And while it’s long (264k word count, standalone novel), this book is about dragons. Dragons of every type. Good dragons, bad dragons, western dragons, eastern dragons. It’s essentially the Reign of Fire of the epic fantasy world, and I enjoyed it a lot. I just wish they’d marketed it that way!
I brought a laptop with me to the hotel and nearly finished a short novel set in the world of my next series. This will go out for free to the newsletter and Patreon next year, around when the series shows up for preorder. (Side note: thank you so much to my patrons! I’ve named my AC unit after all of you.) That free novel is essentially a fantasy version of Animal Search & Rescue with a vulpegryph (fox gryphon) who enjoys baked goods, multiheaded goose hydras as an invasive species, and dryads who hate grass.
But you’re probably here for the gryphon books, and I have good news there, too. My developmental editor is finishing up Crackling Sea (#6) and should have it back to me before the end of the month. And now that I’m back in my house, I’m finishing up Opinicus (#7) to send to him. 2020 and 2021 have been crazy years, so I’m not going to make any promises until the preorder page is up, but let’s just say it’s very likely both will be out this year.
That’s all the news for now. I’m looking forward to spending all of July editing in the air conditioning. I hope you have a cool summer (or, for my southern hemisphere readers, a pleasant winter)! And don’t hesitate to shout if there’s a gryphon pride shirt design that you’d like to see added. We’re happy to oblige =]
I just received a surprising, delightful gift from my friend Anna, courtesy of Wolfberry Crafts: a Reeve Brevin figurine for my gryphon book shelf!
I’m blown away by just how beautiful and intricate the details are. Really, I’m speechless. It’s amazing, and thank you so much to Anna for the late Christmas gift—and to Wolfberry for doing such great work!
I’m about 97 books into the 100 gryphon book reading challenge, but I lost count so I’ve been going back to write short reviews on each and count them up. Yesterday was IVIG Infusion day for me, so I spent the first few hours reading a new book that James Spaid from the Gryphon Pages website recommended to me: Beyond the North Wind by Gillian Bradshaw.
One of my biggest concerns has been for gryphon books that have gone out of print and lack ebook editions. Every so often, you hear about how gryphon novels were so plentiful that in the 1950s other books would joke about how none of them could decide on the same spelling for gryphon, but I’ve had a hard time tracking down all of these lost books.
North Wind isn’t that old, but it fits into that period of time in the ’90s when gryphon books were huge (think of The Black/White/Silver Gryphon trilogy by Mercedes Lackey) but so many of those titles never made it to ebook and the rights lapsed. The Wyrmwood books by Robin Wayne Bailey, the Crossroads books by Nick O’Donohoe, and…. Beyond the North Wind.
This book only has a German paperback and an English hardcover, but I found a lot of used copies online because it was common in school libraries. So if you want a copy, they’re still out there.
What’s special about this book—and the reason James recommended it to me—is that the author spent a lot of time researching the Greek-Scythian myths about gryphons and Arimaspeans. While I’m more of an Egyptian gryphon fan (go team four cat paws!), and I don’t think gryphons have any one true set of defining myths, a lot of how we think about modern gryphons come from this source material.
For those who don’t know, the Scythians told the Greeks that the hills of Siberia were full of gold guarded by gryphons. And those gryphons were at a constant war with a race of one-eyed men, the Arimaspeans, who wanted their gold. Eventually, the Armiaspeans tamed horses, which allowed them to steal the gold and escape, which is why everyone knows that gryphons hate horses and will kill them on sight.
(The poet Virgil later used the image of a horse and gryphon creating offspring, the hippogryph, as an example of impossible love. Because everyone knew gryphons killed horses on sight, they could never fall in love. That’s actually where the hippogryph first shows up. Unlike the gryphon, which sprouted from dozens of different cultures, hippogryphs were invented by one poet.)
Gillian Bradshaw’s Author’s Note for North Wind goes into detail about the fragments of Greek myths and poetry that she used as her reference, and the story does feel like a YA version of a Greek epic by Homer, though written in a much more accessible style. It centers around the search for the people from Beyond the North Wind, but it’s really about one Greek poet who is charged by Apollo with saving the gryphons from the Arimaspeans.
A gryphon dies at the start, so I was a little worried, since I’m only reading these books for the gryphons. But it quickly becomes pro-gryphon, and while there are no gryphon protagonists because it’s told from the Greek guy’s point of view, there are more named gryphon characters than humans or Arimaspeans.
Ultimately, I liked it. I loved seeing the most common gryphon mythology brought to life. This feels like it was a book the author had a great time writing, and I’m sad that it’s been lost to time without an ebook edition.
As my own Author’s Note to this post, if you’re interested in all of the disparate gryphon myths that different cultures came up with, The Book of Gryphons by Joe Nigg is a good starting place. It’s out of print but easy to find a cheap, used copy of. And the cool gryphon insignia under the dust jacket means it’s okay to get a well-loved copy =] And I should give a shout out to the Gryphon Pages online by James Spaid, which recently managed to get a foreword by Joe Nigg. I think every little gryphon fan found the Gryphon Pages the moment their parents let them online, but if you didn’t, there’s a lot of information there.
Over the last year, I’ve had a lot of people reach out and ask for two things: a poster of the map and physical stickers of the Telegram stickers. Well, I have good news for both of those emailers: wish granted! I’ve held off for so long because I haven’t had the time and energy to handle orders myself, but thanks to RedBubble, I don’t need to. They can take care of everything for me. I may still do my own stickers for conventions, but for now, you don’t need to wait.
Included in the stickers are Kittrel’s chapter heading designs, Kittrel’s chibi hearts, and Shepherd’s Zeph, Younce, Ninox, and Sand Gryphon stickers. It’s not just stickers, though. Shephard created three brand new masks for the store: Hatzel (saberbeak), Younce (taiga gryphon), and Pink Sparkle Younce!
The masks come in several sizes and two versions. The fitted masks have an adjustable nose bar to make them easier to wear with glasses, along with a slider on the straps.
In addition, there’s a poster for the map and covers. Yay!
If there’s anything else you’d like to see, feel free to reach out with the contact form or on social media and let me know. Mostly, I wanted everyone who requested physical stickers to know I hear them loud and clear, and the masks were a fun bonus. But if you enjoy the RedBubble masks and want to weigh in on another design, go for it. Would a Soft Paws or Tresh/Sharkbeak design make you happy? Let me know!
Also, while it’s a bit late for this, you can quickly combine a pair of Costume Shop cat ears with the mask to get a makeshift Halloween costume. Yay!
The Ruins of Crestfall, book five of the Gryphon Insurrection, is now available everywhere! Pick it up at your favorite bookstore or request it from your local library. 2020 has been a hard year, so it’s time for some happy sand gryphons. Back cover copy below, so if you haven’t read the other books and want to avoid spoilers, stop reading here.
Something haunts the desert, something that was once an opinicus.
Cherine—scholar, adventurer, metal-beak, and popular kidnapping victim. While his old mate and friends fight for his amnesty, he lives out his exile in the aneda forest. When Zeph and Kia approach him about hunting down the infamous Nighthaunt, he’s all too happy to leave his hovel behind.
Little do they know that the key to finding the most dangerous criminal the world has ever known lies in the abandoned eyrie of Crestfall. Long silent, something lurks in the shadows of the city, and its homes may not be as abandoned as once believed.
Will Cherine and his friends unravel the mystery of the desert eyrie in time, or will they become the hunted?
The Ruins of Crestfall is a full-length creature fantasy novel full of fan-favorite characters, desert monsters, fancy opinicus armor, and charming sand gryphons.
But wait, there’s more! The best part of every book launch is the Telegram stickers. You can pick up Hoppy and Sponge’s Sand Gryphon Attack Pack (by the wonderful @StupidShepherd) for free here: https://t.me/addstickers/Crestfall
As I promised when the boxed set went up, I know some readers prefer having the Jeff Brown covers in their digital libraries so Eyrie and Ashen Weald are both on sale for the rest of the month. Eyrie‘s free most places and 99 cents others (depending on the store/country), and Ashen Weald is mostly 99 cents. So if you want to pick up the first three gryphon books for the price of the boxed set, give it a go!
On the writing life side of things, I’m happily working on Crackling Sea. I started IVIG infusions to treat my autoimmune disorder, so life is a little chaotic now and should get easier as the infusions start to work in 3-6 months. I’m still hoping Crackling Sea will release in 2020, but my editing deadlines are tentative while we see how these treatments go.
Of course, that’s book 6 and you’re all waiting for book 5! It releases August 31st, and it’s… well, it’s a lot of fun! I won’t spoil anything, but if Reevesbane made you sad once or twice, The Ruins of Crestfall is here to make you feel happy =] With the infusions and global pandemic and everything else, I thought you might appreciate some warm, fuzzy feelings.
And now, guess who was busy getting stabbed with six long needles for six hours and infused with antibodies and forgot to turn in all the Kindle X-ray information for Crestfall? Yep, it’s me! Let’s see, what was Ninox up to in the last book and what do we need to stay about her in this one….
Oh! Oh! I nearly forgot. With Reevesbane‘s release, the Gryphon Insurrection series is in almost every major store. If you’re enjoying the series and want to help other readers find it, please feel free to leave a review. It’s tough to get traction sometimes, and reviews really help people get a feel for if a book has enough gryphons or not =]
Okay, back to filling out the Kindle X-ray. “Younce is a gyrfalcon and snow leopard gryphon. He is secretly afraid of fish…”
Yay! If you’re looking to catch up on the gryphon series before Crestfall releases next month—or if you’re hoping to nudge a friend to catch up—there’s now a Gryphon Insurrection Boxed Set One with ebook editions of Eyrie, Ashen Weald, and Starling in it.
Would you like to see a boxed set for the paperbacks or hardcovers, too? Which of the first three books is your favorite? Feel free to let me know on Facebook or Twitter =]
I got a chance to sit down (figuratively) with another of the authors in the SFWA Fantastic Beasts story bundle and ask him some questions. This isn’t just any writer, however—in addition to being the author of nautical fantasy, Dustin is the developmental editor on my Gryphon Insurrection series. If you enjoy the books, he definitely deserves some of the credit. Though if you think too many fisherfolk died at the start of Ashen Weald or too few at the end, you can lay blame at his feet for those. He’s been a guiding light for the series, and I appreciate all of the work he’s done helping me.
And… I love the nautical fantasy he writes. I grew up in Florida, and he did a great job of recapturing the feeling of the islands and marine life. I wasn’t surprised to see that the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America had picked Whalemoon as one of the picks for the Fantastic Beasts bundle. It’s a great match, and it was good to see a familiar face among the authors this year.
VALE NAGLE: Hello, Dustin!
I’ve noticed how excited other interviewers (like Richard Parry in your interview from last week) have been to talk to you, and while I think you’re a very smart person and that sense of awe is earned, I also come from the place where, when we’re both not busy working on books, we often ramble to each other about the author business, editing, and books we love. Sure, you’re also an impressive writer, editor, and artist. I guess I wanted to say that, unlike your past interviewers, I’m not intimidated by you. =]
Having set that as the precedent, I just wanted to add that I love Whalemoon. I was in the middle of a 100 book reading challenge when I received my advanced reader copy, and I just happened to start reading it a little that evening when I didn’t have my usual e-reader on me. The moment I hit the shark selkie, I was in. (I refuse to say “hooked” when we’re talking nautical fantasy.) I knew I was going to drop everything to finish reading Whalemoon that night.
So my first question is this: how did you come up with the character of Mako? Listening to the audiobook, I suspect the narrator loves her as much as I do.
DUSTIN PORTA: Oh, the narrator took that character in a completely different direction than expected. We had a long conversation about how neither of us knew how to voice her.
I just gave up and told Lynsey to go wild with it and see what she came up with. The result was instead of sounding like a crusty old sailor, she sounded like a know-it-all teacher’s pet. It added an entirely new dimension to her personality. Which informed some of the decisions I made while writing book two.
You just had to ask the selkie question. I’ve been dodging this question since you first mentioned it but I guess now I have to tell you. I had no idea what a selkie was until you told me that I had written one.
Ironically, Mako was inspired not by Scottish, but by Irish folklore. The story goes that Ireland was first settled by one man and 50 women. And the man I guess wasn’t up to the task so he jumped into a river, turned into a salmon and swam away. No explanation. This happens all the time in Irish folklore. While Mako’s transition is a little more detailed, the goal was the same. I wanted it to be something that people in the book just take for granted without needing to know how it’s possible.
At the same time I was re-watching my old DVD of Jacques Cousteau’s river adventures. It was the episode where he journeyed up the Amazon and interviewed villagers about local folklore. The most interesting to me was the pink dolphins of the Amazon who turn into beautiful humans and cause all sorts of terrible mischief.
We weren’t given an explanation for why it happens, that’s just something that dolphins do. So that’s how it happened in my book. Flopping onto land and shaking off their shark skin to become human is just something that sharks do.
It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t know about selkies or I might have written her as a seal instead of a shark.
All right, I guess I should turn the question back on you. You have taken an even stricter no magic approach to your books than I did. Everything has a biological explanation. And it is treated in such a way that it all feels very magical. Is there an early draft of your first book that includes real magic, or did you know that you wanted to write a magic free story from the beginning? Why do weird animal adaptations feel so magical and awe inspiring?
Also, what is a serpentine whale, and is it really possible for a gryphon to train one?
VALE: That’s really interesting about the pink river dolphins. It seems like selkies are almost a kind of universal myth that exist in different forms in different cultures. I’d go so far as to say that selkies are much less interesting when they’re dolphins or seals. Those don’t capture my imagination the way Mako did. The eyes, the teeth—she’s a brilliant image even before you get to know her.
The lack of magic in Eyrie really sprang out of the origins of the gryphons themselves. There are many ways to write gryphons. Magic constructs, magical creations, genetic engineering gone awry—take your pick. I wanted to try something different and find an ecosystem that could support them. Once I’d made that decision, having mages or scientists didn’t make sense. And to help support the idea of an ecosystem with gryphons as the apex predators, I limited the land-based mammals to a few invasive rodents and made certain every other animal in the series was real, even if it was extinct in our world. The serpentine whale is based upon a real, serpent-shaped whale: the basilosaurus.
Genre is a funny thing. The same way a science fiction novel can throw science out the window and revert to knights fighting space wizards and laser dragons, fantasy can sometimes look very different from what Grandpa Tolkien read as a boy. You can strip away the magic, the humans, the swords, and still create something that’s undeniably fantasy. And I love that.
Of course, fantasy thrives on sense of wonder, but nature handles that nicely. There’s nothing I love more than learning about new cats and birds to base gryphons off of. I had no idea there were so many water-loving cats to pair with cranes and diving petrels, but coastal gryphons are a joy to write. Then there’s gryphons based entirely on extinct species like the Haast’s eagle and saber-toothed tigers. And that’s before we even start looking at green beard altruism, oilbirds, microraptors, sandgrouse, or pumpkins for inspiration.
So the answer to why nature feels magical is that, well, it is. Maybe not in the hocus-pocus, “I cast fireball” sense of the term, but I’m always impressed by the world we live in. We say dragons aren’t real, but is a wyvern really that different from Hatzegopteryx, a pterosaur that weighed 850lbs, could fly, and preyed upon dinosaurs? Or we talk about magical shapeshifting spells, then read about parasitic plants that use horizontal gene transfer to borrow the DNA from their prey. Doppelgangers, demons, and changelings are the stuff of legend, but several types of spiders kidnap ant children, steal their scent, then hide in ant hives, preying upon any ants who find themselves alone away from the hive.
Pulling myself back from listing off more strange animal facts, something I really appreciated from Whalemoon was the focus on storytelling. I suppose all authors are storytellers at their core, but you really seem to love not just the story on a novel level, but the stories that the characters inside the novel tell themselves and others. A high school student could fill an essay with peeling back the stories in sea shanties, the stories of past whalepike owners, those told in jewelry, those told by the sharkling, and those told by her enemies.
In a way, Whalemoon is a story about storytellers. Where does your love of storytellers come from? Why the emphasis on the stories we tell each other?
DUSTIN: I don’t know. Maybe because I have a short attention span and I like big stories stitched together from little stories (Moby Dick, Dracula, Canterbury Tales). But also, stories are how we learn. I can read an entire novel without bothering to learn the main character’s name. But I will remember an interesting moth on the third page of the second chapter, because it taught me the the character is observant. And because I’m interested in bug and where to find them.
As a poet, I learned that rhymes were created to help storytellers remember long epics. If an ancient bard couldn’t remember the next line of a story, she could at least guess what the next rhyme would be and go from there. I don’t know if you noticed, but there is no writing in Whalemoon. It doesn’t exist. Even on maps and drawings, nobody has invented language. This is particularly important when the legends surrounding a magic sword are the only thing that gives it power. So, where you have stripped magic out of your fantasy and replaced it with biology, I stripped it out and replaced it with stories and superstition.
There is a small glitch in the magic system that happens when blood interacts with steel. Swords that spill blood for a purpose develop a memory of their own and will twist fate to make it happen again. That is the closest I come to real rules of magic.
It might not be apparent in book one, but Phehl’s people are unique in that they have invented pictographs. In a world where oral storytelling can change the course of history, the ability to carve a story into bone and make it permanent is actually very dangerous. And there are some clues, in the confusing wording or the opening poem that more history has taken place on Phehl’s little Atoll than anyone realizes. That’s second problem with writing down stories instead of memorizing them, you can change what is written nobody will remember it differently.
Sorry, I sort of dodged your original question by talking about my magic system instead. Too late now.
Here’s a follow-up if you’re interested. Do you have any arbitrary rules that you follow in lieu of magic. For example: MacGyver doesn’t have high tech gadgets, but if you give him a paperclip and some chewing gum he can invent his way out of a problem. Another example: One of my old characters always had a knife in his pocket. No matter the circumstances, or how unlikely it seemed. He was literally impossible to tie up or to catch unarmed.
Do you have any fun rules that you impose on yourself as a writer? Like: Owl gryphons do not lose fights at night. Or: Cherine will always be captured. And where do you draw the line between things that only you think are clever and things the readers will actually pick up on and enjoy?
VALE: That’s a good question. You came close to it with your comment on Cherine always being captured. I think the actual (subconscious) rule is that no prison can hold Cherine. He’s the one character who never tries to fight no matter the circumstances. He’s a scholar and an observer, and even though he’s a lanky golden eagle opinicus, there’s no meat on his bones. So he’s every easy to capture, but karma has a way of opening the doors to his cells.
I suppose I do have one more. In one of my books, Lei comments, “Nothing bad ever happens when Zeph is around.” I would counter that if Zeph shows up, either something has already gone wrong and you don’t know it yet, or something is about to go horribly awry at any moment. He never just shows up for a preen and a scream; he’s always chasing trouble.
Okay, that’s my interview with Dustin Porta! If you enjoy shark selkies, stories about stories, or sea shanties involving sea gnomes with whisker lances riding flying fish into battle against sea gulls, pick up his book from the SFWA Fantastic Beasts story bundle.
Eyrie is in SFWA’s Fantastic Beasts Bundle with a lot of other exciting books from now until June 18th. If you’re looking for books with gryphons, werewolves, shark selkies, or dragons, you can find them all on Story Bundle!
I’m having a great time reading through all of the other authors in the bundle with me. Here’s a few I’ve read and loved.
Windsworn by Derek Siddoway is gryphon riders in a setting full of arcanepunk golems and saber cat riders. His pacing and sense of adventure are always top notch.
Whalemoon by Dustin Porta is a nautical adventure, but I was hooked (er, drawn in? I need help finding a non-nautical pun to put here) the moment shark selkies showed up. He uses sea shanties at the start of his chapters which are delightful. I especially like the sea gnomes riding flying fish into battle against sea gulls.
And most of my family has been reading Lindsay Buroker dragon books all pandemic to stay sane, so big shout out to her.
I’m still reading through the rest. Ben Galley I already know because of his beautiful teal gryphon cover for another of his series. And Richard Parry’s werewolf covers always catch my eye. I don’t know if it’s spoilery, but the cover of the third Night’s Champion book has always made me want to read that series, and now I’m getting my chance.
The rest are all great authors I’m enjoying for the first time, but I’m honored to be in the story bundle with them. So if you’re looking for some new fantastic beast books to read, check it out!
