Heroes and Heartbreakers from Tor

Tor is launching a new site called Heroes and Heartbreakers. Looks like a mix between romance and urban fantasy.

The community site that brings together the best in all things romance, including historical and paranormal romance, and urban fantasy. As a Tor.com member, you can use your existing username and password to access exclusive content on Heroes and Heartbreakers, and receive the weekly H&H newsletter. Below are this week's highlights.

To kick off the website there is a short story from Darynda Jones as well as a sneak peek of Laura Leigh's latest Live Wire. The first chapter is available on the site. Aside from the sneak peeks and short stories there are several blog entries and commentaries.

Registration and log in is required.

Ask Steven Erikson

If you have been following Tor.com they (Bill Capossere and Amanda Rutter) have been doing a re-read of Steven Erikson's Gardens of the Moon. The first book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. They are just about to wrap up the book and are fortunate to be able to interview Erikson. But they need some help. They will post their final article on Gardens of the Moon if you want to ask the author a question you can do it by placing a comment after the article.

So if you are dying to ask him something about, well, anything stop by and maybe he just might answer your question.

Tor.com article to follow:

Questions for Steven Erikson on Gardens of the Moon? Start asking!

BILL CAPOSSERE AND AMANDA RUTTER

Next week we will be wrapping up Gardens of the Moon in our Malzan reread with a look at the last chapter and epilogue and then a broad reaction to the book as a whole. The following week Steven Erikson will be here answering selected questions.

Selected from where, you ask? Why, from here, of course! From you few, you happy few, you band of rereaders... So think of what you’d like to ask Steven (just Steven on this one, Cam will do the same at the end of our Night of Knives discussion) and put the question in the comments here or in this Wednesday’s coming reread discussion thread.

We’ll compile them all, weed out any repetitions, then send them along to Steven for his answers (or non-answers as may be the case—you know these author types). So start the questions coming; the sooner the better.

Ian Tregillis Short Story

Ian Tregillis, author of Bitter Seeds has a great short story up on Tor's website right now. Stay tuned for a Bitter Seeds review later in the year but, if you want a taste of Tregillis to see if it is your cup of tea, or coffee. Take a look at the short story entitled "What Doctor Gottlieb Saw."  If you haven't picked up Bitter Seeds yet, I recommend you give it a shot as I was very impressed with what I read.

A teaser from the short story:

“Do you suppose it’s possible to murder God?”

Gretel was Gottlieb’s most troubling patient. She was clairvoyant. She was also, he feared, quite mad.

He paused in the midst of jotting a note in her file. Capping his fountain pen and setting it on the desk, alongside the blotter, gained his scattered thoughts a few seconds to catch up with her. “I beg your pardon?”

Sanderson's The Way of Kings Preview

The good folks at Tor have released the first three chapters of Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings, Book one of the Stormlight Archive. You have to register with Tor's website but it should be worth it.

Synopsis of The Way of Kings:

Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter.

It has been centuries since the fall of the ten consecrated orders known as the Knights Radiant, but their Shardblades and Shardplate remain: mystical swords and suits of armor that transform ordinary men into near-invincible warriors. Men trade kingdoms for Shardblades. Wars were fought for them, and won by them.

One such war rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. There, Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable.

Brightlord Dalinar Kholin commands one of those other armies. Like his brother, the late king, he is fascinated by an ancient text called The Way of Kings. Troubled by over-powering visions of ancient times and the Knights Radiant, he has begun to doubt his own sanity.

Across the ocean, an untried young woman named Shallan seeks to train under an eminent scholar and notorious heretic, Dalinar’s niece, Jasnah. Though she genuinely loves learning, Shallan’s motives are less than pure. As she plans a daring theft, her research for Jasnah hints at secrets of the Knights Radiant and the true cause of the war.