Kylie’s on tour!

Emma and Simone are on their own ... and descending into the very depths of Hell.

I am possibly the one who is most excited about the release of my next novel, Earth to Hell. I’ve received a constant stream of emails from fans since the release of Blue Dragon asking me ‘when the next one is coming out?’. The definite release date is January 1, 2010, but some book stores will have it as early as the 14th of December, and I’ll be touring the southern states to sign copies for anyone who wants to purchase them before Christmas. I’ll be signing in Brisbane city on the 14th, then I’ll be in Canberra on the 16th, Sydney on the 17th to 19th, Melbourne the 20th to 22nd, then back in Brisbane to sign again on the 23rd and 24th of December. Check my website at www.kyliechan.com for full details of where and when I’ll be, and bring as many copies as you like for me to sign. I look forward to seeing everybody there!

Kylie

Small Shen, go back before Dark Heavens

Voyager is delighted to announce that Kylie Chan has written a prequel to her bestselling trilogy, Dark Heavens (White Tiger; Red Phoenix; Blue Dragon).

Meet Kylie Chan

Red Dragon

Blue Dragon

Small Shen is the story of Gold, a stone spirit who is also a terrible troublemaker and philanderer! In Dark Heavens, we met Gold as a servant of Xuan Wu — and how Gold got that job is a fabulous tale of incredible adventures and unbelievable disasters, loveable characters and evildoers, gods and dragons — everything we all love about Kylie’s books, Small Shen has in spades!

Small Shen will be out in 2010, along with Kylie’s follow-up trilogy to Dark Heavens … more about that at a later date!

But there are lots of wonderful Voyager books to keep all you travellers of the imagination occupied in the mean time … as well as your favourite authors, look out for these new authors in 2009: Kim Falconer (The Spell of Rosette), Maria Quinn (The Gene Thieves), Rhonda Roberts (Gladiatrix) and Duncan Lay (The Wounded Guardian).

Kylie Chan wraps up Gen Con

The media reported it as ‘A Massive Gathering of Geeks’ and had photos of people dressed as Star Wars imperial storm troopers and Star Trek Klingons. But for me, GenCon was more a gathering of people with imagination who want to live outside the everyday – even if it is for a short time.

The main focus of the con was for role-playing gamers, trying out the games on show. For me, it was a marvellous opportunity to meet other writers, and the people who’ve enjoyed my work.

I spent a lot of time with other Australian authors – Marianne de Pierres and Sean Williams who’ve both produced magnificent space operas recently and who were approachable, good humoured, and a lot of fun. Ian Irvine shared some of his ideas for new novels – and was cornered by many fans of his existing work. Matt Farrer shared his experiences as a writer based on a gaming universe – Warhammer 40k – and it was great fun to compare notes with him, as my son was very much into Warhammer during his teen years. (‘He played as Necrons? Cool! Those dudes are nasty!)

Queenie Chan gave me a copy of her delicious Gothic light horror manga ‘The Dreaming’, full of atmospheric images of the Australian bush as a quiet lurking menace.

For the first time, I was up the front at some seminar panels. Fortunately Sean, Marianne, Ian, and Matt were willing to help my (often tongue-tied) novice butt, but by the second or third seminar I was able to give ambitious writers of spec fic some good advice and tips on the number one topic, How To Get Published.

I wandered around, drooling on manga and anime, wishing I could buy the entire contents of the Pulp Fiction stand, and watching bemused as the Klingons ran their jail. Fans of my stories asked me all sorts of questions about them, the first and most common one being ‘When is Book Four Coming Out??!!!’

I wished I’d reserved a place in the ‘Jedi Training’ which was a bunch of people learning how to properly wield a Light Sabre. I enjoyed the roars of despair from the gamers as they lost an important point. I laughed hysterically at the entire Cosplay cast who did a “Caramell Dansen” up on the main stage. And the two young ladies dressed as Inuyasha and Sesshomaru who were carrying a sign saying ‘Will Yaoi for Pocky’ (I nearly caused a riot when I mentioned Kagome). I giggled to myself when Matt said ‘I can has…?’ in perfect lolcat during one of the seminars.

In short, it was a gathering of people like me, who are into the new, the weird, and the interesting. I had a blast and at the end, one of the organisers thanked me and said ‘You will be coming next year, won’t you?’

Damn straight I’ll be there next year. That was the first GenCon, and now they’ve shown that they can pull it off, I’m sure that next year will be better than ever.

Visit Kylie Chan’s website.

The (Martial) Arts and upcoming books: part two of Kylie Chan’s guest blog

Part two of our Q&A with Kylie Chan, author of White Tiger, Red Phoenix, Blue Dragon.

Do you ever wish we had gods running around the way that Xuan Wu and co do in your series?
Oh goodness no! Particularly the White Tiger, could you image the trouble that one would cause? And Chinese believe that when you die, you are judged by courts in Hell, and punished by demons – tortured, in fact – for all the crimes that you’ve committed during your earthly lifetime. Then you’re given a drink that erases your memory, and you’re sent back up to Earth until you get it right. Doesn’t really sound terribly fair to me!

Did you always intend to write a second trilogy or could you just not bear to leave Emma in such a plight?

I originally planned to write one trilogy, three books. The first book grew and spread and became the first trilogy. So the story that I’d planned for one book grew into three! The story for the second book will take up the second three books. I can’t help it, it just keeps flooding out, and the characters take over the story and make it more complex, and interesting things keep happening.

So I never planned to leave Emma where she is, but I never planned for her to take quite so long getting there. And she still has a very long way to go. I’ve left her in an extremely complicated predicament at the end of book three, and now we have the journey to put her life back together and to return her most loved people to it.

Do you actually know any of the fighting styles that Emma and John use, or are they purely from [non-violent!] research?

My son is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, I’ve never actually practised that Art but I attended every single lesson when he was there (I can now count to ten in Korean).

At the moment, I don’t have the time to practise my Arts. I am looking around for a new school to join though, I know exactly which styles I’d like to pick up again and it’s just a matter of finding classes that fit in with my extremely busy schedule of writer, worker, and mother.

I am a senior belt in Wing Chun. This is the martial art that Bruce Lee practised (until he controversially modified it into his own style called ‘Jeet Kwun Do’). It’s a Southern Chinese style, ‘soft’ and ‘close’.

‘Soft’ means that it focuses more on disabling the opponent with pressure-points and leverage rather than hard hitting (Tae Kwon Do is a ‘hard’ style, they practise a lot hitting blocks of wood, therefore Leo’s famous quote about it in book one – which I personally think is untrue and undeserved, Tae Kwon Do is a beautiful and worthwhile martial art). A top Wing Chun practitioner can disable someone and knock them to the ground without actually hitting them at all, just using their own body weight against them.

‘Close’ means that it’s not long-range kicks and punches, but close-in attacks that are through the opponent’s defences.

This is not a showy type of martial art, and the basic form, or ‘kata’, isn’t very much to look at. In fact any time I’ve performed the ‘Siu Lim Tao’ basic form for anyone who doesn’t know the style, they’ve fallen over laughing. So much for that.

I have done a lot of Chow Gar as well, ‘Gar’ means ‘family’ or ‘clan’, so this is the Chow Clan style. It focuses on showy animal-based forms (‘tiger’ and ‘crane’) and has a lot of really fun weapon forms. My sifu (master) insisted on me practising with nunchucks and doing the nunchuck form even though chucks and I really don’t get along. I never got to learn double sword, but my double stick form (with a broomstick from Woolworths that I’d sawn in half, way to go $2.49 for a lethal weapon) was complete and I was often called up to demonstrate it. I was about a third of the way through learning the double daggers and the single sword, so I’d love to get back into that and learn the complete forms.

I learned a Yang Tai Chi set (There are five basic styles of Tai Chi, each named after the clan who created it, and a couple that are ‘national standard’ sets in China) and I would love to learn some of the other Tai Chi forms. Once again it’s just a matter of finding a school that fits in with my schedule.

I’m not as accomplished a practitioner of the Arts as I would like to be, I don’t have a black belt in anything, and I wouldn’t call myself advanced level, merely intermediate. I hope to get back into it, though, and finish that black belt!

I’d also love to try some other styles, such as the Japanese forms of Karate (long hard) and Aikido (extremely soft). There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do as much as I would like.

Kylie Chan
Visit Kylie’s website or visit Voyager Online for news on other great fantasy authors.

Kicking ass and dating Dark Lords: Kylie Chan guest blogs

Kylie Chan answered a few questions for us – which give fans an insight into how she came up with the Dark Heavens trilogy (White Tiger, Red Phoenix, Blue Dragon). If you haven’t yet read the series, click on the image of White Tiger to the left to browse inside the pages of the book!

Where did you get the idea for writing the Dark Heavens trilogy?

I’d lived for twenty years with my Chinese husband, ten in Australia and then another ten in Hong Kong. The culture had completely soaked into me – I would do and say things terribly Chinese (aiyaa!) without even thinking. We originally went to Hong Kong just for a year, that stretched into a three-year contract, and then eventually he took a permanent, and extremely well-paying, position there.

After ten years of Hong Kong, he was making a lot of noise about never returning to Australia. He enjoyed the lifestyle, this was his home. He went golfing across the border in China every Friday afternoon directly after work, and came home Sunday afternoon. I was thoroughly sick of Hong Kong – the crowds, the noise, the pollution, and mostly the fact that when we went to the Mall on a Sunday there was such a crush of people that it was impossible to actually buy anything – a fun family day out turned into a stampede and a massive headache. I’d had enough.

I came back to Australia by myself, with the two kids. To breathe fresh air, and see the blue sky again! Complete bliss. My husband still supported us, and I found myself with quite a bit of time on my hands, concentrating on running these two over-booked children to and from various sporting and intellectual activities.

Finally, I had easy access to my beloved fantasy novels – in English! – and to my delight discovered that there was a bright and flourishing fantasy powerhouse here in Queensland. I bought a lot of Ikea bookshelves and proceeded to quickly fill them. I’m a fast reader, and it didn’t take me long to run out of things to read.

At that time, the news was full of J K Rowling, the Writer That Made It Good. I thought about what she’d done to be successful, and decided it was that she’d made a story that was different from anyone else’s. Well, I knew an awful lot about Chinese culture, so why couldn’t I write a story that’s different as well – but in a different direction?

Then I thought about what my sister Fiona, in her cubicle in a government office, would like to read. She’d love some romance, a serious dose of ass-kicking, some intriguing fantasy elements, and of course some delicious angst, a Love That Can Never Be. Sexual tension and a strong female lead – so she can imagine herself in the position of this love-torn ass-kicker – would just make it better.

Just for fun I decided to add the love triangle of the strong hero, and the woman and man who both love him – and are also best friends. I was hoping for some jealousy between the two but they turned out to be BFF’s (Best Friends Forever!) and Leo was so noble about it I wanted to slap him.

It started with the mental image of the strong Chinese man in black, clipping his sword to the wall next to the front door of his Hong Kong apartment. I looked for a god who fitted that description, so I started doing a massive amount of research into the Chinese deities. I discovered Xuan Wu, the Dark Lord, whose colour is black and is the God of Martial Arts. Who is also a combination of a turtle and a snake. How weird was this? I delved deeper into his history and mythology, finding out more and more intriguing things about this very unusual god. And the story took off from there.

Kylie Chan

Read about Kylie’s next book, Small Shen!

We’ll have Kylie’s answers to more questions – on martial arts, and upcoming books – tomorrow!

Too far away? Go and visit Kylie’s website to read about her books, or visit Voyager Online for news on other great fantasy authors.