Rhonda Roberts talks Gladiatrix and news on Hoodwink!

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Rowena Cory Daniells has posted a fab interview with our own Rhonda Roberts, author of Gladiatrix, where she talks about getting published, gender in fantasy and what’s coming up next for her time travelling heroine Kannon Dupree.

We’re thrilled to announce that Rhonda’s much anticipated next book Hoodwink will hit the shelves in January 2012.

Now we know it’s not close enough for some Gladiatrix fans so here’s a little bit more info to keep you going:

A perfectly preserved body, covered in Mayan occult tattoos, is discovered embedded in the concrete floor beneath the set of a teen werewolf TV series. The police identify the man as Earl Curtis, a famous director who went missing in 1939 while working on Gone with the Wind. Hired to investigate, Kannon returns to old Hollywood. But in the present someone is stalking the remaining witnesses.

Check out the interview here.

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Fallon Friday: Jennifer on books, books, and Klingon-English dictionaries …

I love books. Always have. If there is a down side to being a professional author, it’s that I don’t get time to read nearly as much as I used to. Nevertheless, I keep acquiring books in the optimistic belief that one day I will have the time to read them. I do the same with DVDs. I have hundreds of them, all waiting for me to watch them.

And what an odd collection it is. I have biographies of the first 12 Caesars, Hitler, Cromwell and Kenyatta, to name a few, as well as quite a few people nobody (including me) has ever heard of. I have the Fair Dinkum Australian Dictionary, alongside a two volume version of the English Dictionary bound in leather with a 22ct gold trim. I have a German–English and a Klingon–English Dictionary (doesn’t everybody?), too. I have the Bible, the Koran and the Book of Mormon. I have both volumes of Everyday Latin (which are chock full of useful, everyday phrases like “Beam me up, Scotty” in Latin, in case you ever need to use them) and two volumes of the Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.

I have a 5 inch thick copy of Robert Aspey’s definitive work on guerrilla warfare, War in the Shadows, next to Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and Robinson Crusoe. Being a cat lover, I have Paul Galico’s hysterical, Silent Miaow, and the “must have” reference work for all responsible cat owners: Games You Can Play With Your Pussy. Asimov’s Complete Works of Shakespeare sits on a shelf beside the Complete Illustrated Book of Card Magic. I have Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, next to the Collected Poems of AB “Banjo” Patterson, and Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book.

I have an inordinate number of reference books regarding Africa, 19^th century history of the South Pacific (why?), and ancient Rome, along with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in a rare hardback edition. I have the Millennium edition of Lord of the Rings, the illustrated edition of The Hobbit and the movie tie-in book from the Thunderbirds.

I have a disturbing number of books about Star Trek and Stargate and the novelisation of Joss Whedon’s, Serenity. I have Stephen Hawking’s, A Brief History of Time next to the Retox Diet, which offers marvellously sage advice about nutrition such as french-fries are made from potatoes (that’s good), cooked in vegetable oil (more vegies, even better), and then sprinkled with salt (which comes from the sea, ergo, it’s a seafood – even more better), so french-fries are really vegetables and seafood, therefore they must be good for you… right?

By far, my favourite books in the whole collection are the set of children’s encyclopaedias published in 1958 which categorically states that the British Astronomer Royal has decreed “humans cannot survive in space”, so one should encourage their sons to build crystal radio sets, rather than waste time on foolish enterprises like imagining space stations, satellites or space travel.

11 years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

Trying saying “whoops” with a stiff upper lip:)

Jennifer Fallon

Jennifer Fallon’s latest book The Palace of Impossible Dreams, the third book in the Tide Lords series, is available in all good book shops. The Chaos Crystal, the final book in the series will be out in December.

Visit Jennifer Fallon’s website.