Miles Cameron Introduces THE RED KNIGHT
What better way to introduce you to a forthcoming book, than from the perspective of the author who wrote it?! We’re welcoming Miles Cameron to the blog today, to talk a little about where The Red Knight came from . . .
Introducing The Red Knight
I love to fight with swords almost as much as I love to write. I’m hardly the first such person – history seems littered with us, and sometimes I wonder if there’s some neurological link. But having said that; The Red Knight is a fantasy novel with deep and complex arguments about fighting and about war but that’s not what it’s about.
It’s about love.
That’s an odd thing to write about – it’s not what drives most of my favourite Fantasy (list headed by J. R.R. Tolkien and E. R. Eddison, just so you know what you are in for). Serious epic isn’t usually about love – not the Iliad (which I also love) nor the Odyssey (somewhat sadly, at least for Penelope). But love is something that most of us are lucky enough to experience, and it is the single most powerful motivation in Chivalric Romance. So . . .
The Red Knight is also about power and the exercise of power. I have been blessed (cursed) with having actually worked with Presidents, Prime Ministers, and their immediate underlings – I’ve seen them make history and also fail to make it. I’m fascinated by the interplay of crisis and human decision making. And . . . in non-human decision making.
And I’ve always wanted to write a book in which magic worked the way the Medieval Arab and European Hermeticists thought it worked. With a touch of science and a whole lot of ritual.
Finally – really, I could go on – I like a good story. The Red Knight is the fantasy novel I wanted to read. Under all the themes and the philosophy and the chivalric ideals and the exercise of power and the correct martial arts techniques that actually work, there’s a story about people who, I hope, will seem alive and real, driven by their own motivations, well led or badly led or ruggedly independent, with their own arcs across three books, or five books (heh, or twenty books . . .). So I want to do all these writerly things – but when Ranald Lachlan throws his axe in the air and it whirls in the sun – or when you first come to the Inn of Dorling – or see a dragon – I hope you’ll say . . .
‘Cool.’
Because, as Peter Beagle said better than I, it is those moments of discovery in worlds of fantasy that stay with us forever. Go explore. It’s a big world, and there be dragons. And they’ll be three hundred paces long.
Miles Cameron is the debut fantasy author of The Red Knight, the first of The Traitor Son Chronicles novels. He lives in Canada with his family, and is a full time writer. Find out more by following @thegreensquire or visit his website: www.traitorson.com.