John C. Wright's Journal

FREE Audible codes for the third book of the lovely and talented wife’s Books of Unexpected Enlightenment.

It’s Halloween at the Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts, and Rachel Griffin is stirring up the dead!  — enjoy this Halloween audiobook for FREE 

(Leave a review if you are feeling generous.)

The First Book is also still available for FREE.

Also FREE is some Audible codes for Ken Dickason’s hilarious rendition of The Last Straw!

My beautiful and talented wife was asked to write an article for the Christian Speculative Fiction magazine, Lorehaven.

“Ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea, trouble is brewing. Ancient racial hatred is simmering, growing dangerously close to boiling over.

This is the situation in the Fishman Island Arc of the long-running anime/manga One Piece when the main characters, the Straw Hat Pirates, arrive at Fishman Island. In the midst of the action and humor of this pirate adventure story, author Eiichiro Oda gives us an unexpectedly insightful glimpse into racism and its effects upon a culture.

Readers, ye be warned: there be spoilers throughout.

Fishman Island, deep beneath the ocean, is inhabited by a race of undersea beings who are both stronger and more-varied than humans. Some are beautiful, such as mermaids. Others are huge and powerful, like shark-men or octopus-men, massive creatures who can crush a human with a single blow. The loveliness of the first and the fearsome destructiveness of the second have made the fishmen into hot commodities at the slave markets of Sabaody.

Pirates often descend to their home island, deep under the sea, in order to kidnap fishmen and their children. Fishmen pirates return the favor, terrorizing humans and destroying their towns. This clash of races has been going on for generations.

In the midst of this racial animosity, two inhabitants of Fishman Island saw the toll it was taking on their society and vowed make a change. They both saw the same suffering. Their reaction, however, could not have been more different.”

Read more…

My beautiful and talented wife is less than one dollar away from having made $2000 on her Books of Unexpected Enlightenment this spring.

Be there any kind and generous reader here who wishes to be the purchaser who pushes it from $1999.24 to over $2000? An historic event!

First book is FREE:

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My beautiful and talented wife will be participating in Stay-In-Place Virtual Writing Convention, today, Tuesday, April 28th.

She will be leading a short Art and Craft of Writing Workshop and participating on some panels.

For more information and a list of other authors, look here.

For a schedule of events (some on Zoom, some of Facebook), look here.

Jagi, here. You may have heard that the Planetary anthology series has changed publishers and is now coming out from Tuscany Bay Books (TBB).

Today, TBB launches Planetary: Luna. I am particularly proud of this book because I was the co-editor before it moved to its new home. (I bowed out because I wasn’t needed.) This book includes excellent stories from many great authors. It also includes two works that might be of particular interest to readers here:

“Merry by Gaslight” — a background story of one of the students at Roanoke Academy

“Mask of Dhuran Zur” — one of the first stories John ever finished. I remember being creeped out by it in the 1980s. So nice for it to finally see the light of day, or, at least, the moon.

Read the remainder of this entry »

My beautiful and talented wife and regular commenter Zaklog the Great and his friend Nate discuss Kipling’s poem, the Dane Geld.

Here is the poem:

Read the remainder of this entry »

My lovely and talented wife wrote a response to the Amelie Wen Zhao situation. It is published at the Christian Fantasy site, Lorehaven

Standing Up To The Impuritans

You have probably heard by now about Amelie Wen Zhao, the Chinese immigrant who pulled her YA fantasy nove, Blood Heir, after being set upon by Twitter piranha.

Zhao based the invented world in her novel on her own experience growing up on mainland China. In China today, slavery is a concern, especially for young women, who are in danger of being kidnapped and sold to men who cannot otherwise find wives, due to China’s one-child policy. So Zhao included indentured servants and human trafficking as a plot issue in her novel.

Only, in her fantasy world, it was magic powers, rather than skin color, that fueled the discrimination that decided who ended up as a slave.

It was this that—of all things—that upset her attackers.

Nearly every fantasy or science fiction book I read as a child had basically this same theme—that prejudice would be different in an alien culture, and by viewing it from afar, we can learn to overcome it in ourselves. And yet, this very premise is what Zhao’s attackers denied. They condemned her for allowing slavery to be about anything but skin color.

They actually said this.

Read more…

Jagi, here, shanghaiing John’s blog:

You guys have been asking, now after three years of work: A new Book of Unexpected Enlightenment!

Coming from Wisecraft Publishing, the YA Imprint of Superversive Press, the fourth Book of Unexpected Enlightenment: THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT FORGETTING

The launch will take place on Tuesday, November 21st on Facebook from 2:30 to 5:50. There will be games, giveaways, a video reveal of the book trailer made by Superversive’s own Ben Zwycky and lovely singer Sarah Koolbeck, and conversation with Rachel Griffin and Sigfried the Dragonslayer.

There will also be a Spoiler reveal, so get your questions in early! (You can leave them in the comments. )

The invitation reads:

Come one, come all and join in the wonder!

Rachel Griffin and Sigfried the Dragonslayer invite you to a Facebook Launch party for the fourth Book of Unexpected Enlightenment: THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT FORGETTING. 

Festivities will included: games, givaways, meet the characters, guest authors (TBA), and one Spoiler in response to reader’s questions (the person who submits the winning question will receive a set of four Unexpected Enlightenment bookplates signed by the author and illustrator. )

Grand prize winner may choose one item from among The Wright Stuff Zazzle store’s Roanoke Alchemical Shoppe.

#Unexpected4

Tomorrow from 7pm to 9pm EST, while the unsuspecting Declan Finn rests on his long-needed vacation, John C. Wright and L. Jagi Lamplighter will be hijacking his radio show: Catholic Geek Radio. As if this were not bad enough, the Wrights have turned the show over to a crew of imaginary characters. The Lady Rachel Griffin and her blood-brother Sigfried Smith the Dragonslayer will be conducting the show and interviewing other fictional characters from the works of Wright and Lamplighter, with an eye toward whether any of them are worthy to be hired to star in a book. Interviewees may include Miranda and Mephisto Prospero, Wendy and Raven Ravenson, Menelaus Montrose and Blackie Del Azarchel, Gil Moth and his trusty friend, Ruff the phooka dog (Not a spy for elfs.)

Tune in to find out how Montrose and Blackie survived living together in a tin can for all those years, what Ruff thinks about spying for the elfs, and whether Mephisto really does like cheese.

Feel free to leave questions for any or all of the characters below!

Catholic Geek Radio — February 26th at 7pm EST with Wright and Lamplighter