Never Argue With a Woman Holding a Sword

Earlier this year, my collection Eltava: A Sword for All Ages was published by the lovely people at Gypsy Shadow Publishing. I didn’t have an active blog at the time, though, so I couldn’t announce it. But here it is, better late than never.

The collection actually had its roots many years ago, when I wrote the novel At An Uncertain Hour. At one point, the immortal main character, the Traveller, tells a story about one of his long-ago adventures, and I wanted to give him a companion for it. So Eltava made her appearance.

And that was supposed to be that — but Eltava insisted she wanted more stories written about her, and you don’t argue with a woman holding a sword. So I started to write them.

At first, like most writers of action fantasy, I wrote about her in her twenties, but after a while I began to think — why? A male action hero has a little leeway to age (if not much) but if the character’s female, once she hits about thirty she’s supposed to settle down and raise kids or knit socks, or something.

That isn’t Eltava.

So I wrote stories about her in her teens, thirties, forties, sixties, and eventually even in her eighties. OK, she isn’t dashing around having adventures at eighty-four, but she can still wield a sword to good effect when she needs to. And, of course, she does need to.

So who is Eltava? She’s a woman of mixed race — her father (whose parents also appear in At An Uncertain Hour) is of a race similar to East Asian, while her mother’s race is not unlike Native American, although Eltava takes mainly after her father.

One point to note is that these similarities are only a matter of appearance. The various peoples have had very different histories from their terrestrial equivalents and shouldn’t be confused with those.

Eltava grows up in a privileged merchant family, but her love is always for adventure, and eventually she leaves home to wander the world with her grandparents friend the Traveller on board his magical ship. Some of these stories feature the Traveller too, in three cases as a roughly equal main character, but Eltava spends plenty of time apart from her companion, too, facing adventures, romance, betrayals and sorcery. Not to mention having to face her ultimate foe — the fact that she ages and the Traveller doesn’t.

This doesn’t mean that Eltava just fights for the sake of it. Although she comes alive in combat, she has a strong sense of right and wrong. Whether she’s defending villagers against aggression, striking against tyrants or just protecting a child, the causes she fights are always just. It’s simply that she really, really enjoys fighting them.

Seven of the eleven stories in this collection have been published before in various outlets, with the four most recently written appearing here for the first time. I’d like to thank Charlotte Holley at Gypsy Shadow for getting this ready for publication and particularly for the stunning cover.

So why not get to know Eltava — in all her ages?

Welcome to the Fantasy Worlds of Nyki Blatchley

So, I have a new website and a new blog — welcome to both.

OK, what do you write about for the first post in a new blog? It doesn’t seem right to post something that could just as easily be the two-hundred-and-twelfth blog, so I’ll use this to introduce the site. I did have a website before, which I created back in 2007. Now, I’m anything but a designer, and back

then it seemed like a great idea to have white text on a black background. And, for good measure, pack every inch of the screen full of stuff. What could be wrong with that?

I’m still not a designer, but I’ve hung around with enough designers to know better now. I wouldn’t actually call the new site minimalist (I’ve never liked minimalism), but I haven’t been afraid of white space this time.

The Home page and the About page do what they say on the tin — tell you about the website and about me, respectively. The photos of me were taken by the wonderful Arianna Cagli of Ari’s Thread, while the various other images on the site come from a range of sources, but all legally sourced.

The bulk of my fiction is set in a world I’ve been developing since I was at school, which I simply refer to as the Traveller’s World, after the immortal character who runs through its history. On the page devoted to it, I’ve explained how it came to be, as well as a brief outline of its geography and history.

On linked pages, you’ll find maps of the Traveller’s World, available books set there, and a list of all the stories set in the Traveller’s World that have been published, whether or not they’re still in print. I’d like to think that I’ll be adding to those pages on a regular basis.

I also have a number of unconnected stories published in a range of anthologies, ranging from epic to comic, and all those currently in print are listed on the Anthologies page.

I also write articles. In fact, I now write articles for a living, but even before that I wrote about my interests. Some years ago, the website Fantasy Faction published two series of my articles. One was a study of a new way of looking at fictional heroes, called The Chaotic Champion, while the other was a looser series of pieces about older masterpieces of fantasy that are often ignored by today’s fans. Links to all these can be found on the Non-Fiction page.

And then there’s the blog — this very page. I’ll be aiming to update it at least monthly (packed work schedule permitting) on a variety of topics — introducing aspects of my world, introducing new publications, giving reviews, discussions of writing, reading, speculative fiction, history, music — whatever takes my fancy.

I did have an old blog, as well as an old website, which ground to a halt in 2016. It’s still sitting there, and you can read my old posts, but I may repost some that were well received from time to time, as it seems appropriate — or if I can’t think of anything new to write.

You can sign up for notifications of new content at the bottom of the Home page and contact me through the Contact page (who’d have thought that?). In the meantime, I hope you enjoy trawling through the Fantasy Worlds of Nyki Blatchley.