Cameron Johnston

I have a new guest blog post up on the Fantasy Faction website, enticingly titled Fantasy Worldbuilding: From the Bottom Up What does fantasy worldbuilding and magical poop have in common? More than you might think.

Hot on the heels of The Blitz of Din Barham being published, another short story will be coming out soon between the pages of Deep Magic. Look out for more details next week.

My latest short story, The Blitz of Din Barham , has been published in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #37. HFQ has this to say about it: You want dragons? You want sorcerers? You want sorcerous in-fighting? Oh, you get it, in abundance! Din Barham is besieged by dragons, and the squabbling sorcerers are barely able to keep them at bay. Desperate times call for desperate measures and young Kyna, apprentice to the great Magus of Din Barham, has to break ranks and find a solution.

The Dragon Awards have released their 2018 ballot and The Traitor God is a finalist for Best Fantasy Novel category alongside Brandon Sanderson, so that's pretty damn cool :) I'm stoked that people out there decided to nominate it. If you want to sign up to vote you can do it here: http://application.dragoncon.org/dc_fan_awards_signup.php All the finalists for the 2018 Dragon Awards are listed at the link below. Congrats to everybody nominated (especially if any are part of this group) http://awards.dragoncon.org/2018-ballot/

So a very unexpected and wonderful thing happened at the weekend. I got an email to say that The Traitor God is a finalist in the 2018 Dragon Awards in the category of Best Fantasy Novel!! Please excuse the jaw trailing on the floor right now... I have no expectation I will actually win of course, but I'm delighted that something I wrote was liked by enough people to get it nominated, and that's a truly wondrous thing. Thank you all, whoever you gloriously amazing people are! If you want to take part in the final vote, anybody with an email address can sign up to receive a ballot when they are released: http://application.dragoncon.org/dc_fan_awards_signup.php

And lo the rough draft of God of Broken Things (The Traitor God 2) was finished and sent off to his agent for comments! Next he must face the valley of the cutting edits and traverse the dark forest of rewrite...*sigh* Lucky I enjoy writing 😛

On Friday I took my first ever lesson in blacksmithing. Now that my arm can bend again I thought I would do a little write up of the experience, because it was a damn cool one that I would recommend to everybody. There's something hugely appealing and almost magical about heating and hammering red-hot metal into shape. For the first project I was forging an iron coat hook from a long rod of metal. We were shown the forge (a small modern gas one rather than charcoal and bellows) all the various hammers, tongs and tools and the square rods of iron we were going to be beating into shape. The first step was getting a feel for the metal and the hammers and begin drawing the iron out (making it longer and thinner). We heated the iron until it was a hot and glorious yellow and then placed the end on the anvil, hammering it five times on one side, rotating 90 degrees and then another five, alternating back and forth in order to keep the existing shape. Rinse and repeat until the ...