If you want to read along with us and avoid the SPOILERS that will follow, you can pick up your copy of The Untold Tale from major online retailers.

About the book

Forsyth Turn is not a hero. Lordling of Turn Hall and Lysse Chipping, yes. Spymaster for the king, certainly. But hero? That’s his older brother’s job, and Kintyre Turn is nothing if not legendary. However, when a raid on the kingdom’s worst criminal results in the rescue of a bafflingly blunt woman, oddly named and even more oddly mannered, Forsyth finds his quaint, sedentary life is turned on its head.

Dragged reluctantly into a quest he never expected, and fighting villains that even his brother has never managed to best, Forsyth is forced to confront his own self-shame and the demons that come with always being second-best. And, more than that, when he finally realizes where Lucy came from and why she’s here, he’ll be forced to question not only his place in the world, but the very meaning of his own existence.

Smartly crafted, The Untold Tale gives agency to the unlikeliest of heroes: the silenced, the marginalized, and the overlooked. It asks what it really means to be a fan when the worlds you love don’t resemble the world you live in, celebrates the power of the written word, challenges tropes, and shows us what happens when someone stands up and refuses to remain a secondary character in their own life.

Part One: “I assume the body is a corpse.” Chapters 1 and 2

Part Two: “Information, at last!” Chapters 3, 4, and 5

Part Three: “Your brother is a slimeball.” Chapters 6 and 7

Part Four: “It’s not cheating to know your enemy.” Chapters 8, 9, and 10

Part Five: “I’m allowed to want it.” Chapters 11 and 12

Part Six: “I wasn’t any help.” Chapters 13 and 14

Part Seven: “That’s the magic of being a fan.” Chapters 15 and 16

Part Eight: “Scars are scars; they don’t just vanish.” Chapters 17 and 18

Part Nine: “Fill it with good.” Chapters 19 and 20

Part 10: Chapters 21 and 22

Pip and Forsyth have been back in the “real” world for several months when Pip surprises Forsyth with a trip…to a fantasy convention a la WorldCon, where Elgar Reed–Forsyth’s Writer–is the guest of honor. What’s more, she’s arranged for a private dinner for Forsyth to meet his creator.

For our final post on The Untold Tale, we’ve interviewed author J.M. Frey.

Q#1: You’ve said that The Untold Tale is about the power of imagination, of the written word, and all of that is closely tied with the experience of being a fan, particularly when you’re not, shall we say, the fan the author had in mind. In that way, could it be said that The Untold Tale exorcised a lot of particular emotions for you?

Oh, heck yes! The very first scene I wrote of The Untold Tale was the section (now chapters four and five) where Pip yells at Kintyre and Bevel for being brutes in the middle of the dinner and dance sequence.  (Though back then the POV was Pip’s and Forsyth didn’t exist yet as a character).

I did this specifically because I was writing to exorcise a frustration I had after a conversation with a male friend about fantasy novel tropes. We had argued in circles and circles, and realizing that I wouldn’t win this argument, I stomped into my office, shut the door, and wrote a scene where a female aca-fan shouts at a fantasy hero for being the reason she wasn’t taken seriously as a fantasy fan.

When I reread the scene again, I realized that I had accidentally invented a few characters that I might like to return to, and set about trying to figure out if there was a narrative here, instead of just a rant.  So it was meant at first to be an exorcising exercise, but it did bloom into something more, which incidentally allowed me to address more than one frustration, and to do so within the context of a plot and a character’s journey.

Have those frustrations with the genre been completely purged since I wrote the book? Well, no. I mean, there are two more books coming!

On a serious note: the thing is, me writing about how frustrating, and annoying, and scary being a female fan can be has not magically changed the way women in genre fiction, comics, conventions, and cosplay are treated. It has brought the issues into light for people who might not have already been aware of them, and it might have made some readers more aware that they exist, but it has not made them disappear. And until women are not objectified in fiction in ways that make others treat their real-life counterparts as commodities, groped and raped at conventions, trolled and stalked and doxed and told to kill themselves on social media for daring to work in SF/F, as long as disgruntled men shoot up campuses and blame the girls who wouldn’t date him for it, then no – my frustration, and anger, and sorrow, and hurt will not be exorcised.

The writing has helped articulate my horror, and hopefully in the reading of the books, others will learn to recognize the harmful trends and tropes and move beyond them.

Q#2: Reading The Forgotten Tale, I’d never have guessed that The Untold Tale was meant to be a standalone. They flow so well. What gave you the idea for Pip and Forsyth’s second adventure?

The Untold Tale was always really only meant to be an extended character-study with plot.  I felt, when I had reached the end of the book, that Forsyth had reached the end of his evolution as a character, that there was nothing left to say. The Untold Tale was pitched around as a stand-alone. A few publishers expressed a wish to see a series out of the world, but they wanted The Tales of Kintyre Turn, not a fantasy series from the POV of Forsyth.

As the whole point of The Untold Tale was explicitly to write something that wasn’t The Tales of Kintyre Turn, I wasn’t interested in discussing it with my agent. (Though, I don’t think any of those discussions were serious offers in and of themselves.)

REUTS Publications was the first publisher to ask what happened after Pip and Forsyth slip their pages. They were the first ones to really express an interest in turning Forsyth’s story into a series. While I had batted around ideas about what I could do as follow-up short stories and novellas (Ghosts was written nearly immediately following The Untold Tale), I hadn’t considered an actual trilogy of novels.

So, the first thing I did when my agent made it clear that yes, I really did have to entertain their offer for a three book deal, was freak out, panic, pour a glass of wine, and contact as many of my nerdy book friends as I could to ask what it was that they loved and hated about second-in-the-series books.

I had a conversation nearly a decade ago with Doctor Who writer Robert Shearman, about what it was like to be asked to bring back the iconic villains featured in his episode Dalek. He told me that he didn’t want to do Daleks. He’d always thought they were kind of stupid, as far as baddies went. They were defeated by stairs, they had plungers that did nothing, their whisk-guns weren’t terrifying, they sounded squeaky and wobbled when they moved.

But his wife challenged him, he said, to take everything he disliked about the Daleks, and to make it terrifying. What if stairs didn’t hinder the Daleks any more? What if the plunger did something? Something horrible? What if the creature’s voice was the very thing that horrified the Doctor more than anything else?

So I asked my friends, what do you love about second books? What do you hate? What annoys you? And I compiled this list and I recalled this conversation with Rob and I thought: “Okay. How can I make these weaknesses strengths? How can I be true to the tropes and stereotypes of second novels, but do it in a way where I flip them, the way I did with book one?”

It also helped that a television producer had been interested in the book as a series at the time and had pleaded with me not to write a “mushy middle book” that they would have to struggle to turn into a second season that wouldn’t get the show cancelled. With that playful threat looming over my head, I knew that the story had to be meaningful, had to flow organically from the first book, refer back to the first book, and build on what I had already started there.

Q#3: What’s your favorite chapter in TFT?

I like all the bits ones with the songs and poems that I had to make up. I love culture-building in books. I not-so-secretly hope that someone will one day compose melodies for them so I can sing my own songs.

—

The Forgotten Tale is out now! Pick it up from these retailers:

Smashwords | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Forsyth Turn has finally become a hero—however reluctantly. But now that Lucy Piper has married him and they’ve started a family in her world, his adventuring days are behind him. Yet not all is as it should be. Beloved novels are disappearing at an alarming rate, not just from the minds of readers like Pip, but from bookshelves as well. Almost as if they had never been. Almost like magic.

Forsyth fears that it is his fault—that Pip’s childhood tales are vanishing because he, a book character, has escaped his pages. But when he and Pip are sucked back into The Tales of Kintyre Turn against their will, they realize that something much more deadly and dire is happening. The stories are vanishing from Forsyth’s world too. So Forsyth sets out on a desperate journey across Hain to discover how, and why, the stories are disappearing… before their own world vanishes forever.

In this clever follow-up to The Untold Tale, The Forgotten Tale questions what it means to create a legacy, and what we owe to those who come after us.

The post “Welcome to the madhouse, Syth.” The Untold Read-Along Part 10 appeared first on REUTS | Boutique Book Publisher |.

If you want to read along with us and avoid the SPOILERS that will follow, you can pick up your copy of The Untold Tale from major online retailers, or snag a free copy from StoryCartel.

About the book

Forsyth Turn is not a hero. Lordling of Turn Hall and Lysse Chipping, yes. Spymaster for the king, certainly. But hero? That’s his older brother’s job, and Kintyre Turn is nothing if not legendary. However, when a raid on the kingdom’s worst criminal results in the rescue of a bafflingly blunt woman, oddly named and even more oddly mannered, Forsyth finds his quaint, sedentary life is turned on its head.

Dragged reluctantly into a quest he never expected, and fighting villains that even his brother has never managed to best, Forsyth is forced to confront his own self-shame and the demons that come with always being second-best. And, more than that, when he finally realizes where Lucy came from and why she’s here, he’ll be forced to question not only his place in the world, but the very meaning of his own existence.

Smartly crafted, The Untold Tale gives agency to the unlikeliest of heroes: the silenced, the marginalized, and the overlooked. It asks what it really means to be a fan when the worlds you love don’t resemble the world you live in, celebrates the power of the written word, challenges tropes, and shows us what happens when someone stands up and refuses to remain a secondary character in their own life.

Part One: Chapters 1 and 2

In this section, we’re introduced to our narrator Forsyth Turn, lord of a rural fiefdom by day, King’s Shadow Hand by night, as he receives the unexpected delivery of a grievously injured person. That person turns out to be a victim of the evil Viceroy, the biggest bad in the kingdom of Hain, and his lackey Bootknife, whose preferred method of torture is carving designs into people’s backs.

But Lucy Piper, aka Pip, outlasted her captors, resisting their interrogation longer (and gaining a more elaborate scar) than anyone Forsyth has ever heard of. Between that and the fact that nothing about her points to any family or country he knows–and as the Shadow Hand, he knows just about everything–Forsyth finds himself engrossed by his impressive and mysterious guest.

Given the scant clues he is able to discern about Pip and the conditions of her imprisonment, Forsyth begins to consider that she may be more than human; that she is, in fact, a mythical Reader. Far from being an answer, this possibility only raises more questions.

“I am upstairs when I catch sight of the approaching cart.”

The opening line is in present tense, but it reminds me of a recollection anyway–someone remembering the moment everything in their life changed. And that’s exactly what this is for Forsyth Turn, the moment an unconscious Lucy Piper is brought to his manor.

The first pages of this book are excellent in so many ways, establishing expectations for the narrator (he assumes the body in the cart is a corpse–me too, man, me too) and for the story. Frey doesn’t give us the suspense of the raid during which Pip was rescued, she gives us the reflection that comes after, the care and the follow-through. She doesn’t give us the point of view of the guy who kicked down the Viceroy’s door and saw an unexpected prisoner; she gives us the man who quietly arranged and ordered simultaneous–and successful–sneak attacks on numerous enemy hideouts.

This first section of the book is primarily an introduction of Forsyth, our unusual narrator. He is intelligent, stable, composed; at least, when he’s going about his duties. As the master of his house, he efficiently handles the sudden appearance of a woman in great need of comfort and medical care. We can infer his similar competence as Shadow Hand by the fact that the men he trains and commands didn’t know they were going to find Pip on the raid and still managed to get her out alive, along with the books that were their target, without any loss of life or other catastrophe in the operation. And as a Lordling, it’s impossible to not be reminded of Mr. Darcy; we get the first hint of Forsyth’s goodness as a landlord in the discussion of the generous and improved usage of the Law Manor, both for his friend Sheriff Pointe specifically and the Chipping (the land under his protection) as a whole.

In all these instances, Forsyth seems sure of himself. But the moment the focus goes from his obligations, to his own self and happiness, he is uncomfortable at best and violently self-deprecating at worst. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen this in a male protagonist, if ever, and yet there are men in my own social circle and probably beyond who struggle with this same odd balance of competency and anxiety. His first instinct is to see the lack in himself, and he assumes that all but a select few see exactly what he sees: his uselessness and failings.

What seems to unify the areas in which Forsyth is confident is their distance from himself–the Shadow Hand is literally a “personality [he wears], a costume [he] conceived” (p 22), and the role of Lordling is one that he was obligated to take up due to the neglect of his elder brother Kintyre, the rightful lord.

Though Forsyth is a man who has seemingly resigned himself to loneliness, he is marvelously sensitive. The man has Feels; he’s crushing on Pip from the get go, clear to the reader long before Sheriff Pointe jokes about Forsyth courting her. He is sentimental and sincere in his tenderness and his obligations to protect her, though she is a stranger. The significance he attaches to Pip’s trust, the naivety with which he accepts it, is perhaps a tad over-the-top, but in that way it is an insight into Forsyth. It’s a sign of just how smitten he is that he’s not more suspicious of her.

Forsyth is a character who doesn’t know how great he is, and I have to admit, it’s nice to see that look on a male-identified character for once. I also enjoy the obviousness of the chemistry between him and Pip, as well as his total obliviousness to it–this is what great ships are made of, after all.

via Giphy

The Untold Tale has a slow start, action-wise, that’s true–chapters one and two, despite being more than fifty pages, are pretty much all about Pip’s early recovery and her and Forsyth getting to know each other a little. But the writing flows so well that the reading goes easily and quickly; it was almost hard to stop at page 53.

Coming Up

There’s a lot to look forward to in the next installment. Pip is an utter mystery, we’ve only just gotten teases of magic and mythology in this world, and big hero-man Kintyre Turn has been heavily talked up before the appearance we can expect soon.

Part two of the read-along will go live next Tuesday on C.M. Spivey’s blog, and cover pages 54-140 (chapters 3, 4, and 5).

The post “I assume the body is a corpse.”: The Untold Read-Along Part One appeared first on REUTS | Boutique Book Publisher |.