Books and Banter: B. Y. Yan ~ 2nd appearance and his novel Eye of the North Wind

TITLE: Eye of the North Wind

RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2016

AUTHOR: B.Y. Yan

PAGE COUNT: 425

ISBN: 978-0995051614

IMPRINT: Chimera

BOOK PAGE: http://ravenswoodpublishing.com/bookpages/eyeofthenorthwind.html

KEYWORDS: kings, gods, fantasy, epic adventure, action, mad max, medieval

CATEGORIES: Epic Fantasy/Adventure

ONE LINER: A cripple protects his king in secret on a scrapping journey through wastelands in search of a missing army and the wealth of Dead Gods.

SYNOPSIS:

Deep in the dunes a crippled son has come on the advice of his renowned father to earn into the illustrious Hundreds of the Wasteland King, before being robbed by an unhappy misunderstanding. But where a door closes a literal window of opportunity opens, and he soon finds himself accompanying his master in search of a missing army.

 The young monarch, however, knows nothing of his presence or contributions. And for the sake of his pride he must never learn he has a secret protector—even when contending with the indomitable courage of harlots, laying claim to the wealth of Creatures of Calamity, or facing down the wrath of Dead Gods.   That is, unless the Greatest Standard Bearer to ever stand at the king's side chooses to come clean to uphold his promise at the cost of everything he has achieved in a world of scrap, fire, and iron.

Guest Post - On the characters:

Some spring fully formed from the mind and barge right in, demanding a job, a salary in everlasting fame, and make like they have known you all their lives. Once you start to listen, however, it soon becomes obvious that you have; only they have never stopped by for a visit before then. You hear them out, chat them up, and soon they are telling you about their experiences that strike a chord in the depth of your heart and mind, until you find that instead of them overstaying their welcome, you can no longer consciously let them leave. Chain them to a table-leg and leave them rattling against their restraints if you must, but they won’t leave until you’ve heard everything there is to hear.

Or you can meet them through terrible day-time TV, whichever works best.

For Eye of the North Wind, progress was preceded by a terrible bout of near-depression and anxiety coming off a year of the people closest to me suffering from one malady after another. The pressure built, was never released, and the mind turned into a nervous wreck, some horrid combination of insomnia and despair which could not be banished. My only refuge then was a Chinese TV series which had long since gone off the air—a comedy of upbeat personalities trading witty banter while trying to root out government corruption in the Qing dynasty and staving off beheadings as best they could (wait, how was this a comedy again?). It had marvelous actors in tailored roles, and utterly nonsensical storylines which forgot beats from its own story from scene to scene (seriously: in one scene a yearly tea competition was mentioned; in the very next it was remarked by one of the principle characters that the competition was a once-every-three-year affair, has been for a hundred years prior).

Most of all it had an indecisive king.

In one scene he is a master of combat, able to destroy two dozen trained assassins by himself with a single stroke of his sword. In the next he is captured and held for days in a building by three guys and a mule without being restrained in any way. He is flabby but out wrestles guys whose biceps have biceps, and he is shown to be an experienced adventurer in one moment, but at the next blithely oblivious to the culture, peoples and ways of life outside the walls of his own palace.

Strangest of all was the aura of confidence he exuded, as if this was how he operated, and that nothing was out of the ordinary.

So I began to fill in the gaps with my own imagination. He must have had help. Secret help that even he was unaware of, a real expert bodyguard who understood that to curry favor with your monarch meant not only being very good at what you do, but knowing when to preserve the ego of your employer and to attribute to them the success they seem convinced that they are able to achieve. That thing with the assassins? The bodyguard had poisoned them beforehand to the point of impotency. The time he was held in captivity? The same bodyguard took a day off. The guy with biceps and more biceps? That was probably the bodyguard himself, and the cultural gap was a real thing, only the king was too stupid to figure it out.

So I met Sangor. He ended up a cripple without biceps, but it seems he made for a pretty good bodyguard still in the end.

AUTHOR BIO:

B.Y. Yan is a Chinese-Canadian author who has spent most of his time with education learning everything that is necessary to become a writer. He currently lives in Toronto, Ontario but spends most of his time travelling between two opposite points on the globe on business to Beijing with his wife Jeane, sometimes accompanied by a giant orange tabby cat. In his spare time he has maintained the same great love since childhood for stories told through every medium imaginable.