Curtis Craddock & An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors Aug 14, 2017

The first million words are practice, right? Many times on the podcast we’ve had examples of patience and dedication and hard work, and this chat with Curtis Craddock is proof again of the notion that you just need to keep writing and keep getting better. It also doesn't hurt to attend Colorado Gold. We’ve had stories in the past about chance meetings at the conference and again a very random encounter put Curtis Craddock together with the right editor and that informal meeting led to the publication, later this month, of Curtis’s first book, An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors, the first book in a series. Kirkus has already raved and the Washington Post picked Curtis’s debut as one of the top three science fiction and fantasy books of the month. Curtis Craddock was born in the wrong century and quite possibly on the wrong planet. He should have been born in a world where gallant heroes regularly vanquish dire and despicable foes, where friendship, romance, wit, and courage are the foundations of culture and civilization, and where adventure beckons from every shadow. Instead, he was born on Earth and lives in a world bounded by bureaucracy, hemmed in by cynicism, and governed by the dull necessity of earning a wage. An exile in this world, he is a biographer of friends he’s never met, a chronicler of events that never happened, and a cartographer of places that never were. Given that the mundane world supplies a dearth of oddly progressive kingdoms to be saved, he spends his time saving cats, dogs, and the occasional bird of prey. By day, he teaches Computer Information Systems classes to offenders at a correctional facility. By night, he puts on his writer’s cap, the broad-brimmed one with a feather, and, into the prison walls of reality, etches defiant words of legend.