Brendan Moody

The Devi/Goldberry cage match is no longer online at its original home as far as I can tell, but the link below seems to be a full repost. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3836768&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=39#post490921889

K. J. Parker’s Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and Alex Marshall’s A Crown for Cold Silver are both $2.99 on US Kindle for today only.

Warner Bros optioned the series around the time the first book came out, but their option lapsed quite a while ago. Phoenix Pictures then optioned it in January of this year.

It’s kind of ironic that as The Two of Swords finally shifts from slow-burn preliminaries to conflict and action, the format changes in a way that makes the world-shaking events feel much less meaningful. I assume Parker had some trouble figuring out how to structure the conclusion— that must be why the series took a hiatus of a year and a half— and this was what he felt worked best. But it loses a lot of what made the series unusual and interesting. The last four parts are basically the final third or so of a more conventional Parker novel. Which means they’re funny and dark and thoughtful, but still there’s something of a damp squib effect compared to the promise of parts one through fifteen.

It's been so long since I preordered #16 at Amazon that the order was glitched, asking for an update on my payment method and refusing to accept anything I tried to use. Fortunately I could just redo the order from the product page. Interesting change in format for this installment.

When the pub dates were changing Amazon sent notifications of a delay. These say outright canceled. And at this rate further delays would have individual installments coming out after the omnibuses. I guess they just decided not to bother, or Parker needed more time to finalize the text than installment releases would have allowed.

Looks like it has-- I just got an Amazon notification moving it to March 2017. Which means almost a full year between installments.

Part Five of The Two of Swords is out today. It's the shortest part yet, but it does a lot for the overall story, and ends on a vicious cliffhanger.

The Invincible Sun does come up in the fourth part, but not in a way that makes it seem like this could be the series that was supposed to start with a book of that title. Even so, I think it has to be: the descriptions are generally similar, and something as big as The Two of Swords doesn't just come out of nowhere.

Part Four of The Two of Swords is out today. And Hachette's site now includes listings for Parts Nine through Twelve, while the dedicated website for the serial has sidebar listings for thirteen parts. Parker reiterated in a recent comment at the site that the writing, and indeed the planning, of the serial is still unfinished:

Parker/Holt is reading and replying to comments posted in the discussion section of the Two of Swords website. All the discussion so far is attached to Episode 1, but there are discussion sections for all three released episodes.

People were suggesting the two were the same; that's presumably why Holt worked so hard to make it seem he and Parker were different people (the "interview," William Schafer of Subterranean Press telling people and editing Wikipedia to the effect that Parker was definitely not Holt). The wife theory was in part a way of maintaining the idea of a connection to Holt while accounting for the claim that Parker was female.

I'm guessing The Two of Swords is the Invincible Sun trilogy under another name and in a tweaked format. If it's not, the trilogy has to be pretty far off now, since The Two of Swords looks likely to run into 2016 at the very least. The pseudonym thing doesn't bother me much. I do think outright lies are against the general spirit of mysterious pseudonyms, even if you're worried about being found out, and that being irritated that people are interested in what you've actively promoted as a pseudonym is a bit silly. But Holt didn't trade on the mysteriousness or the gender aggressively enough for me to feel misled. I'm not much interested in Holt's comic fiction based on what little I've looked at-- even by the standards of that sort of thing it doesn't seem very well-done-- but I'm intrigued by the historical fiction, and would probably already own some of it if the US Kindle editions didn't have spacing between the paragraphs.

It's what I was expecting despite not having paid much attention to the identity guessing prior to yesterday. The first-person narration in the historical novels as Thomas Holt is just so much like the first-person in Parker's short fiction. Honestly, the surprising thing to me style-wise is that Tom Holt and Thomas Holt are the same writer, if you see what I mean. Anyway, I've now finished the second part of The Two of Swords, and I'm already hooked. The POV shifts are used to great effect in balancing revelations with new mysteries. The structure suggests at least nine installments, by the way, and probably a lot more: twenty-odd, perhaps.

Parker is Tom Holt: http://www.pornokitsch.com/2015/04/interview-hello-my-name-is-k-j-parker.html.