The Fascinating World of
Charles M. Ryan
I’m a writer, gamer, and game industry impresario. Here I talk about my books, and share musings on writing, games, the game business, and other little things of interest to me.
Print and audiobook format!
I recently crowdfunded print and audiobook formats for The Mason of New Orleans and The Angel of Ecbatana. Grab some great pricing and extra incentives (check out those art prints!) with a late pledge!
Livin’ La Vida Medieval
Getting a Peek into Medieval Life. By Way of Southampton. When I lived in England, I got to go to a lot of really cool places. We were members of both English Heritage and the National Trust, the two organizations that operate 98% of interesting historical sites in England, and we took advantage of those memberships on an almost weekly basis. We visited huge places like Dover castle, famous ones like Stonehenge, and grand ones like Canterbury cathedral. But perhaps my favorite site of all is neither huge nor famous nor grand. It’s this place: You can visit lots of cool…
Let’s Have a Look at the Castle (part 1)
In The Mason of New Orleans, Martin, our titular character, builds a castle. (Well, sorta. It’s a bit more complicated.) To write about that (or write about it well, at least), it makes sense that I’d want to know something about castles and how they’re built. Fortunately, I lived in England for four years, and, being a lover of ruins and history and fortifications, I visited a lot of castles. Let’s have a look at one of them. My poster child for this excursion is Conwy castle in northern Wales—but the competition was stiff. Caernarfon? Beaumaris? Caerphilly? Dover? Bodiam? Chepstow?…
The Value of a Big Dumb Guy
In a recent watching of the awesome Big Trouble in Little China, I was struck by how that movie went about solving a problem in very much the same way I did in The Mason of New Orleans. Here, let me (or, rather, someone else—I didn’t put this video together), demonstrate: You may ask what problem, exactly, is being solved in that clip. (Go ahead, ask. I’ll wait.) The problem is that of immersing the audience in an unfamiliar setting filled with cultural nuance and iconography and intricate backstory, and getting that audience fully invested in the story without a…
History and the Historical Novel, part 1
So I wrote a novel. Naturally, when people learn that, they often ask, “What’s your novel about?” or, “What kind of novel is it?” or, “What are you, nuts?” And then I have to answer them. Ignoring that last question, I could call The Mason of New Orleans a fantasy novel. But there’s not really a lot of fantasy in it. Obviously (if you’ve read even the first few paragraphs—if you haven’t, you can grab a few chapters for free here), the whole thing hinges on a pretty big fantastical element right out of the gate: the transportation of a…