Mexico has some of the most spectacular caves in the world. It’s images like this and photographs of the famous ‘cenotes’ in the Yucatan region that have inspired one scene in ‘Dark Water’, the second book in the Aztec Elements series.
Click here to see more astonishing images.
Imagine living under the shadow of this volcano! This is Mexico, 17th of June 2013
Video of Popocatepetl eruption
Someone just advised me that Graham Hancock is about to lauch a historical fiction book set in at the time of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire. It can only be good news for ‘New Fire’ if more famous authors than I take up the Aztec banner. Hopefully they will draw in people who would not otherwise have looked in.
Other novels set in Mexico during the Aztec Empire, in no particular order:
Let’s see if the ‘Eye of Sauron’ (Bernard Cornwell) turns this way! 
I’m reading ‘Flute of the Smoking Mirror’ by Frances Gillmor. It’s a real gem and is providing me with ideas for book two. Here’s an extract…
One day in the market place he saw a procession of herb women and midwives leading a woman through the aisles between the close-shaded stalls. She scattered corn meal before her where she went, bidding farewell to the place forever.
“For tonight you go to the bed of a great lord,” one of the women told her in the hearing of the boy.
But the boys in the Calmecac whispered to him the truth.
“Tonight she will be killed and skinned in honour of Toci, our Grandmother. Her skin will be taken to the temple of Cineteotl, son of Toci, as has been done since the princess of Culhuacan was skinned in Tenochtitlan…”
He watched her go in the procession of midwives. He watched the mock battle in which she was pelted with yellow flowers so that she would not weep…she must go gladly to her death, deceived into happiness.
A handful of people have read the first three chapters, so I’m reposting them with the fourth chapter in this PDF.
Read the first four chapters of ‘New Fire’
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This week’s initiative is to have some business cards made out like this…
Book launch business cards
…and hand them out on the train in the morning and maybe even stand on London Bridge for 10 minutes giving them out! Now that’s what I call ‘forward’.
For anyone who has read scenes one and two, the third and final scene of chapter one will be posted here this weekend.
Tomorrow night (12th July) was probably not a great night to promise to release scene two of chapter one since I’ll be running the J.P. Morgan Chase in Battersea Park and won’t get home until late. So here it is, a little earlier than promised.
The PDF version includes scenes one and two : New Fire – Chapter 1 – Scenes 1 and 2
Click here to see scene two in HTML.
Scene two introduces us to our hero Heart of the Jaguar (Ocelotyolotl in Nahuatl). His friends call him Jaguar. Jaguar’s closest friends are Obsidian Crocodile (Itzcipactli) and Precious Flower (Tlazoxochitl or possibly Quetzalxochitl depending on the context).
As promised, the first scene of the New Fire is now live on this site. Start here…
All good fantasy and historical fiction books start with a map or six!
The valley of Mexico showing Lake Texcoco and surroundings c1455 AD