http://corabuhlert.com/2019/01/17/science-fiction-is-dying-again-the-hopepunk-edition/
There have been some interesting reactions to the definitions of hopepunk as a genre.
I think this sums things up nicely.
Tag Archive: fantasy
So! A brief catch up.
Since the last post I have been to Sign Club again (fun!) and a Deaf Awareness day at work (v interesting). I also decided to try something new and exercise-ish in the form of aerial hoop, which is not dissimilar to static trapeze but on a suspended hoop instead. Turns out you need lots of upper body strength for that.
I have no upper body strength at all (which is kind of the point), so probably just as well I’m only doing it every second week, alternating with Sign! Gives me a chance to be able to get past the frankly impressive levels of stiffness involved. The nice thing is that being twenty years older and probably four stone heavier than most of the lithe young things there, I am in no way going to be anything but a lot slower and less good than them (not at this level of fitness anyhow) so I feel precisely zero urge to keep up. We take turns: they do the next move and the one after that, and I keep working on the first one.
I’ll get there eventually of course, and the stiffness tells me it’s working exactly the muscles I wanted to shape up, so I’m happy as a slightly unco-ordinated clam…😏 And glad I didn’t try this at an age where being far and away the bottom of the class would have made me feel crappy. Bonus about getting older: I am far less likely to give a damn unless I accidentally hurt someone’s feelings or something of the sort.
So that lot is one day a week. As for the other six…..
Writing:
It’s all hotting up now! Holly 4 is in the last throes of edits and about to go out to betas. I’ve recut so it should come in somewhere around 40k words. Also, Wes has done another of his fabulous covers, which I can’t wait to show you!
Release date tbc but probably mid-March. And then it’s on to editing Holly 5, which is already written….
So as ever, it’s all go at the gasworks. Watch this space for confirmation of the release date and cover reveal!
More information as I have it….
🙂
JAC.
Just a quick one today and a bit off-topic but it pleased me, so….
For many years I have been an enthusiastic if not very knowledgeable gardener. As soon as I had a little space that was mine, I started putting plants in it. My flower beds are not keenly planned out or beautifully manicured; more a case of “that’s a pretty colour–let’s stick it in the garden and see what happens.” Sometimes things flower briefly and die away, but other times they thrive, which is always very pleasing.
However, I am not now allowed to go near the garden centre. This is not because I am liable to go dashing down the aisles whooping like Tarzan (far too tired for that these days). It’s just that I find it difficult to go past any display of plants without picking something up, and in my local garden centre they have hit my Achilles heel square on by the cunning placement of what is known as the “graveyard shelf” just near the exit.
The graveyard shelf is where they put all the plants that are a bit gnarly, look a bit sickly or they don’t expect to live. They put them all on a big mixed shelf by the checkout for a pound each, and if they don’t sell, at the end of the week they all go in the bin. Hence the name!
Now I am a sucker for this sort of thing. I have a terrible need to rescue them.
One day I walked past and there was little peach tree in its pot, a patio peach tree, which is to say one that has been grafted onto stock that will not grow tall and is therefore suitable for growing on your patio.
At the time we were between houses. We had sold our beloved house further out from London and were looking for somewhere a little bit nearer to the elderly mother-in-law. Our attempt to buy a house had just fallen through, and so we had moved into rental in the area in order to scope out the area and keep an eye out for new properties coming onto the market. It was a bit of a miserable time.
So I saw this peach tree and knew that I should not buy it. It was a silly idea. But it was also a Saturday evening and nobody else had bought it because it had a terrible case of peach leaf curl, and the leaves were all blistered and malformed. I could not have planted it at the rental house, but as it was in a pot, I ended up bringing it home. I had to look up what was wrong with it, and then what to do about that.
For the past four or five years I have been spraying it twice a year to stop the mould that causes it, picking off the leaves if they come through blistered again, moving it from the little lean-to by the house where it spends the winter to a nice warm sunny spot by the wall where it gets maximum warmth in summer but is still protected from rain. I have even – and given the state of my short term memory this is not always guaranteed – I have even remembered to feed it and water it! And it has responded nicely.
Each year fewer leaves come through blistered and it has started bearing tiny little fruits on the branches. Last year they stayed in place for long enough that one was not rockhard, but it was still completely inedible. It looked so pretty with the peaches all rosy against the green leaves though.
This summer, we have had some very hot weather. Outrageously hot, for the UK. And the little peach tree has loved it. Every morning on my way out of the front door I’ve paused for long enough to water it with the can of water set ready, and each new day it it’s dry again. It has six little fruits across its branches – I picked off the other tiny ones so that these six get a chance to ripen properly – and finally today one fell.
We brought it into the kitchen and decided to see if it was edible. This is it next to a teaspoon for scale. Isn’t it the tiniest peach you’ve ever seen?
It separated from the stone beautifully. It was as ripe as could be. And the scent of it! I have never smelt a peach that smelt so beautifully fragrant. We tried the flesh and it was slightly odd of texture – I need to return to Google– but the taste was there, and I could not help thinking that perhaps in a couple of years if I fine-tune the way I have been looking after it, perhaps we will finally get some true, delicious peaches from it. Not bad for a pound purchase from the graveyard shelf!
In some ways my writing career is much the same. I am hopeful that we are getting to the tipping point now whereby the books I have on the shelf are of a quality to please, and there are slowly starting to be enough of them to be memorable. The Holly series is now in editing for the first couple of books although the last one is still to be finished off, and I am in negotiations with Wes for the cover of Holly 3.
I have also recovered the Scarred Artisan. Although the old cover had a much better picture of the main character, Lyria, it was not immediately obvious what genre it was. A lot of people glanced assumed it was women’s lit, which it isn’t. Consequently sales have been negligible. I have now ordered a cover which doesn’t look so very much like Lyria herself, but it does look very much more like the sort of story that it is. It will be interesting to see whether this works better.
Anyhow, back to the grindstone. Lurcher supremo Lord Thunderpaws is starting to give me the meaningful eye. He believes it is time for me to go up to the study and get on writing, not sit on the sofa drinking tea. No brownie points for writing blogs from the lurcher who wants to go snooze on his comfy bed upstairs!
Another busy week at work beckons, so I have no idea how much I’ll be able to do this week: most evenings I’ll probably end up logged on again.
I hope you have a more restful week, in any case. There will be another newsletter going out on the 21st as we are part of another group giveaway. And hopefully also the sneak preview of the new cover for Scarred Artisan so watch this space!
Catch you later – –
J A C
As regulars will know, periodically I burn out and have to take time out. This one’s a doozy. However although in a pretty unfocused way, I am still chipping away at the outstanding stuff, so here’s the latest sitrep.
On Dark Shores series:
Flight. I thought it was pretty much finished apart from the research on sailing. That is actually a dauntingly huge job but I did a bit of research and discovered a really good resource that looked likely to be available in four or five weeks. Excellent, I thought. In the meantime I’ll reread the first book.
This was either a massive mistake or really lucky. I discovered the timelines need a bit of work and in all honesty, I suspect it might work rather a lot better if I cut all of the books into chronological order; but there there will be far two many characters. So what I need to do is cut them all together, work put what plot strands are going to be superfluous, any characters who can sensibly be merged or cut, and streamline the whole thing. Which is an ENORMOUS task, and that’s before I even start sorting out the 100k words I already wrote of Mother.
Plus side, Scrivener should allow this to make more sense.
Minus side, I’m going to need the world’s biggest Excel sheet to make the timeline even attempt to make any sense.
Plus side, I can re-cover the lot with something closer to market and make pretty files with Vellum, then relaunch the whole lot at once.
Minus side, that launch is a long time and a lot of work away.
Summary: months of work, lots of research and thought needed.
Bugger.
Wolf series:
Finished Book 1, self-edited and did a lot of work on it, sent it to betas and all of them loved the story and were very excited by it…but agreed to a person that the dialogue between the two main characters is flawed in register and needs redoing in its entirety. So close!
They are right of course, and it shouldn’t be difficult to fix, but it does require substantial rewrites and a bit of thought to ensure the story still works if the motivations change. Bugger. Still, there is some consolation to be had in that Book 2 is written and ready to start editing, book three is half done and four and five are plotted out. These are congruent with the new register (ironically, as I was writing it I was wondering how to make it work with old-stylebook one) so it’s just book one that needs a total fix (hopefully!).
The later books involve stuff that is new to me and needs a bit of basic knowledge; they come across a new character who will be pretty important to the plot, and he is profoundly deaf. I was a bit hesitant about this on several scores. On the one hand,the lack of diversity in fantasy has always annoyed me as I think fiction is so much more powerful if it reflects real life? On the other hand, it’s always seemed such a big subject to tackle that… well, frankly, I didn’t know where to start. And yes, this is exactly as stupid a reaction as it seems. But of late because diversity has finally become a Thing, there is much more visibility of resources, which is fabulous, & I got to a point in Wolf where it became clear that for the story to work, the character in question had to be deaf.
Now, the number of questions this raises is not small. In a fantasy world, how likely would it be that they would diagnose him correctly if he was born deaf? How would he manage the day to day exchange of the Court? What advantages and disadvantages would it bring? And most importantly, how can I as a hearing person, write a genuinely authentic and moving character that deaf people (and Deaf people) will enjoy and identify with? The quick answer is that I will almost certainly get some bits wrong, but hopefully if the main, important bits are right, it might either pass muster, or inspire others to write a better deaf character than mine, which would be epic.
I have thought a lot about this and I end up with the viewpoint that is better to attempt to write a diverse cast in good faith and with due diligence put into getting it right than it is to chicken out of it in case someone shouts at me. It is almost certainly true that I will get it wrong in places and no doubt lots of people will be angry at me and rightly so: but if one young deaf person identifies with and is lifted by my attempt at representing a deaf character, in a world where they don’t normally get to think “that person is like me”, then that is worth taking a bit of flak for.
No doubt I will be blogging at a bit more length about this later in the process, but for now I am at the very beginning of learning a bit more about deaf people and the Deaf community in the UK (as well as elsewhere, a little bit). I am learning some very basic sign language as my character will sign (of course the story won’t use British Sign Language but I reckon there is much to be learned from understanding how the language is put together that would make sense transferred across to an invented language). And I have to say, I’m totally loving BSL- it’s absolutely fascinating. In an ideal world, I’d go on to study the proper BSL courses, but that will probably have to wait till I have actually finished some books and sold them, as the course is far from cheap.
So though it’s frustrating that Wolf series has also stalled, that doesn’t annoy me so much. It seems more like an opportunity to get learning the sort of things that will make the story, the world and the character so much richer (and which feed into my general obsessions with communication, languages and acting in any case). I have been lucky enough to find someone knowledgeable who has offered to help when I finally get to that part of the story, but I am conscious that this really does need to be as right as possible. So work continues, if not writing, and this is going to be another slow one.
Summary: months of work, lots of research and thought needed.
Kinda cool and exciting, not to mention fascinating, but still won’t be quick.
Bugger.
Holly series:
So this series is pretty much the only thing of mine that’s shifting at the moment, but given that I’ve stopped all attempts at any kind of publicity or marketing (due to burn out) I’m quite impressed that it is shifting at all!
I looked at my author page and realised it looks as if I have a two second attention span. I really need to finish at least one series, just to make the point that I’m writing characters who will be around for long enough to be worth reading! And Holly being pretty popular, and made up of shorter novellas than the rest, it seemed obvious that these were the ones to try for.
So: Holly 3 is written and halfway through editing. Holly 4 is written and Holly 5 is showing signs of wishing to become a full length effort, which wasn’t the idea at all but would be quite a nice way to end the series. Work continues on this in dribs and drabs in the two minutes it takes the kettle to boil, and in my lunchhour when I have one. I think this is going to be a cracking series, but because of the way the story builds up, I need to write it to the end and then go back and make sure that everything in the earlier storied tallies up with the later ones… so guess what? Quite right, can’t publish H3 till H5 is written. Argh. And they have the most expensive covers as well, so writing them first makes loads of sense…no wait…!
So. Plus side, they are probably nearest to being finished.
Minus side, still a fair bit of work to go.
Plus side, the covers are going to be epic!
Minus side, the covers are going to be expensive.
Summary: a few months of work, and a lot of cash needed.
Bugger.
🙂
Dragon series:
So this is ridiculous, I thought. There must be one solitary series I can finish. How about the Dragon stories? People like dragons. I like dragons! Let’s do some dragon shorts to go with the Last Dragon….
Did not go well.
Wrote two nice little stories to go with the Last Dragon. Went to get some cheapie covers to go on them from someone new. These covers were so good I can’t use them for little random stories. These covers suggest Emotional Depth, dammit! Quandary!
So after a bit of thought, I got a fourth matching one done as I have a quartet of dragons whose stories need telling, and these covers will be splendid for those. Then I went back to try for some new covers. The short stories will need to be renamed which could be confusing, only no-one has actually bought The Last Dragon so I don’t really think it will be a problem.
So I made up new names and a new series name, and went back to my new person. Dragons are a bit difficult to find decent pics of for obvious reasons, and having used up the idea of tattoo-type icons for the Four Dragons, I had to resort to renders, which looked a bit shonky. I did hesitate but I figured, we need to use the shorts to earn money for the Holly covers but once they’ve done that, I can use them to save up for new covers with better dragons on. We’ll get there in the end.
So I sent my choice of pictures to the new person and bugger me if she didn’t come back with the most stonkingly fabulous covers ever. The shonky renders now look reasonably respectable next to Anne McCaffrey’s covers! (Fangirl moment!) Hurrah!
…and indeed bugger. Because now I can’t use these fabulous covers for little fairytales. Argh! Again!
So. Before I got stuck too deeply into a cycle of buying tremendous dragon covers for stories I haven’t even written yet, I called a halt. The two sets of fabulous covers can go on stories I am planning out which will tie in a bit remotely with the Holly series, which is pretty cool, and will be referenced in ODS, which is also cool- but I’m not starting to write them just yet.
The Holly covers need to match the first two.
ODS can’t be re-covered till I know where the story splits, but in the meantime no-one’s buying it so I don’t need to worry about that.
Wolf is too far from completion to worry about.
Scarred Artisan may get a new cover and relaunch at some point, as will Song after a slight re-edit. But those are simmering along quietly in the background until I have time to do a launch.
The real reason everything has stopped right now is just burn out. Work is unsustainably manic, and I end up working in the evenings and weekends when possible. I don’t actually agree with that sort of thing, but sometimes you just have to pull all the stops out to get the job done. My partner is in a similar position. It’s not good.
Add to that the weather: two weeks of heatwave means the dog hasn’t been able to go out and run with his friends as usual. We’ve been doing a late evening runaround, but not all his friends can make that time and lots of other people have been doing the same, so his running time is severely limited. This makes him crazy, which means that some nights, I’m still taking him through his training at midnight in an attempt to tire him out. With an 0440 alarm call, this does not make for a restful night’s sleep, and I am one who really needs my sleep!
There’s always the usual other stuff going on of course, but right now I’m frazzled, and a bit bewildered by the way my stories have suddenly fractalled!
The answer is always the same: proper time out with the exception of two minutes’ writing here and there to keep me sane. Theoretically the day job should calm down in a couple of months, and I shouldn’t be using all my creative mojo on getting through the day. By then my brain will have worked out what a plan of attack (current thinking is Holly is next up) and with a bit of luck we should be a substantial way towards getting at least one series up and running. I’m looking forward to getting back to it…
But in the meantime, the dog is barking, we’re late for his walk and goodness only knows what we’ll have for tea….
🙂
Take care, and I’ll catch you on the flip side!
All the best:
JAC
The Origin Tale of Ghosts of the Sea Moon
Normally I don’t write these “how the book came to be” posts, mostly because when people ask me where I get my ideas I never know what to say. Replying, “um, they pop in my head and I write them down”, doesn’t sound very glamorous or interesting, even if it’s true.
But this particular novel is different, it actually has a story behind the book (and hopefully not a boring one).
It started a couple of years ago with a writing contest. The contest was to write a flash fiction story (fiction under 1000 words) based on a beautiful photo of a ship against a large moon background (you can see the photo here on my Pinterest board).
Being from Nova Scotia, Canada, I’ve always loved the sea and had an interest in ghost stories, and that’s exactly what came to mind when I saw the photo. A ghost story, more specifically a ghost ship story. Tales of ghost ships like the Flying Dutchman fascinate me, so I thought, write a dark tale of a ghost ship. Then the stray idea crept in, “why not make it a ship that ferries ghosts instead”, similar to the Greek myth of Charon and his carrying souls across the river Styx. And so I ran with it, throwing in a bit of “mystical moon magic” as well.
Alas, the story didn’t win the contest, but it did stay with me.
Stayed with me enough that I wanted to expand the story, especially the character of the ship’s captain (that’s why I changed the protagonist in the novel from a sailor to my roguish captain). I sat down at my keyboard and began to write a short story based on the flash fiction piece. Soon I had all these gods and sailors, sea monsters and ghosts yapping in my ear, giving me plot lines and character arcs, and the word count began to creep up. Okay, (I said to myself), so it’s a novella now instead of a short story.
Nope.
The story grew and grew into a full novel. It went from a, just under 400 words, piece to a novel of sea adventure, monsters, and very dysfunctional gods. And didn’t stop there. The narrative now spans across three books, in a series I call the Saga of the Outer Islands. I also have at least two prequel books, two short stories, and a secondary series either planned or in the WIP stage (this is why I nicknamed Ghosts of the Sea Moon the story that wouldn’t die).
I hope you enjoyed the strange and slightly meandering tale of how Ghosts of the Sea Moon came to be written.
Book Info:
Title:Ghosts of the Sea Moon (Saga of the Outer Islands Book 1)
Author: A. F. Stewart
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Publication Date: January 13th, 2018
Paperback Price: $12.99
Digital Price: Pre-order and Release Price $0.99. Will go up to $2.99 on February 14th
Book Page:https://afallonblog.wordpress.com/saga-of-the-outer-islands/
Pinterest Book Series Board:https://www.pinterest.ca/scribe77/saga-of-the-outer-islands/
Book Trailer:https://youtu.be/8cr7tSCeI0A
Ghosts of the Sea Moon Blurb
In the Outer Islands, gods and magic rule the ocean.
Under the command of Captain Rafe Morrow, the crew of the Celestial Jewel ferry souls to the After World and defend the seas from monsters. Rafe has dedicated his life to protecting the lost, but the tides have shifted and times have changed.
His sister, the Goddess of the Moon, is on a rampage and her creatures are terrorizing the islands. The survival of the living and dead hinge on the courage and cunning of a beleaguered captain and his motley crew of men and ghosts.
What he doesn’t know is that her threat is part of a larger game. That an ancient, black-winged malevolence is using them all as pawns…
Come set sail with ghosts, gods and sea monsters.
Buy Links:
Books2Read link (all non-Amazon retailers): https://www.books2read.com/u/ml5GvM
Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078MS397S
Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37648721-ghosts-of-the-sea-moon
Author Links:
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/afstewartauthor/
Facebook Fan Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/348788975590362/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/scribe77
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/afstewartauthor/
Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/author/show/1175681.A_F_Stewart
BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/a-f-stewart
Website: https://afallonblog.wordpress.com/
Newsletter Signup: http://eepurl.com/OGrTT
Author Bio:
A steadfast and proud sci-fi and fantasy geek, A. F. Stewart was born and raised in Nova Scotia, Canada and still calls it home. The youngest in a family of seven children, she always had an overly creative mind and an active imagination. She favours the dark and deadly when writing—her genres of choice being fantasy and horror—but she has been known to venture into the light on occasion. As an indie author she’s published novels, novellas and story collections, with a few side trips into poetry.
Excerpt:
Chapter One
The Captain
Captain Rafe Morrow paced the quarterdeck of his ship, Celestial Jewel, the signs of an oncoming squall setting him on edge. Blustering wind rattled the sails and the crew’s nerves, their usual jaunty hubbub reduced to grumbling and snipes. Trouble travelled on that wind. Rafe could smell it woven in the air, and his blood prickled with a sense of worry. The ship trembled as if with warning. He glared at the sky and its darkening clouds painted amber and crimson from the setting sun. A storm sky coming ahead of a full moon meant dark magic and sea monsters would prowl the waves this night.
The Moon Goddess will hold sway tonight.
A trickle of blue energy raced across the back of his hand at the thought.
Damn her…and her beasts.
On the breath of a sigh, he whirled to face his crew. “Storm’s coming, boys. Doesn’t bode well, not with the moonrise tonight.”
“How long, Captain? Will we be in the thick of the weather or just what comes after?” A rough-edged sailor, Pinky Jasper, spoke up, but all ears of the deck crew listened for an answer.
“It’s coming within an hour or two, out from Raven Rock, by my reckoning. After nightfall by certain. We’re heading in, boys, but we’ll likely hit the edge of it.” He heaved a breath, exhaling. “It’ll be a bad one even for this crew so expect trouble.”
A shiver of tension settled over the deck. Some of the crew cast worried glances at the sea and each other. Others shivered, and a few more whispered prayers. Storms brought bad memories and nervous anticipation to the sailors of this ship.
“Which port then, Captain?” The mariner at the ship’s wheel chimed in. “Might make Abersythe if we head north.”
“We might, Anders. But we head east. We’ll race the edge of the tempest, but it’s closer and the ship will find better shelter anchored at Crickwell Island.”
“Aye, sir. Laying in course to Crickwell Island.” One-Eyed Anders turned the wheel and the ship’s bones groaned. Others of the crew adjusted the sails, and the Celestial Jewel leaned into her new bearing headed east.
Instafreebie preview (download the first four chapters): https://www.instafreebie.com/free/cu9nx
Hey peeps!
So. Phew! Release day over, The Holly & the Ivy launched, A Sprig of Holly at #1 on several different lists in different countries… it’s been fun! A proper run down will follow, but just now I’m doing the last bits of tidy-up and admin.
The giveaway books are being parcelled up and sent across the world in all directions. The bonus material is just going through its last polish before I send it out – and I am pretty pleased with it. It includes: a recipe for Holly’s favourite spiced milk, a behind-the-scenes audio file talking about where the idea for A Sprig of Holly came from and what’s queued up to be written next, and best of all, a short story telling about the run up to the story, told from another character’s point of view.
I’ve enjoyed putting all that together, but in some ways it’s been a bit of a learning curve – not least as I haven’t done any audio stuff before, so not only did I have to check out what the best equipment and software was for a beginner on a budget, but also I had to work out how to use it and find out whether I could talk unscripted for the right amount of time….! Turns out my early brush with a radio show was not entirely wasted – the problem was actually making the ramble short enough to not crash everyone’s inboxes! 😂
The recipe, as well, was one that I made from scratch, and it took a little time to get the mix of spices just right. I can tell you, I’ll be using that one again though! Mmmmm! Though I say it as shouldn’t….
Of course, with this being exclusive to those who bought before 1st Sept, none of this will be surfacing anywhere else for a while, if ever. Maybe when the Holly series has finished and there’s a box set or something…. so essentially, if you want to read any of this and you bought The Holly and Ivy, get your receipt into me quick! The email address is in the back of the book but it is jaclement [dot] ondarkshores [at ]gmail.com. Get in quick!
So, apart from that, there will of course be the ongoing round up of deals and giveaways that my stuff is featuring in on the newsletter, which you’re welcome to sign up to if you haven’t already, and once I’ve finished off a couple of outstanding blog posts related to the release, it’ll be time to put together the big overview of what I did, how it went and what next….
…and then onto the next bit of writing of course. But which??
In the meantime, a couple of big deadlines in the dayjob, and the dog has managed to prang himself on a tree at some speed, so is currently sporting one of my tshirts to stop him licking the resultant gouge (far better than a cone, esp given that this is the dog who routinely slides off his own sofa!)
But though life is as frantic as ever, at the moment it feels oddly focused and productive. I feel like someone who’s been trying to carve something with a penknife and someone’s just given me a hammer and chisel… The tools available to us as writers are the moment may well make a huge difference, and I think now is the time to use them – I just need to keep producing the odd short to keep me publishing while I’m working on the longer series.
Moreover, it turns out I have a genre developing, albeit one with a slightly high-falutin name. You know grimdark, where terrible things happen to everyone and are described in detail and it probably is all going to end with the bad guys winning (my definition!)? Well, it turns out, someone has invented “noblebright”, which sounds a bit po-faced, but as far as I can see, the diff is that whereas bad things can happen, noblebright fiction is characterised by a thread of hopefulness running through it. It’s not as simplistic as good always winning, but sad things can sometimes be the correct outcome too, provided they provide the best outcome.
There are undoubtedly better definitions than this and unlike Joe Abercrombie who is known as Lord Grimdark, I have no illusions of being dubbed ‘Lady Noblebright’ any time soon (you’d definitely need a robe with stars on in that case, don’t you think?😂) but it’s nice to finally have something to tell people who want to know what I write. Esp as I have written what I wanted to write, and the genre has appeared just in time to fit my stuff! Most obliging!
Anyhow. Also turns out there’s a bit of a market for fairytale retellings and fairytale-like stories, which is the other thing I’ve been playing with with such shorts as The Last Dragon and The Scarred Artisan That’s good as I already had several ideas for more, so these might well be the shorts I work on in between chunks of series stuff.
So, it’s been a busy old month but a sharp learning curve, and has left me somewhat cheered. Can’t complain, eh? Anyhow, back to the edits on the bonus material – if you are expecting yours, look for it around the tail end of this week, if not before.
The rest of you, take care. It’s a bit of a grimdark world at the moment, and we fantasy fans need to look out for each other. I sometimes think that when we can’t influence real life, all we as writers can do is to provide an escape for people, and hope that when they set our books down, they have had a little emotional respite from it all, recovered enough of their equilibrium to get through the day, and the next and the next. If that is all we can do for our readers, that’s a pretty powerful gift, not that we will ever know it.
So. Be kind to yourself and others, and stay safe. Whether from fire or flood, or the far off rumble of national hostility, I hope you can all find a safe haven, whether in the real world or fictional ones.
Take care;
JAC.
Ooh, look! A nice review of “The Locket” from CNC Books Blog. NB it’s at the end so you’ll need to click through to the blog.
Thanks to Lelia for taking the time to review it- much appreciated!
JAC
Once again, big surprise, I find myself with
an overload of books read but not yet reviewed
so I think it’s time for a roundup or two.
Don’t Get Mad, Get Even
Colin Goodwin
2QT Limited, July 2015
ISBN 978-1-910077-60-3
Trade Paperback
This book had me chuckling quite a bit with its premise—blackmailing an English village’s cricket club to either win a trophy or lose its playing ground. Along with this audacious crime, we have village ladies who truly appreciate the hired ringer’s skills and a shady real estate development plan. It’s all great fun even with sabotage and perhaps a little murder.
Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, August 2017.
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Cat in an Alphabet Endgame
The Midnight Louie Mysteries #28
Carole Nelson Douglas
Wishlist Publishing, August 2016
ISBN 978-1-943175-05-5
Trade Paperback
I confess, I put off reading this as long as I possibly could, so long I’m really embarrassed but…
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Guest post at Barb G Tarn’s blog is here: Barb was one of my early friends on Goodreads, I think from the original Creative Reviews gang.
Release day frivolities will include;
Giveaway of a rather lovely copy of Jackie Morris’s children’s book The Golden Hare.
Giveaway of paperbacks to the first few people to leave a review for both A Sprig of Holly and The Holly & the Ivy
Details of some outrageously good deals on other books that I have enjoyed
And a solar eclipse we put on, special….
….okay, maybe that wasn’t us, but it’s still going to be cool, okay?
More tomorrow-watch this space!
JAC
Hey people!
So, how’s things? Enjoying the rain? (Hey, I’m in the UK and it’s summer- I’ve just taken my raincoat off!)
Here all is even madder than normal. Apart from that thing that happens sporadically where I end up covering two totally different jobs simultaneously in the dayjob (quick version: if you have a good senior manager I believe you should support them, as there are SO MANY bad senior managers out there) and the sheer non-stop nature of wrangling a large puppy through the day with a minimum of damage, I seem to have suddenly taken it into my head to attempt some marketing and something resembling an actual proper release for Sprig 2 (that’s The Holly & the Ivy, for newbies and random passerby).
So- the date is set for 21st August and all sorts of promotional things are happening in the interim. Watch this space for details of various promos, contact me if you’re up for a review and want an ARC, or if you have any other comments or suggestions for promotional ideas, etc: and if you haven’t signed up to the mailing list, now’s the time to do it as there will be giveaways and bonus material exclusive to the list!
Exciting, huh? Even if I have chosen a cover based around a colour that really clashes with the blog. 😏
Let’s see how it all goes, eh?
Catch you later;
JAC.
Hi all:
Bit of a surreal day today. Went to a funeral which was held in a natural burial place; not a graveyard, but a very beautiful stretch of woodland sloping down to the sea. There are no grave markers, though you can see the mounds for a few years till the soil settles a bit, and as we walked down the path to where the grave was, at first it’s a bit disconcerting, seeing all the mounds under the trees, some more recent and others barely discernible. Most were covered in woodland flowers and undergrowth – not as if they were unkempt, but as if they were being reclaimed by nature.
The coffin was made of wickerwork, and the bouquets were simple cut flowers, no oasis or cellophane. The grave was under the canopy of a most beautiful beech tree, with other trees closely around. I looked up during the service, and was fascinated by the moving mosaic of leaves, layer upon layer of them. The sun glowed through the higher leaves, and now and then there was a blink of blue sky as the branches shifted and whispered in the breeze. It was really lovely, actually, and looking around at the other grave sites, I really liked that slowly, the mounds settle back into the ground and become part of the woodland. They’re tall and proud at the beginning, when you need the marker, but gradually as the sadness of grief fades and the happiness surfaces, the mound also fades and the woodland stops being background to grief, and comes back into focus as a place of peace to sit and be thankful for the good memories.
That really appeals to me. For me, a quiet, sunny space filled with leaf-whisper and the dappling of sun through the leaves is perfect for dealing with grief; not lonely silence, but filled with enough sound and movement to keep your brain occupied while your heart quietly breaks, and quietly mends itself, though it takes a long time.
One of the moments during the service that made me wobble a bit was the readings as they used one – sometimes called “What is dying?” – that we had at my Dad’s funeral. He died last year, just before our wedding. That reading was one I first heard at the funeral of the father of a good friend. It talks of dying as standing on the seashore watching a ship carrying cargo which disappears over the horizon. It’s lovely: have a quick look at the link above (the rest of this blog will make a lot more sense if you do!)
I loved it. I sent it home to my parents as my mum plays the organ at a lot of funerals and my Dad’s choir used to sing at them, so it’s always useful to know these things in case the family are having trouble finding something relevant. My Dad had always loved sailing and the sea, so he really liked the reading too. It always makes me think of him, and certainly it did today. I miss him, the old bugger. I found myself standing at the funeral for one person and crying for another, which was also weird.
My Dad found school very difficult as a child, and that included reading. He said once that he read maybe five books from the time he was a teen to that point (his early seventies, maybe?) But at that point we went on a mission to get him reading. I had persuaded my Mum to read Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice. She didn’t like fantasy until she read Hobb and discovered it wasn’t like she had thought, and she was sure that my Dad would enjoy it too, but he was an awkward one and not necessarily inclined to oblige. So we left it on the table, slightly in the way. When he came in, he looked at it and read the blurb and said “What’s this?”
“Oh, sorry, is that in your way?” I moved it onto the side. “It’s the book I just finished reading.”
“Is it good?”
I shrugged. “I think it’s epically good,” I told him, and went off burbling about it being really exciting and gripping and all the stuff I thought might appeal. “But you wouldn’t like it.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I know you’re not right bothered. Anyhow I lent it to Mum and she loved it so I’m going to see if (my sister) wants to read it.”
I left it at that and wandered off, and sure enough when I went back into the kitchen a couple of hours later it had mysteriously gone. He loved the book, of course, and was up till all hours reading it several nights in a row. Less than a week later I caught him sneaking into the other room to see if he could find the second one in the bookshelf… and he did read the whole trilogy.
After that, there was a rather lovely thing where he would come and ask my Mum rather hesitantly what she thought he might like next. Mum, having been a school teacher, is pretty good at judging that sort of thing, and he went from kids books like Stig of the Dump, which he loved, to James Herriot and Nevill Shute, and by the time of his death he was part way through Oliver Twist. To me, that is just the most amazing thing, to suddenly discover the joy of words so late in life, and I’m so proud that he stuck with it all the way up to Dickens (I know the classics can be a bit Marmite, but I love Dickens’ use of words, so it’s amazing to be able to share that enjoyment with someone discovering it for the first time). I am so proud and pleased that he did start, and kept going nearly to the end of his life, when his Parkinson’s intervened. He gained so much pleasure from it until then; I love that that was a gift we were able to give him. It feels like a real privilege.
I don’t think he ever read any of my books apart from one short story, The Black-Eyed Susan, which had a sailing ship in it. He really liked it and wanted to read Song of the Ice Lord after, as it also involves ships and war, which were two things he was quite interested in, but sadly his illness intervened and he never got that far. Whether he would have enjoyed it or not I can’t tell you, but I think he would have liked the shipspirits.
What are the shipspirits? In Song, the warrior/sailor tribes that make up the Skral people have a complex relationship with their ships, to which they attribute a sort of benificent awareness, and when each ship becomes too old to repair, the tribe haul them to a very secret and sacred place, the ships’ graveyard, where they are laid to rest in honour. Maran and Lodden, a bard and a engineer of sorts, travel across the island where Maran’s people live. Lodden, who comes from a far country, is awed to see the row upon row of ships along the hillside, the older ones crumbling into flat, shapeless mounds while the newer ones stand high and stark.
…Sound familiar?
As I looked around the burial ground today, with the grave-mounds unmarked and settling into the earth, it felt as if someone had taken the pictures in my head and made it real, just on a smaller scale (and with less snow!). That’s why it was doubly eerie when they started reading the poem; Song is dedicated to my friend’s father, at whose funeral I first heard the poem that gave me the idea of the shipspirits- but that poem, the poem at my Dad’s funeral, was the very same one they read today.
Today, the combination of the burial site and the reading made me shiver, though not in a bad way. Song of the Ice Lord is about grief and loss, but it is also about coming to terms with losing the people you love, and understanding that while we remember them with love, they never really leave us.
I will leave you with the last part of the poem in the version we heard today, as the soul-ship disappears over the horizon and is lost to sight:
“And just at the moment when someone at my side says
“She is gone!”
there are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout
“She is here at last!” “
Take care, all.
JAC.
– – –
NB Song of the Ice Lord is quite randomly on a 99c deal at the moment, if you’re interested. Oddly enough, we organised it weeks ago before there was any question of a funeral at all. Synchronicity is a weird, weird, thing.
Wandering On Dark Shores.... 