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Bone Walker

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Bone Walker, Faerie Blood, Valor of the Healer, Vengeance of the Hunter, Victory of the Hawk

Wednesday news!

Today’s top story: screw Black Friday, we’re releasing the first single from the forthcoming Bone Walker soundtrack NOW! Because we CAN!

Dara’s got her post up about it right over here, in which you can stream the premaster mix of “Something’s Coming” right off of Bandcamp. If you’re inclined, you can buy that single. AND you can preorder the album!

If you backed the Kickstarter, you of course don’t need to actually buy it because we will be sending it to you. But DO spread the word! And check out the previews of the other tracks that’ll be coming!

We’ll be doing the official release for this thing at the next Conflikt in January, along with the release for the actual Bone Walker novel! SO EXCITING. Stand by for more on this as it happens!

***

As I think I’ve mentioned before, Dara and I are fans of the Doctor Who Podcast, one of the many Doctor-themed podcasts available for your listening pleasure. In addition to reviewing new episodes when they come out, they have extensive knowledge of the Classic-era series as well as the Big Finish audio range, and all of their presenters are just generally fun to listen to.

One of the things we find particularly charming about them is the jingle they wrote for whenever they review a Big Finish release! It goes like this:

Big Finish with Ian! And Michelle from across the Atlantic Ocean!
Ian from UK, and Michelle from the United States!
Reviewing Big Finish, sorting out the wheat from the chaff and nonsense
Saving you money on the ones that are not so good!

It’s insidiously catchy, enough that every time we hear it show up in an episode of the podcast, we start singing along. Hell, THEY’VE even songvirused themselves with it.

So the other night I said to Dara, “I wonder if this thing would work as a round!” And the fun thing about having a spouse with her own music studio? She can FIND OUT.

Behold! Dara’s round edition of the Doctor Who Podcast Big Finish Review Theme!

***

And while we’re on the topic of things you should signalboost, don’t forget, Faerie Blood is ON SALE for $2.99 until this coming Monday! All the details are right over here!

I will also honor the sale price for anyone who wants to buy the ebook directly from me in the format of their choice!

***

Last but DEFINITELY not least, Victory of the Hawk is now available for preorder as well AND has shown up on Goodreads. So if you’d like to get in some preorder love on Book 3 of the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy, NOW IS THE TIME! Links are on the Victory of the Hawk page!

And if you haven’t read Valor or Vengeance yet, now would also be a VERY good time to get caught up on those. If you haven’t read anything of my writing at all yet, or if you’ve just read Faerie Blood and aren’t sure whether you’d like my high fantasy, you can even see some shiny samples that’ll let you read up to 10 percent of each book, provided courtesy of Overdrive! The samples are available on the Valor of the Healer and Vengeance of the Hunter pages!

November 26, 2014 by
Bone Walker, Queen of Souls, Victory of the Hawk

Victory of the Hawk (and Kickstarter) update

And now, a long overdue update on Victory of the Hawk! AND Kickstarter stuff!

Have been running annoyingly behind on getting this monster done, and managed to miss most of VCON for the second year in a row working on catching up. Got to the point that now I’m within scope for getting this monster’s first draft done by the end of this week, and shortly thereafter, there will be development edits.

How fast I can charge through those will, in turn, impact how fast I can charge through line edits. If all goes well, I could conceivably be done beating on this book by the end of the month. I’d like to be done before I scamper up to Canada again in November, this time for Operation SWING!, in which there will be ridiculous amounts of De Temps Antan!

If I’m done with edits on Victory by then, I’ll be swinging around to finally working on the edits on Bone Walker. When I go up to Canada for the De Temps Antan shows, I’ll be taking the entire week off–and between the two shows, I’ll be holed up in Cumberland working on edits on whatever’s popped next off the queue.

Once I can finally actually free up enough brain for the Bone Walker edits, they should go reasonably quickly since they’re all line-level edits, and I’m not going to be making any structural changes to the book at this point.

When Bone Walker‘s edits are finished, Dara and I will work on layout and on the design of the cover. And when that happens, I’ll have a better idea of when the final ebook and print editions will be deployed. The likely timeframe for this is early 2015, at this point. I’d like to have Bone Walker out before Victory is due to drop in April 2015.

Meanwhile, Dara has been doing a hard push to finish up the Bone Walker soundtrack. She’s very close to finishing the musical bits, although she and I still need to do the recordings for the readings I’ll be doing as accompaniment to the musical tracks. My ability to musically participate in the album has had to fall to the wayside, due to my having to focus on writing actual words, about which I’m sad. But on the other hand, we’ve gotten in excellent people to work with Dara. Especially Alexander James friggin’ Adams, about which I am not sad in the slightest.

When Bone Walker is cleared off my plate, I’ll be turning my attention to finishing up the novellas in the Warder universe, also due to Kickstarter backers. All three of these are still untitled, but to refresh your all’s memories, they are:

  • Origin story for Millicent Wray, who later is Millicent Merriweather, Warder of Seattle
  • Story set in Providence, RI, about a psychic who must help a man solve the murder of his Warder sister
  • Story of a musician who helps a Warder stop the hunt of migrating deep sea creatures

And once all THIS is done, well, we’ll see what happens next. What’s most likely to pop off the queue is the long-overdue Queen of Souls, which needs to be cleaned up so I can try to query it somewhere.

Wish me luck, folks. The rest of this year’s going to be busy, and next year promises to be more of the same!

October 7, 2014 by
Bone Walker, Music

A long overdue Kickstarter update

I’m still dealing with my obligations to Carina Press for the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy, which means I haven’t been able to put attention to finishing up editing Bone Walker and prepping it for release. To wit: AUGH.

Meanwhile, Dara and I both have had medical crap to deal with, as many of you know–my medical crap from last fall, as well as Dara’s eye surgeries, plural. She’s got another one coming as well, since she developed cataracts after the last procedure, and that’s got to be dealt with. To wit: AUGH.

AND, as Dara’s been posting about a lot lately, she’s had to throw a LOT of time into renovation of one of the tenant spaces in MurkSouth. This has taken a huge amount of her time and our money, though now she’s finally finished with that, and if I may say so she’s worked magic in that kitchen. You can see before and after pics here.

BUT, we do finally have some progress to report! Even though I’ve been stymied on dealing with the book, Dara’s made some progress on getting the soundtrack done. She’s had significant progress on the instrumental sets–and we do also have some very, VERY exciting news.

We got Alexander James Adams.

Those of you in the Pacific Northwest fandom community, and hell, any of you who are into filk and SF/F-based or pagan-based music at all–you know who I’m talking about. He who stepped in to take up the mantle of song when Heather Alexander went off to Faerie. THAT Alexander James Adams. We are beyond delighted to have him joining us on this project, lending not only fiddle, but backup vocals and some drum work to various tracks.

And now Dara’s got a preview track to share with you all. It’s right over here!

This album is going to ROCK. 😀

August 5, 2014 by
Bone Walker, Quebecois Music

It has come to my attention that LJ actually FIXED something

Namely, Bandcamp embeds! So here, have a couple! (Does this also work on Dreamwidth? LET’S FIND OUT.)

Like “Manteau d’hiver” by Le Vent du Nord!

And “La déroutée” by Yves “Most Badass Accordion Player in Quebec” Lambert and his trio! A song which rattles me around every time I hear it. I LOVE the repeated chorus.

And last but MOST ASSUREDLY not least, Dara’s got some tasty previews up for the WE SWEAR TO ODIN IS ACTUALLY FORTHCOMING Bone Walker Soundtrack!

July 10, 2014 by
Bone Walker

And now: a blurb for Bone Walker!

Tonight is the first night I’ve worked on Bone Walker in ages, and one of the things I wanted to accomplish tonight was to write a proper blurb for the book. This’ll be cover copy for the back cover, as well as for the forthcoming official page on this site for the book.

Here’s my first take at the blurb!

Two months should be long enough for a girl to learn to cope when she finds out she’s half-Sidhe, or so Kendis Thompson has convinced herself. She wants nothing more than as normal a life as possible, playing her violin and pursuing her growing relationship with Christopher, Warder Second of Seattle. But when the Unseelie bard Elessir falls through a portal out of Faerie, bringing with him a ghostly peril that puts her best friend Jude’s life and sanity in danger, Kendis must test the strength of her new magic. And when the bone walker Melorite threatens all of the Emerald City, Kendis must choose between saving everyone she loves—and succumbing to the dominion of the Unseelie Court.

Pretty happy with this wording, and this’ll be a decent working draft, though the final word choices may change between now and when the book is ready to deploy. Need to think of a proper way to condense this down to a sentence, too.

What do you think, sirs? Anybody got any wording recommendations?

And oh, this is going to be fun. 😀 Let’s see if I can get this puppy edited before New Years, shall I?

December 3, 2013 by
Bone Walker, Vengeance of the Hunter, Victory of the Hawk

Status update on ALL the books

As of this morning I received an official final Word doc version of Vengeance of the Hunter. This means we are now SIGNED OFF on the text of this book. Next comes the cover copy and the cover art, and I hope to be showing you all these some time soon in coming weeks.

And this means as well that I need to start planning on Victory of the Hawk and start writing this puppy WAY sooner than I did Vengeance. Getting Vengeance ready to ship was an exercise in pushing it, and I need to NOT DO THAT for Victory. Expect me to be posting more updates about the third installment of Rebels of Adalonia in coming weeks as well, for the sake of visibility and accountability!

ALSO: I need to start the official edit pass on Bone Walker. Which will be starting THIS WEEKEND. I want this thing done and dealt with and hopefully ready to ship before Vengeance comes out in April. Again, look for more updates to come on this.

Likewise, I have the shorter works I want to finish off as well and get to Kickstarter backers who are LONG overdue for getting the shinies that are due them.

Lot of work before me, folks, as I head into 2014. Looking forward to taking it on and letting you know how it goes!

November 29, 2013 by
Bone Walker, Short Pieces, Vengeance of the Hunter

Long overdue Kickstarter update + Vengeance of the Hunter

Just to bring folks up to speed on where I am with all the things I’m trying to pull out of my head: my long-waiting Kickstarter backers, y’all will have noticed I have not yet delivered unto you Bone Walker or any of the other remaining rewards. This is a combination of four factors: one, Vengeance of the Hunter pretty much eating my brain for the last few months; two, my abrupt return to the land of Medical Fun (spoiler alert: not really fun); and three, emergency eye surgery on the part of Dara, as I’ve previously posted; four, delay on getting the rest of my edits back from JoSelle, who’s been working on editing Bone Walker for me.

As of this writing I am in what will be hopefully the final line edits for Vengeance. My goal is to finish this edit pass and hand the manuscript back to my editor this weekend. She will let me know if I need to do any remaining tweaks to it, and the goal is to get it squared away before I go offline for surgery on November 11th.

I have also been talking with JoSelle about getting those edits on Bone Walker back, and our game plan moving forward is that she will be doing everything in her power to get them to me by end of November. Either way, I will be commencing my edit sweep on Bone Walker on December 1st. If I have enough brain for it following surgery, I’ll actually start before–but this is me allowing myself some time for recovery to happen. Ditto on finishing the shorter works due to Kickstarter backers.

Related to those shorter works as well–I’m working on getting some cover art together for “The Blood of the Land”, the short story I’d previously done in the Warder universe. Once that’s ready I will be making that available as an immediate freebie to Kickstarter folks, and slightly after that, will be deploying it onto the various places where Faerie Blood is already available for sale.

Meanwhile, Dara’s having had to do eye surgery has thrown her for a loop in getting soundtrack work done, too, but she is recovering from that nicely and we hope to resume work on that ASAP. I also need to hand Dara the data she needs to do the poster and postcard layouts for the Bone Walker cover so that I can get those out to folks as well.

Kickstarter folks, as soon as I’m done with the Vengeance edit sweep, you’ll be hearing from me further. I’m really sorry for this ongoing delay, and that I have to ask for your patience for a little longer. Hang in there. Bone Walker is coming.

November 1, 2013 by