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The Free Court of Seattle

Bone Walker, Faerie Blood, The Free Court of Seattle

New Faerie Blood and Bone Walker print editions

After working with fellow indie authors in NIWA for a few years now, I’ve decided that it’s stupid that I don’t have print copies of my books available on Amazon (and by extension, a couple other places that carry books published via CreateSpace/KDP). Some time in the next month or so, I’m going to fix this problem. There are going to be new Faerie Blood and Bone Walker print editions!

The particular motivation here: I’m flat out of copies of Faerie Blood, since I sold my last remaining five copies at Norwescon (yay!). I’m down to only five copies left of Bone Walker as well. These will be the last remaining espresso-book-machine copies of that book!

So if anybody wants ’em, this would be a real good time to get ’em. I bumped the price down to $12 at Norwescon after I sold out of Faerie Blood, and will keep that price until they’re gone. Likewise, I have a couple of copies with misprinted covers, and a couple of damaged ones, available for only $5. (The damaged ones were ones I’d signed and mailed out to Kickstarter backers. But they were damaged by the Post Office in transit and came back to me.)

Since I’m doing whole new print editions, I’ll also do a minor edit pass on both books. Notably, I’ll finally correct that typo in Chapter 20 of Faerie Blood in the name of the demon, Azganaroth! But I’ll fix a few other minor typos as well as I find them. Dara will make any adjustments necessary in the PDF and print masters, including the edition numbering in the books’ front matter pages.

Once I finish the edit passes, I’ll deploy the print PDFs up to Amazon. I’ll be able to get author proof copies and vet them before finally releasing the new editions for sale.

The end result? Hopefully, more discoverability and ease of purchase for people who don’t already know me or follow me on social media. Hopefully nicer covers, too! Once I deal with any hiccups in the process, I’ll deploy print books this way moving forward. I’ll be doing Walk the Wards this way as well.

Any questions? Talk to me in the comments!

Bone Walker, Faerie Blood, The Free Court of Seattle

Faerie Blood and Bone Walker sale for the holidays!

Faerie Blood Second Edition Cover

Y’all may recall that I had Faerie Blood and Bone Walker on sale during November for Orycon. Well, I’m extending that sale through the holidays!

What

So you can get the ebook editions of these two books for 99 cents each at your favorite ebook vendor. And! If you’re print-inclined, I’m also waiving the shipping costs for the print editions if you’d like to order them directly from me!

This sale will run through the end of December, to give folks plenty of time to get either title for Yule, or even a few days after. If anyone happens to get an ereader and has a hankering to find something to read to put on it. Because I am HELPFUL. ;D

Where

If you aren’t already familiar with the books, you can read samples on the official Faerie Blood and Bone Walker pages. You can click over to your favorite ebook vendor from those links as well, or from the Books2Read links for them, which are:

Faerie Blood on Books2Read

Bone Walker on Books2Read

If you’d like to order the print books, you can do so on my Square store. You can also use the merch pages hosted by Crime and the Forces of Evil on Bandcamp, which are here and here.

If you don’t want to go through a vendor, you can pay me directly via Paypal. I go into more detail about how you can pursue other options on the Buying From Me page. If you have any questions about how you might pay me for either book, contact me!

Any questions?

Talk to me! And do spread the word!

The Free Court of Seattle, Warder Soul

Now introducing: Warder Soul!

I am delighted to report, for those of you who didn’t already see me post this on the social networks, that Book 3 of the Free Court series now has an official working title! Until and unless something better presents itself, the book will now be called Warder Soul.

Though really, I’m pretty happy with this, so I doubt it’ll be changed. It fits nicely with the short, punchy two-word titles the previous two books have. It also continues an unofficial theme of Book 1’s title being about Kendis, book 2’s being about what’s going on with Elessir, and now book 3’s title tying in with Christopher. And there’s also a theme of “blood”, “bone”, and “soul”, which I like.

My In Progress page has been updated accordingly, and I can also now create a whole new post category as well!

The Free Court of Seattle

And now, a short list of things I will not be calling Book 3 of the Free Court series

The One With Christopher on the Cover: Even though that would be entirely accurate. And I can safely say that even without having gotten work on the cover art going yet! (Because Christopher WILL be on the cover of this book.)

The One Where I Am Terrible to Everybody in the Cast: Because:

  1. If a writer does her job, that’s usually EVERY book in a series! And it’d be like saying “The X-Files Episode With the Alien”.
  2. I’m not actually going to be terrible to EVERYBODY. Just mostly everybody! Certain characters actually get off pretty lightly in this plot. 😀

My Latest Awesome Story That You Should Totally Read: Even though every writer feels exactly like that about every new release. Don’t think we’re not tempted to call these books that, either, because we so totally are.

The Queen of George Street: Even though George Street is very likely to make an appearance in this story, and despite how Bone Walker actually starts with a not-mentioned-by-name-but-TOTALLY-actually-this Great Big Sea concert, and despite how “Old Black Rum” IS one of my and Dara’s favorite Great Big Sea songs to do.

The Hunger Games: Because I’m pretty sure that title is taken.

BUT ANYWAY.

More seriously, I am very pleased to actually have a clear idea of how this book is going to go, now. I continue to be delighted with Scrivener, and the ability it gives me to organize my work and have planning notes immediately available alongside the actual prose.

And, I’m hoping that if I have a coherent game plan out of the gate, this will serve me in good stead for actually writing this thing a lot faster than I have produced previous books. Some of y’all may remember that when I wrote Faerie Blood for the 2003 Nanowrimo, I did actually have about half a book’s worth of outline before November 1st that year. At the time, I felt like having that plan available was a strong contributing factor to being able to actually chug through the requisite word count.

Because here’s the thing: thanks to having a full-time day job in addition to doing the writing, as well as a strong interest in playing music as a hobby, I write real slow. Without a clear idea of what the hell I should be doing in a story, I can often go for days on end without actually writing new words, because I’m mulling the next advancement in the plot in the back of my head. And I gotta cut that out, if I want to keep producing words. I need to up my game, and pull in the turnaround time from the beginning of a book to the end.

So now, thanks to Scrivener–not to mention a lot of deeply satisfying bouncing of ideas off of Dara–I have a full five-act game plan for this story. The next thing I’ll need to do is to take this overall plan and see if I can do a chapter breakdown on it.

Then I’ll start some serious writing in earnest, to go along with the couple of thousand words I’ve already got. If all goes well, sometime by the end of this year, I’ll have a new book to offer you all!

And somewhere in here I will also figure out what to actually call it. Till then, it’s Book 3!

Shake the Light, The Free Court of Seattle

And now, a teaser for upcoming books!

Book 3 of the Free Court of Seattle series doesn’t have a working title yet. But as of tonight, it does have a one-sentence summary! And I’m working on a longer one as well, which will be used to plan out an outline, and get me going on the actual writing.

This is how I do it, thanks to a technique I picked up from back in the day when I was going to Writer’s Weekend. Start with one sentence, along the lines of a “thirty second elevator pitch”, or as I also like to think of it, “what would be listed on the Tivo if this were a movie or a TV show”.

Then take that one sentence and expand it into five. Then take each of those five sentences and expand it into a paragraph. Then take those paragraphs and expand each of their sentences into a paragraph. By which point I should in theory have a full plot synopsis!

And I’m getting that ball rolling with both Book 3 and with Shake the Light, the Free Court prequel that will be the origin story of Millicent Merriweather.

Here’s the single sentence for Book 3:

“When impossible wild magic hurls them to St. John’s, Newfoundland, Kendis Thompson and Christopher MacSimidh must seek the aid of Christopher’s Warder family to get him home again before he’s struck down by his own magic—or by the mysterious assailants out to take his life.”

And here’s the five-sentence summary for Shake the Light:

“The first daughter in two generations of her family to carry the full strength of the Warder magic, Millicent Wray is determined to find a city of her own to protect and defend. Seattle, Washington seems like just the place, for its Wards are down, its Warder gravely ill. But as she takes on the burden of restoring Seattle’s magical protections, Millie soon discovers that malevolent forces are rising from the depths of Lake Washington, bent on claiming the ailing Warder Catherine Heino’s power for their own—and Catherine, her strength shattered by polio, is desperate enough to bargain with them. Now Millie, with her Texas-born tenacity and her trusty shotgun Butch, is all that stands between the vulnerable city and the hungry spirits from the lake. Can she lay the kodama to rest before they claim all of Seattle—and Catherine’s life—with their vengeance?”

The five-sentence versions of both of these summaries are about to go onto my In Progress page!

And boy howdy am I looking forward to both of these plots. Insert authorial muahahaha here. 😀

The Free Court of Seattle

So about Book 3 of the Free Court of Seattle series…

Serious planning for this book has now COMMENCED. By which I mean Dara and I had an extensive brainstorming session about this last night, with the happy result that now I have a much better idea of what is going to happen in this book. Enough that I have begun to sketch out the overall plot structure, which will then lead me into doing a proper outline.

And THAT will lead me into beginning to be able to write this thing VERY soon.

What can you expect? Without getting spoilery, you can expect that this book will feature all of the following:

  • An attempt on Christopher’s life
  • Inter-Court and intra-Court politics among the Sidhe, including followup on what’s going on with House Kirlath
  • Magic all over the damn place
  • Followup on Christopher’s backstory
  • More pieces falling into place to lead to what gets hinted at in the song “Anarchy Now”
  • Kendis being a geek actually serving a plot-useful purpose
  • Relationship advancement on multiple fronts
  • An on-camera srs bznz kitchen party
  • A plot-relevant on-camera screech-in

And if you know anything about Newfoundland customs, you can guess that last but very much not least, this story is going to feature action in St. John’s, Newfoundland! Which will also let me pull a couple of important members of Christopher’s family on camera: Thomas Hallett, Christopher’s uncle and the current Warder of St. John’s; and Caitlin Hallett, Thomas’s daughter, who’s next in line to Ward the city when her father passes.

This story will also introduce Gabien Desroches, my first Quebecois Warder character. He is a young man of the Quebecois Warder lineage–Les Gardiens, as they are called in Quebec–and he’s in Newfoundland on his turn at the traveling many young Warders do before they commit to a city. Which is how he’ll be meeting Caitlin. Bilingual sparks will be flying, and yes, Caitlin and Gabien will also be taking the lead in a later story of their own.

You guys, this is going to rock. 😀