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Victory of the Hawk

Bone Walker, Victory of the Hawk

Monday morning news: Boosting the Signal, Bone Walker, and more

If you missed them over the weekend, I put up two Boosting the Signal posts featuring recent releases from Dragonwell Press–for The Blackwell Family Secret: The Guardians of Sin and Nine Planets.

Check them out, won’t you? Dragonwell is the venture spearheaded by fellow former Drollerie author Anna Kashina, and a couple other former Drollerie authors have shown up there too–notably, Cindy Lynn Speer, who wrote The Chocolatier’s Wife, which I adored. Their website is here.

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Meanwhile, as of last night, I finished the editing sweep for Bone Walker! Which means I’m now significantly closer to getting this book ready to finally deploy to Kickstarter backers, and then to the world! \m/

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And speaking of Bone Walker, don’t forget–Faerie Blood remains on sale for a tidy little 99 cents for all ebook editions! Details are here.

As always whenever I put one of my indie books on sale, the price applies to all places where the book is sold, and also to anyone who’d like to buy the book directly from me (which is the best option if you’d like the fancy PDF).

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And continuing the Bone Walker theme, don’t forget either that the soundtrack for Bone Walker is available for pre-order right over here on Bandcamp! There are preview tracks and everything!

Dara’s busily working on the cover art and liner notes for the CD, and if you’d like one of the physical discs she’s having made, a pre-order will be the best way to get it!

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And speaking of pre-orders–Victory of the Hawk IS already available for pre-order on some sites. I’ve seen it show up on Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and Google Play! So if you’re a customer on any of those sites, do consider grabbing the book. Links are on Victory’s official page!

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!

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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!

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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!

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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!

Rebels of Adalonia, Victory of the Hawk

Victory of the Hawk status update

Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, all my pals of the Internet, last night I finished the final scene in the initial draft of Victory of the Hawk. There is an Invader Zim quote that seems appropriate at this time:

I have fired the complete, LONG overdue manuscript to my editor and am now on standby for her requested developmental edits, which I am expecting to fall on my head any time now. Chances of my needing to hunker down this weekend to work on these edits are VERY high. Chances are also good that when I go up to Canada next month, I’ll be charging through line and/or copy edits by then, too. Given how long it took me to turn this thing in, I promised my editor as well that I’ll be doing everything in my power to get the edits done as fast as possible. We need to finish this puppy up before Christmas.

Meanwhile, given that our targeted release date is April 6, 2015, I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you all that if you like high fantasy and you haven’t yet read Valor of the Healer and Vengeance of the Hunter, now would be a very good time for you to do so. The two of them together are only around six bucks from Carina! And as always, you can find all the buy links you can shake a stick at on the Rebels of Adalonia page right over here. Don’t forget, either, Valor of the Healer is also available in audio format.

I have to clear Victory off my plate before I can also turn long overdue attention back to Bone Walker, but stand by for updates on that score, too. I hope to be diving back into that the instant I finish the final Victory edits.

Very much looking forward to delivering this final book to the trilogy, you guys, and closing the arc on Kestar, Julian, and Faanshi. I hope you all will enjoy it!

And also? HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS this means I’ve written six, count ’em, six complete novels. Victory will be my fourth one on actual sale, and I’m VERY much looking forward to getting Bone Walker out to you hopefully at the same time if not before, to become novel #5 on sale. And then? Then comes Queen of Souls!

Victory of the Hawk

And now, an excerpt from the tail end of Victory of the Hawk

Oh MAN, you guys. I want to gush at you about the tail end of this book so very, very much, and I can’t, because massive, and I do mean massive spoilers. But I will share with you this mostly context-free excerpt from the end of Chapter 18, about which I will simply say that this is the point in the Victory of the Hawk Movie In My Brain where the orchestra has just lain down some Okay, Shit Is Now About to Go Down ominous building chords.

If you’ve read the first two books, you’ll recognize the names of Kestar and Margaine. And yeah, let’s put this behind a cut, shall we? Since there is a spoiler here. Muahaha.

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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!

Victory of the Hawk

Victory of the Hawk excerpt, just because I can

I feel an urge to share an excerpt from Victory of the Hawk with y’all tonight, just to show how yeaaaah, I can’t write a damn thing without having music sneak in. My characters DO tend to be musicians. Like Kestar Vaarsen, being shown a picture of his elven great-grandfather:

It was a sketchbook. One part of Kestar’s mind stumbled over the seeming incongruity of so prosaic an object in an elf’s hands. That wisp of thought vanished utterly, however, as he stared at the page that Gerren had chosen—and found, rendered in black ink that still stood out on paper yellowing with age, himself.

Once the shock of recognition faded, though, he began to find the differences. Larger eyes. Longer hair, with some pulled back from the face in two intricate braids bound in what Kestar was willing to bet was either silver or gold. Sharper cheekbones, giving the subject of the picture a more lupine look than he’d ever seen in his own mirror, accentuated by the pointed ears. All of those details rained down upon Kestar’s awareness like a hail of arrows. But what stopped his breath in his throat was the instrument in the figure’s hands, larger than Kestar’s lost mandolin, with five pairs of strings instead of four. His great-grandfather’s hands, lean-fingered and nimble, were poised in mid-flight along those strings. His head was tossed back, as if bobbing to unheard rhythm. He wasn’t smiling, and in fact looked almost angry. But that meant nothing, for Kestar knew that look; it was the fierce joy of being caught up in the act of making music, of being swept away by song.

It was exactly, Celoren had told him once, how he himself looked when he played. And the sight of it, all at once, made Kestar’s hands ache for the mandolin he’d had to abandon when the Order had arrested him. No, he added to himself. I want what he’s playing. He had no name for the instrument in the sketch, but that didn’t matter. If he could hold it in his hands, if he could feel its living voice resonating against him as he played, it’d make Riniel Radmynn real.

The alert among you may be thinking, “Anna, are you trying to sneak another bouzouki player into a story?” This would be a reasonable and justifiable conclusion! But the really alert among you may also be noting that bouzoukis have eight strings, not ten. I am in fact thinking cittern here, not bouzouki.