Browsing Tag

faerie blood

Faerie Blood

Ahoy, beta readers! All hands on deck!

I have just completed my proofing sweep through Dara’s layout of Faerie Blood, the second edition–and now Dara and I need your help, people!

We need at least three sets of eyes to read over the PDF for us. Unlike with Lament of the Dove, what we need here is not big-picture proofing–this time we do in fact need nitpicky, fine-tooth-comb level inspection! We’re looking for any layout problem here, whether big or small, so that Dara can adjust it in the final version.

Also, since I’m updating “present day” in this edition of Faerie Blood, I’ve had to adjust various references to time. Anyone who has the book’s first edition handy and who would like to sanity-check the changes I’ve made, that would be very good as well.

So if you’d like in, email me or DM me on the social network of your choice, and I’ll send you the PDF! Note that the only modifications we expect to have to do at this point are to add the names of any appropriate Kickstarter supporters to the Dedication page and to the Acknowledgements. But other than that, the text should be considered final.

March 24, 2012 by
Bone Walker, Faerie Blood

Good gods this is going to be a book cover!

I’m getting excited over here, people, I gotta say. Because OMG OMG OMG look what Kiri Moth sent me tonight! (Those of you on the social networks, you saw this already, but here it is for LJ and DW and blog and Goodreads peeps!)

OMG a Cover!

OMG a Cover!

It’s a mockup, I know, but HOLY CRAP it’s starting to sink in for me that I’m going to have an actual, honest-to-gods, drawn-by-a-professional-artist book cover. ON MY BOOK. That I’m going to be printing and making for all of you folks out there! I can’t wait to fire up the Kickstarter. Dara and I need to make a video, the last thing I need to do before submitting the project for review. And this shiny, shiny thing from Kiri is going to figure prominently in the You Want to Support My Kickstarter, Don’t You? Video of Awesomeness. 😀

Because I mean damn. I’m swooning over this already and this is just the mockup, people! I cannot wait to see what it looks like in final full-color glory!

March 14, 2012 by
Bone Walker, Faerie Blood

Another peek at Kendis!

Kiri Moth has sent me another sketch of Kendis, you guys, check it out! As per the good advice I got in from fellow author Tia Nevitt, Kiri used pics of the classical violinist Midori as a pose guide, and now we’ve got a much neater pose here.

I’ve asked her to tweak a couple things about Kendis’ features here–this outfit, while awesome, makes her look a bit Romani–and she also looks a bit too old and a bit too much like Gina Torres. And while having a young Gina Torres play Kendis in the Faerie Blood Movie in My Brain is delicious, delicious awesomesauce, we should avoid having her look too Torres-like on the cover.

But that said? WOW. We’re getting closer and I cannot wait to see the final version!

Another Look at Kendis

Another Look at Kendis

ETA: OMG, and now I have a color version of Kendis as well! 😀 😀 Violin/fiddle players, let me know: do you think the instrument as drawn in this picture is too big? userinfosolarbird thinks it is, but I’m not sure. Let me know!

Kendis Thompson IN COLOR

Kendis Thompson IN COLOR

March 11, 2012 by
Bone Walker, Faerie Blood

Bone Walker Kickstarter update!

Just to let you guys know I have NOT forgotten or abandoned this, O Internets: there is new news on the Bone Walker Kickstarter front!

As I’ve previously reported, I’m in talks with a cover artist for not only Faerie Blood, but also Bone Walker and the still as of yet unnamed Book 3. But as of this week, I’m also in possession of an editing agreement I’m about to square away!

Which means that once I hand off Lament of the Dove to Carina’s submissions queue, the big plan for March is going to be finishing Bone Walker. Then I shall hand it off to be edited in the latter half of April, with a target of having it back to me by early May.

And! I’ve pinged Third Place for an appointment to discuss printing of Faerie Blood with them. Dara (who will be firing up her considerable layout experience to do the layout for the print edition) and I will be going to talk to them about that soon!

Which all means, O Internet, that April is beginning to look very, very good for a target timeframe for the Bone Walker Kickstarter. As soon as I have all the numbers for projected costs to bring unto you the second edition of Faerie Blood as well as Bone Walker, I am going to officially get this show on the road.

Getting excited about this, and I hope you guys will join me for the fun!

February 22, 2012 by
Bone Walker, Faerie Blood

Plan of action for Faerie Blood, second edition

For those of you who may be wondering what the status is on my plans for Faerie Blood and Bone Walker, there are a few new developments I’d like to share!

First and foremost, I’ve been doing a bit of judicious Googling and also asking around to get a sense of whether I should use one of the services available to deploy a new version of Faerie Blood out into the wild, or whether I can save myself some money and just do it myself. The answer to this question appears to be the latter. I had a lovely little email exchange with romance novelist Courtney Milan, who kindly advised me on how she got her recent self-pubbed Unraveled out: i.e., she deployed directly to Amazon, B&N, and Apple herself, and used Smashwords to hit a couple other services like Kobo and Sony. Moving forward, I’m going to be looking with more depth into how to do these things.

Secondly, I also asked Ms. Milan if she had preferred software for creating her ebook editions. She pointed me at this excellent guide by Guido Henkel about how to do ebook formatting, with a focus on epub and mobi versions. Boil it down to its essentials, and what you get is “do a bit of tweaking to your original manuscript file, throw in some HTML and CSS, and then fling it through Calibre”. As y’all know, I’m a professional techie. HTML and CSS? Not a problem. So yeah, I can totally do this formatting myself.

(Mad, mad props both to Ms. Milan and to Mr. Henkel, by the way. If you’re a romance reader you should totally go read Ms. Milan’s Turner series, the first two books of which I have reviewed here and here! And if you’re not already familiar with the ebook creation process and you want to be, you should go read Mr. Henkel’s guide and thank him for his work!)

Third, in commencing the tweaking of Faerie Blood‘s previously released RTF file, I’m finding some things that need tweaking. After several hard rounds of editing on Lament of the Dove, my older tendency towards ellipses, which is still present in Faerie Blood, is standing out hard. So I’m going to clean those up.

Also, since this book was originally written in 2003, its ‘present day’ setting is in fact 2003, and that now reads a bit weird to 2012 eyes–especially in regards to things like my mentions of older-style cell phones and passing references to pay phones as well. I’m going to tweak these things a bit since it won’t impact the story any, just incidental details to give a better ‘present day’ feel to any new readers who may pick me up. I am aware that this will require me to adjust my perceptions on ages and timing of certain things that took place before this novel; that’s okay. None of those things are actually in released work yet, so they’re still flexible!

And! I was sad to have realized that the first edition of Faerie Blood didn’t have a proper dedication or a proper acknowledgements section. I will be correcting both of these problems, along with an Author’s Note that will mention the changes I’m describing here.

Fourth, I will definitely be pursuing working with Third Place Books (and possibly also the University Bookstore) to engage their espresso book machine to generate any print copies of Faerie Blood–about which I am more excited now that I’ve learned that these machines are not restricted to trade paperback size. So step one here is going to be to get userinfosolarbird to do a proper print layout for a PDF version, and step two will be arranging to hand that off to be printed.

Fifth, I am investigating a particular artist recommended to me by userinfotiggymalvern, and have had a hopeful initial email exchange with her, including sending her a review copy of Faerie Blood‘s Drollerie edition to see if she wants to commit to doing new cover art for me. More on this as it happens!

Last but not least, please note that all of these plans do not preclude proceeding with a Kickstarter for Bone Walker! Before I move forward with that, though, I’d really like to nail down a cover artist, since it will be important to me to have professional-looking art that can give all three books of this projected trilogy a unifying style. More on this as it happens, too!

February 18, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

Would you buy a print edition of Faerie Blood?

So, Carina Press has said no on Faerie Blood. This leaves before me the question of what to do with it next, and at this point, I have three problems with this novel when it comes to pitching it in the current market:

  1. There are already a whole lot of urban fantasy novels out there;
  2. I’m not romance-y enough for the paranormal romance end of the spectrum, read, I have no sex in this novel, and there’s barely any kissing;
  3. I’m also not dark/gritty/apocalyptic enough for the urban fantasy end of the spectrum. There’s not much actual violence in this book, and my heroine isn’t a badass, she’s a fiddle-playing geek who only just finds out about her fey heritage and the magic she’s inherited from her mother–she doesn’t have much time in the story to actually do anything seriously badassed with it.

Given these things, I am extremely dubious about my ability to pitch the novel to any further big pubs or agents. For one thing, I’ve already pitched it to most of the big pubs, with the exception of DAW, and the main reason I haven’t sent it to them at this point is my aforementioned wariness of the current urban fantasy market. For another thing, I’ve also already pitched it to the agents in which I’m actively interested. Part of me is still nagging that the couple dozen agents I’ve pitched it to isn’t enough work on pitching it–but on the other hand, a lot of the agents out there seem to have gotten slammed with so many queries now that their slush piles are crazytalk and their response times have accordingly increased dramatically. There are some agents whose response time has gotten to be over a year, and that’s assuming you get back a response at all.

So given all this, I’m seriously tempted to go the self-pub route with Faerie Blood and any further related stories, and focus other energies on newer things to be pitched to the big pubs.

My question for you therefore, O Internets, is this: if I were to do a limited run of print copies of Faerie Blood, would you buy one? I’m thinking about it because there are two Espresso book machines right here in Seattle, and one of them is right down the hill from my house at Third Place Books. I have two books (by other people) that are the output of this machine, and while it had trouble with the thicker one which is over 500 pages, the shorter one, which is comparable to Faerie Blood in length, is not badly assembled at all. If I were to get new, cover-quality art for the novel, it’s conceivable that I could therefore do a small set of print copies.

So I’m putting hard thought into this. I am looking at Third Place’s posted rates for their printing services, and pondering the possibility of doing a Kickstarter to raise the money.

Talk to me, Internets. Would you be interested? Because if I get enough people going hell yeah, I will move forward with this.

ETA: It has now been suggested to me on Google+ that I should consider a Kickstarter not for Faerie Blood specifically, but rather, for finishing Book 2, Bone Walker–and offering print copies of Faerie Blood as a potential incentive! I like this idea quite a bit and am going to be thinking about it very hard. If any of you out there would like this too, I really want to know about it!

December 14, 2011 by
Faerie Blood, Valor of the Healer

Faerie Blood and Lament of the Dove status report

As of this writing, Faerie Blood has finally vanished off of Fictionwise–and by extension, ereader.com, since Fictionwise owns that site and to the best of my knowledge, they use the same database. This means now that the novel shouldn’t be available for sale anywhere at all.

It’s a bit weird, being back to square one with this book, even if at a smaller scale than several traditionally published authors I know who’ve had a series fold out from underneath them. At the same time, though, it’s also a bit of a relief.

Faerie Blood is now in the queue at Carina Press, for all the same general reasons I was interested in them before: i.e., they’re queer-friendly, they’re digital and therefore appealing to me as a tech geek, they’re taking all genres and do a lot of ‘other genres with heavy romantic elements’ stuff in particular, they now have a solid and established track record. In this specific case, though, I’ve also noted that they’ve published at least a couple of authors who’d been previously published elsewhere–at least one author for example who was previously published through Dorchester. So I’m hoping that this’ll mean they’ll be receptive to my work.

Relatedly, I am one, count it, one single chapter away from finishing the sixth draft of Lament of the Dove. Once that happens, I will be putting out a call for beta readers. (I’m cognizant that we’re moving into the Christmas/Solstice season, though, so I will be trying to schedule around that, and targeting sending Lament off in early January.) Watch this space for further details on that, people!

December 6, 2011 by