All Posts By

Angela Korra'ti

Faerie Blood

And now, the winners of the Faerie Blood giveaway!

As promised, ladies and gentlemen, I give unto you the winners of the Faerie Blood giveaway! If you see your name on this list, please contact me ASAP to claim your prize! If you win an ebook copy, I will need a valid email address to send you a link to download the ebook! If you win a print copy, I will need you to send me your snailmail address so that I can mail you your book before I leave for my Canada vacation!

Print copy winners–if I don’t hear from you by 8pm Pacific time TOMORROW NIGHT (that’s Friday, July 20th), I will have to draw a new winner! I want to send out the winner copies by mail before I leave for Canada, and my only chance to do that will be on Saturday! So do please claim your prize promptly!

Now without further ado, courtesy of your friend and mine the Random Number Generator, here we go!

Ebook #1 goes to David Stayduhar! (Who I primarily communicate with on Facebook, so David, please ping me there!)

Ebook #2 goes to Misty, who I primarily communicate with either on the MurkMUSH or on Google+! Misty, you know what to do!

Print copy #1 goes to Catherine Lundoff who I communicate with in several places, so Catherine, take your pick!

Print copy #2 goes to userinfome_fein on Livejournal!

Congratulations, winners, I hope you’ll enjoy my book! And many thanks to all who spread the word of the contest!

July 19, 2012 by
Books

One more quick book roundup post before I scamper off to Canada

Here are a few quick books I’ve picked up this past week!

  • San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats, by Mira Grant. Because how could I NOT? I mean, DAMN. Newsflesh universe, Comic-Con, Browncoats, ZOMBIES. Read it on the way home from work today. SHINY.
  • The Chocolatier’s Wife, by Cindy Lynn Speer. I bought this when it came out via Drollerie, and I’m buying it again now that it’s been re-released by Dragonwell Publishing, because I liked this book that much and wanted to support the author by buying new copies! Bought the ebook AND print editions, so I’ll need to count this twice.
  • The Bad Beginning, by Lemony Snicket. The first book of A Series of Unfortunate Events, snatched up because it was being offered for the Nook for .99! So I figured what the hey.

84 for the year!

July 18, 2012 by
Music

Things I have NOT yet observed in Quebecois music

As a followup to my previous post, I would also now like to present to you this list of things I have not yet observed in Quebecois music, but which I’d pay good money to hear. Or commission. I’m just SAYIN’. 😉

  • Bouzouki players. Because who says the violin players get to have all the fun in these songs? Yes, I know, the Irish bouzouki is a modern instrument. But this only goes to prove my point that if we wish to have bouzouki players appearing in the lyrics of songs that’ll be sung in a couple more hundred years, clearly we must start writing them NOW. Hell, if I can pull an entire novel with a bouzouki player in a lead role out of my brain, surely somebody out there can whip up a song or two about a bouzouki player and his or her general awesomeness!
  • Zombies. Because I have the following now stuck in my head:

    Dans la ville de Seattle
    Il y a une zombie fille
    Gris comme la poussière
    Traînante dans le sommeil
    Il y a trois capitaines
    Elle veut manger leurs cerveaux

    I blame this on the Charbonniers’ excellent “Dans la ville de Paris”, the first complete Quebecois song I have learned how to sing. (NOT the first French song–that honor belongs to “Trois Navires de Ble”!) Because I mean, damn, the girl’s trying to get her dad’s attention after three days of being stuck in a tomb? What ELSE is she about to do but eat his brains, I ask you?

    Also, I blame it on my general obsession with zombies, but as you know, Internets, I AM a giant nerd.

  • On the general theme of ‘galant, tu perds ton temps’, I wish to see queer belles who, after blowing off the nearest capitaines who are trying ever so hard to get their attention, promptly snog each other.
  • On the flip side of the previous, a couple of capitaines snogging each other wouldn’t go amiss, either!
  • And speaking of Galant Tu Perds Ton Temps, While I am 99.99 percent certain that those girls are not actually singing about “Monsieur Pants” in the song “Les promesses du galant” (which actually queues up if you go and visit their website, if you want to hear what I’m talking about), I now totally want to hear a song all about Monsieur Pants. userinfoeeyorerin claimed to me that he must surely be a Quebecois folk hero, renowned for traveling the province and donating his pants to needy belles. Or perhaps at least ATTEMPTING to donate his pants to allegedly needy belles who then proceed to laugh themselves silly about his outrageous pants, which seems rather more in keeping with the entire actual genre. That this is not a song that exists makes me sad, Internets!
  • I have yet to see a song about a barista refusing the advances of overcaffeinated computer geeks. But then, that may be a song that’ll work way better in Seattle.
  • Another song that’ll work way better if set in Seattle: a ditty about my marketboys. But then, I probably better still write that one, when I build up enough French! It’ll work something like:

    What will you sell me, boys of the market?
    What will you sell me, handsome boys?
    (Fill in a name here) sells me oranges

    (…. and you keep adding in a new line for a new boy every verse!)

    (New name) sells me bananas
    (New name) sells me apples
    And (new name) sells me the berries, the red red berries, the red red berries of May

Yeah. 🙂

July 17, 2012 by
Music

The things I learn from Quebecois music

I’ve been having great fun, O Internets, learning that yeah, Quebecois trad is pretty much only a skip over from Celtic trad in general when it comes to the overall themes that show up in the songs. As I have frequently joked, the themes of Celtic music are Whiskey, Sex, and Death, and a lot of that applies to Quebec trad as well–though you could make a decent case for Religion also being a theme of the genre, in this case, and for swapping out Whiskey for Wine!

With that in mind, I have been taking note of overall character archetypes and themes I’ve spotted in songs I’ve been trying to translate, or which I have been learning off of translated lyrics from various bands’ websites or from lyrics wikis. I present for your amusement and edification the following things I have spotted in Quebecois trad music:

People:

Band members (inserting themselves into their own songs)
Belles (sleeping)
Belles (waking up)
Belles (who are daughters of rich fathers, and pretending to be daughters of the town executioner)
Belles (who want their lovers to murder their mothers)
Belle (who really seriously want their parents to BACK OFF ALREADY when it comes to their chosen galants)
Belles (with unfortunate choices in galants who do not clue in when they’re supposed to making with the snogging)
Dragons (who are actually human soldiers as opposed to mythical giant lizards)
Fishermen (who have issues with their boats tipping over)
Galants (who may or may not be wasting their time trying to win the affections of les belles)
Galants (who are kind of thick-headed when it comes to seeing opportunities to snog their belles in the woods)
Husbands (who lament the scolding of their wives)
Innkeepers (who have issues with their tables not having enough legs)
Knights (transformed into dragons by cranky witches)
Lawyers (who belles do not for the love of GOD want to marry, except their fathers are pressuring them into it)
Mothers (who somehow manage to be concerned about their sons even after being murdered and having their hearts removed, Edgar Allan Poe much?)
Parents (cranky about their daughters accepting the affections of unsuitable galants)
Parents (anxious about the chosen dangerous professions of their sons)
Priests (pursued by women)
Priests (pursuing women)
Priests (who are actually disguised gallants)
Princesses (who are doleful about their knights getting transformed into dragons)
Roofers (who have issues with falling off of roofs)
Shepherdesses (cranky about the shooting of their ducks)
Soldiers (successfully wooing belles)
Soldiers (NOT successful at wooing belles)
Sons of kings (who make shepherdesses cranky for shooting their ducks)
Vintners (who are very bad at making wine)
Vintners’ assistants (who are very GOOD at making wine)
Violin players (who are preferred lovers, not that there’s any bias in that song or anything)
Witches (going around transforming nice young knights into dragons, I mean, the NERVE of some people)
Wives (cranky about their husbands drinking too much, messing around with other women, or both of the above)
Wives (who are not terribly good at household chores, and trust me, you don’t want to know what this one girl wound up doing to her cat)
Wives (who want to poison their husbands)

Animals:

Blue Jays
Cats
Dogs
Dragons (who are actually transformed knights)
Ducks (STILL not sure what the heck they were doing next to the wedding bed in that song)
Hawks
Horses
Nightingales (singing)
Partridges
Pigeons
Robins
Snow Geese

Locations:

Bedrooms (in which locale the activity of the song ought to be obvious)
Churches (in which priests are frequently pursued and/or pursuing, or which young lovers are illicitly meeting)
Inns (all SORTS of shenanigans going on in inns)
Kitchens (more shenanigans)
Mills (yet more shenanigans, lots of mills in these songs)
Woods (oh my yes with the shenanigans)

Things:

Boats
Bottles (generally presumed to be containing wine)
Food
Guns
Poison
Swords
Violins

July 17, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

Faerie Blood on the Kobo store, reported typos, and bonus bouzouki pics!

In the interests of further updates about my self-pub situation, I report that Smashwords has finally approved me for ‘premium’ status in their catalogue, which means they’ll deploy me out to other sites for which they function as an aggregator. I was going to use this as a means to get onto Kobo, except that Kobo’s new “Writing Life” program has finally gone live!

And so now I’m working with the Kobo site directly, similarly to how I’m working with Amazon and iTunes and B&N. For those of you out there who have Kobo readers of any stripe, you can now buy Faerie Blood for the Kobo right over here! I particularly like how the site hooks up to Goodreads–if you scroll the page down, you’ll see the Goodreads reviews for the book down at the bottom. I got that to work by making sure Goodreads had a record for the new ebook edition, using the same ISBN. Nifty, huh?

Meanwhile, speaking of Faerie Blood, one of my sharp-eyed Kickstarter backers (who happens to also be one of my coworkers) reported a typo in the book that I hadn’t caught AT ALL before the Second Edition was deployed! And in fact, this typo dates all the way back to the Drollerie Edition, so it hadn’t gotten caught then either! The typo is a misspelling of the name of the demon Azganaroth–in one part of the chapter, there’s an extra ‘a’ in there, so it comes out as ‘Azganaraoth’ instead. Oops. *^_^*;; I will be fixing this ASAP for the electronic editions, as well as for the second print run of the book. Those of you who have first run print copies, or who will be shortly getting them, you get to have a unique typo in your copies!

(All print copies have now been mailed out to Kickstarter backers, minus the ones I’m hand-delivering! All copies going to people who have directly bought from me should be going out by the end of this week as well.)

Naturally, I promptly signed my coworker’s copy because people who report typos to me get their books signed. New rule! And he’s volunteered to beta read for Bone Walker. I will be taking him up on that, because clearly, I need him!

Also! My aforementioned coworker/backer was curious about Christopher’s bouzouki in Faerie Blood, so just in case any of the rest of you are also curious about what a bouzouki looks like, you can find an excellent picture of one right over here. This is the photo page on the website of Le Vent du Nord, and in the first album of photos on that link, you’ll find a picture of their guitarist/bouzouki player. Christopher’s bouzouki looks a lot like Simon Beaudry’s, except maybe a little darker. And while I have yet to inspect M. Beaudry’s bouzouki up close, I’m pretty sure his doesn’t have an inscription in Gaelic. 😉

July 17, 2012 by
Faerie Blood

Faerie Blood now on more iTunes stores + print copy status!

I got asked to deploy Faerie Blood to the Norwegian iTunes store today, so I have gone ahead and done that! And because I could, I also deployed to the Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Ireland iTunes stores. I will keep adding new iTunes stores by request if people want ’em, so if I don’t have your country covered yet, by all means, folks, talk to me! I have updated the Faerie Blood page with the new direct iTunes links.

Meanwhile, a new confirmed Paypal sale means I have 14 copies left for general sale out of the first print run. I have a total of ten open requests for copies, for which I have not yet received actual payment–but I will continue to give priority to paying customers. So if you want a copy, please do pay me sooner rather than later, to guarantee you’ll get one out of this first batch! If you don’t make this batch and you still want one anyway, also let me know about that so that I can start getting an estimate of how many I’ll need for a second print run.

And don’t forget, you guys–I also have two print copies (as well as two ebook copies) up for grabs in the still-open Faerie Blood giveaway! I have a nice little number of entries in that now, but do please keep spreading the word, and do keep those entries coming! The entry pool’s still pretty small, though, so if you jump in, your chances ARE good right now!

Any questions, give me a shout!

July 9, 2012 by
Books

Post-Westercon book roundup post

So there I was at Westercon yesterday, wandering through the dealers room like ya do, when I came across a table run by these folks! PNW-based organization of independent writers, banding together to establish quality standards for their work–which struck me as, of course, AWESOME. But just as importantly, OH LOOK BOOKS. So I stopped to say hi, indicate my sympathy by holding up my OWN big box of books I was hauling around with (because yeah, over a dozen copies of Faerie Blood is pretty much my card-carrying membership in the club of Great Sympathy for Independent Writers), and ask them to tell me about the books on their table. Which ultimately led me to getting:

  • Fugitives from Earth, by Brad Wheeler. SF/Space opera. Pitched to me as containing political and industrial intrigue, OHNOEZ!
  • Faces in the Water, by Tonya Macalino. Fantasy/paranormal. An artist is trapped in the flooded ruins of Venice under quarantine, only to discover that legends are coming to life in the city.

(Big props to the NIWA folks for being very personable and signing both the books for me, and to Tonya in particular for telling me something interesting about most of the books on the table! Also, big giggles for NIWA’s little questionnaire card asking how many books you buy in a year. I noted that “all of them” was not an option on this card, so had to settle for >10!)

And I also got from the Book Universe folks, because really I can’t go to a PNW con without getting SOMETHING from them:

  • Whedonistas!, edited by Lynne Thomas and Deborah Stanish, by the same fine team that brought us Chicks Dig Time Lords. I’ve been meaning to get this for ages.
  • The Tempering of Men, by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. Because even if I haven’t been reading this series yet, Dara HAS, and she totally wanted this.

Meanwhile, I finally ordered a copy of this from Third Place Books, which I’ve also been meaning to do for ages:

  • The Last Hot Time, by John M. Ford. Previously read as a library book, deeply appreciated as an early urban fantasy novel and a pretty excellent portrayal of elves.

80 for the year!

July 8, 2012 by