We now return you to your regularly scheduled ability to buy Faerie Blood and Defiance on their native turf, already in progress! My editor’s put a nice top-level link right into the store on the DP site now, so it should be easy to find if you’re coming in off the homepage as well. Have at, folks, and do let me know if you have any issues purchasing either book.
Offer still stands on the CDs, though! 😉
Over the weekend, I found out from fellow author Tia Nevitt, who was trying to buy Faerie Blood, that our store at Drollerie Press had fallen over hard. We are still unfortunately undergoing technical difficulties. My editor 
serasempre
Unfortunately though this means in the meantime that if you’d like to buy Faerie Blood or Defiance, the DP store is not available to do so. Many apologies for the inconvenience, folks!
In the meantime I would recommend that if you’d like to buy Faerie Blood, my best recommendations on where to get it are Amazon for Kindle users, and Fictionwise or Scribd for non-Kindle users (and those latter two links should be DRM-free as well as far as I know).
Defiance is also available at Amazon and at Scribd.
And, if all else fails, I still have a small number of CDs with Faerie Blood on them that I’d made for the reading I attended last fall. I’ll still be happy to sell those to interested parties, $8 if you’re local to me and I can hand-deliver you the disc, or $10 if you’re non-local!
Watch this space for further news. I’ll post again when the DP store lives!
Last night was arguably the most awesome of the sessions we’ve had yet at A Terrible Beauty, for quite a few reasons!
I actually got there first, it turned out–since I wanted to make a specific point of ordering food from the pub so as to support the place, I jumped on the 101 pretty much right after I got my daily market berries. That got me down there by 6:20, plenty of time to have tasty pub foods. This gave me a chance to note with GREAT amusement when a very familiar song came over the sound system: none other than “Rant and Roar” by my very own beloved B’ys! Y’all may imagine how at home that made me feel in the place. ;D
Shortly after I showed up, session leader Matt did, getting his instruments together–and then technoshaman
solarbird
The biggest unexpected thing of the session turned out to be this QUITE boisterous dude who proclaimed more than once that despite looking Mexican, he was actually Scottish; certainly his brogue backed him up on that, so he was either actually Scottish or did a hell of an impersonation of the accent. He got in on the session with us on three different songs, one of which was–wait for it–“MARI-MAC”. Not the same arrangement I know from the B’ys, of course, but close enough that I could follow along well enough on backup, AND we had the opportunity to trade off little instrumental solos while Looks-Mexican-Sounds-Scottish guy kept cueing us in.
Which leads me to mentioning that I actually played the piccolo this time, after being initially reluctant to get it out due to it not feeling quite properly session-y enough. But then I remembered what I’d already known from Jam: i.e., it may not be Irish but it’s pretty close to tin whistle in sound, so hey! And I did in fact start pulling back bits of my previous piccolo twiddles as long as we were all tearing through “Mari-Mac”. Which, it must be said, ROCKED.
Dara gamely went through “I’m a Rover”, and I backed her up as best I could, but we’re going to need to practice that one some more, I think. I’m also seriously going to have to practice “Salmon Tails Up the Water”, better known to me and mine of course as the bridge to “Jolly Butcher”. If I’m going to be showing up at these things with my piccolo, I’m going to have to damn well start learning more of these tunes! AND, next time we get called upon for a song, I’m going to have to be prepared to belt out “Paddy Murphy”. ‘Cause I mean, seriously, next best place for that song after “GBS concert”, wut? 😉
Looks-Mexican-Sounds-Scottish guy got perhaps a wee bit TOO boisterous for this crowd when Navy guy John, the other mandolin player besides Dara, started in on “Wild Rover”. Let’s just say some of the verses took on a distinct theme of sheep-shagging, and there was almost some dancing on the bar; L-M-S-S didn’t quite make it to the bar, but he was up on a chair at one point! But hell, he was clearly having such an awesome time that you couldn’t really hold that against him at all, and it must be said that the dude COULD indeed lead a song. After we finished up, he even hugged me at the bar. Aw!
And here’s the other thing that happened when I was at the bar paying the bill for me and Dara: the bartender (who, if HIS accent is any indication, is actually Irish) gave me one of my drinks for free.
This means, ladies and gentlemen, that I have been given complimentary booze for playing music in a public place.
I think this means I’ve levelled up a bit in Musician. 😀
Well, I didn’t make it a whole month before hitting a day when I just could not make myself write anything. It’s frustrating, but it reminds me of two related and equally critical things I’ve had to learn to keep in mind when working on my projects.
One: it’s okay to have a day here and there when I don’t write anything. There are writers who can churn out several thousand words a day; I am not one of them. I do have a full-time day job, and that does slurp up a considerable amount of my daily ration of Brain. Especially during weeks when I’m running short on sleep, when I’m all thyroid-y, or both. Like this past week. I spent all of Saturday, pretty much, thinking “well gosh I should write something”, and wound up playing a lot of Unwell Mel and watching crappy movies instead.
Two: while it’s okay to have an off-day every so often, I can’t let myself default to that, not if I want to get anything done. So I made a point of writing a page in Bone Walker last night, and tonight, I yoinked some more words out of Chapter 20 of Lament.
I’m not bothering with posting actual numbers tonight, since I’m still sort of sleep-deprived and thyroidal. But this is me saying that yes, for the last two days in a row, Writing Things Did Happen. Slow, small writing things, but as long as they happen, I’ll get there in the end.
Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The second of Elizabeth Lowell’s Donovans series, Jade Island, continues the adventures of the jewel-loving Donovan family. This time around the camera’s on brother Kyle, the brother who’d gone missing in Amber Beach and who now gets his own time in the spotlight. He’s being eyed by the powerful Tang family as their way in to doing business with the Donovans–and the Tangs intend to have their unacknowledged relation Lianne Blakely try to seduce Kyle to get their in to the Donovans assured. Meanwhile, Kyle’s older brother Archer is sure Lianne must be involved with stolen jade, so he wants Kyle to put the moves on Lianne.
That our female lead Lianne is half-Chinese and driven by the desire to be accepted by the Tang family is simultaneously one of the best and one of the most disappointing things about the story: best since Lianne’s a nice change of pace from the standard whitebread heroine, disappointing because Lowell played up the “look how awesome the (American) Donovan family is compared to the (Chinese) Tang family and Lianne would be much better off marrying into the Donovans, wouldn’t she?” angle way too hard. There is some decent mileage with Lianne’s conflicted relationship with her parents as well as her grandfather, and that gives her some obvious reasons to want to be accepted by the Tangs. But it would have been nice to see some other positive aspects of the family, just to let us see that they weren’t all assholes.
But hey. As it stands, for what it is, Jade Island‘s a decent enough read, even if it’s on the fluffy side of romantic suspense. Three stars.
I’ll say this for the session that solarbird
I am ready for something more, and I hadn’t really realized this until I was called upon to play “Lukey” at last week’s session. I’ve been hit upside the head with a resurgence of the same feeling I got in the very earliest days of my Great Big Sea fandom, to wit: THIS. I WANT TO DO THIS.
Where by “this”, I mean, “play this type of music along with people who are as engaged by it as I am!”
For the first time I finally have a reason to start looking through these various songbooks I’ve got–in particular, the Celtic Guitar book, the Irish flute book, and the guitar fakebook. In which I found proper sheet music, including chords, for both “Drowsy Maggie” and “Morrison’s Jig”! I don’t appear to have “Road to Lisdoonvarna”, but a quick Google pointed me here, which more than served the purpose. (Although I’m not a hundred percent sure about that AF#m–Dara says that’s just an inversion of an F#m chord, so I can work with that, sure.)
All of this of course was leading up to the fact that I’ve got multiple recordings of both “Drowsy Maggie” and “Morrison’s Jig”, and in particular, those of you who are fans of Heather Alexander or her Heir, Alexander James Adams, will recall that on the album Insh’allah, there’s a kickass set of Road, Morrison’s, and Maggie all tearing right through one another.
Tonight, ladies and gents, I more or less played along with it! I say “more or less” mostly because I just need to memorize these chords. But you know what’s awesome? Being able to play rhythm guitar along with AJA ripping away on his fiddle. Even if it IS just a recording.
And then jumping over to The Fables on a recording of theirs that ALSO paired up Morrison’s and Maggie was fun, too–since their style was significantly different, it meant I needed to play around a bit with how to strum in support.
Altan’s got a recording with Maggie in it, but they don’t line it up with Morrison’s, they’ve got it instead with “Rakish Paddy” and “Harvest Storm”. Yet here too the style was significantly different.
I came out of this pretty sure I’ll properly recognize “Drowsy Maggie” now, anyway! And a few more times playing it, I should have it down cold.
Something else I’ll need to consider, too: I’ve been mostly a guitarist the last few years, but I’m also a goddamn flute player, and I want to remind myself of that! However, my piccolo ain’t exactly in keeping with the overall idea of an Irish session, so I’m thinking I’ll have to break out the bamboos instead. Most likely Jade, who’s in E minor, and Sparrow, who’s in G (which will also let me cover D), but possibly also Sorrel, who’s in A minor.
I look forward to the Bringing of It next week. 😀 Session homework FTW!
But it’s better than zero!
Mostly nicely tired from going out to play music at tonight’s session, and didn’t get home until ten or so. Which didn’t leave much time to write, so I opted for just a couple hundred words of something. That something’s gone into the still-untitled Elizabeth/Ross story, and in them, our heroine gets to flip out as our hero begs her to have another go at the vision that just clued her in about the murder of his sister.
Suffice to say Elizabeth ain’t havin’ NONE of that.
There will be movie watching tomorrow night, but I’m going to aim for a similar small chunk of effort afterwards, just to keep to the Do Something Every Day Dammit resolution. Twelve days in on the year and so far so good!