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Angela Korra'ti

Bone Walker

Bone Walker status update!

I’ve already told my Kickstarter backers this, but for the rest of you, I am delighted to announce that Dara has officially sent the soundtrack for Faerie Blood and Bone Walker off to be mastered!

We are very excited about this, as it means we’re very, very close to being able to finally deliver this long-overdue reward to my Kickstarter backers. But it also means that Dara’s also able to deploy a brand new album! We’re even doing a replication run for it, so that we’ll have physical CDs to sell at Conflikt next month.

Want to check out what Dara did? You can find the album available for preorder RIGHT NOW right over here. So many exciting things going on on this. We’ve got vocals from Leannan Sidhe and Alexander James Adams, you guys. We’ve got multiple awesomely played fiddles. And we’ve even got a bitchin’ remix of the Burke-Gilman Troll set, courtesy of nerdcore master Klopfenpop.

What’s NOT up yet on the preview are readings by yours truly! I’ve read excerpts from both Faerie Blood AND Bone Walker for this soundtrack, and I’m here to tell you, I have much more respect now for people who do audiobook narration for a living. I only did four pieces over a weekend, and my throat really felt the work. But Dara did a masterful job layering my readings in on top of the instrumental sets, and we’re both very proud of how those tracks came out!

Important note on those readings, too–the Bone Walker readings are a little spoilery, so if you aren’t one of the Kickstarter backers who’ve read the early draft of the book, be advised about that. I tried to not get TOO spoilery with the excerpts I chose, which are both very action-heavy, but there will be some things in there that will probably make you go “WUT” until you actually read the book.

And SPEAKING OF THE BOOK–I’m about to go on two weeks of vacation over the holidays, during which I plan to be editing like a mad editing thing, in order to get Bone Walker ready to ship by Conflikt. And now that we’re signed off on the release of the soundtrack, Dara will be able to step up the pace on the cover design as well as desktops, postcards, and posters for backers. I’ll be bringing postcards and posters to Conflikt, too!

VERY excited about this, and looking very much forward to getting Bone Walker to you all!

December 15, 2014 by
The Murkworks

Murkworks.net back to functioning normally

We actually regained power overnight, but we didn’t get the servers back up and running until we got up this morning. However, we ARE now back up and running!

And Dara even took the opportunity to upgrade the network card in our webserver, so now hopefully our websites will be much more zippy for all you lovely visitors who come by to say hi. Let us know if you see any problems, won’t you?

Hope everybody made it through the windy action okay! And all hail the power company crews who’ve been working for the last several hours to get power back on for us all!

December 12, 2014 by
The Murkworks

Possible Murkworks.net outage tomorrow due to High Wind Watch

Heads up, you guys, we have a Wind Event coming in.

The PI is reporting about the incoming wind fun tomorrow night, so here’s the obligatory MURKWORKS.NET MAY GO OFFLINE TOMORROW NIGHT advisory. Dara and I will post if our servers have to go down.

ALSO: the PI’s saying one of our local meteorologists is advising people to go home early if possible. And the current High Wind Watch is talking about the winds hitting us possibly during tomorrow night’s commute. Batten down the hatches, this could get messy.

December 10, 2014 by
Main

Another round of SF/F vs. romance

I sometimes link to Cora Buhlert, so it was nifty to see her getting linked to by Dear Author today, for her post Of Hard SF and Messy Emotions.

She was inspired to post in turn by this article at Uncanny Magazine, asking the question “Does Sex Make Science Fiction Soft?” It’s a question I think needs to get asked more often, because a lot of the SF/F genre’s tendency to go “LALALALALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” every time a relationship of any kind shows up in a story–particularly if that story is written by a woman–is maddening.

Tansy Rayner Roberts says it beautifully here:

One of the most important things that science fiction can do as a genre is to show how scientific breakthroughs and changes might actually change the way we live as humans, and that includes issues to do with sex, family, and love. Famously, social change is also the thing that science fiction has been least successful about predicting. But that just means it’s an exciting challenge for the future, right?

Maybe science fiction readers and romance readers have more in common than they might think.

Speaking as someone who likes to read both SF/F and romance: YES. YES WE DO.

And I particularly like Cora’s describing how she got into reading more modern romance, since it tracks pretty well with my own. Popular perception of the romance genre is still very much “bodice-ripper”, and that seriously isn’t fair.

There are reasons that the majority of SF/F novels I tend to read are in fact by women–because that dramatically improves the chances that I’ll get a story in which one or more female characters contribute in meaningful, multi-dimensional ways to the action. Meanwhile, over there in the romance genre, the vast majority of the works written are indeed stories in which one or more female characters contribute thusly. And indeed, my top romance novelists–and for that matter, my favorite novelists in general–are the ones in which the heroine and hero are participating as equals in moving the plot along.

Yet the SF/F genre is still flailing about this. Massively enough that I’ve seen more than one woman on the Net posting about how she wanted to like science fiction, but the genre drove her away because of its misogyny. And frankly, I can’t blame any woman who makes that decision.

As a fantasy novelist I’m certainly not leaving the genre any time soon, and I take heart from seeing others calling out SF/F for its snubbing of stories with any whiff of romance in them.

And clearly, I need to be reading Saga.

December 10, 2014 by
Movies

Movie review: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Extended Edition

I have finally acquired a copy of the Extended Edition of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and am delighted to report that as with the EE for An Unexpected Journey, I very much enjoyed the EE cut of movie #2! Which is not terribly surprising, given that I very much loved the theatrical cut. (And as a general reminder, I am indeed on Team Tauriel.)

Details behind the fold! Send the burglar in for spoilers! (And for reference, TheOneRing.net has an excellent breakdown of the specific new footage, right over here.)

Continue Reading

December 7, 2014 by
Boosting the Signal

Boosting the Signal is now officially OUT OF HIATUS

Now that I’m >this< close to finishing edits on Victory of the Hawk, I am now officially pulling Boosting the Signal out of hiatus. (As y’all might have guessed given that I put up a post today!)

So I’ll be putting out the word via my usual channels to solicit pieces. Any fellow writers reading this, if you’d like a Boosting the Signal date, talk to me!

December 5, 2014 by
Boosting the Signal, Carina Press

Boosting the Signal: A Christmas Reunion, by Susanna Fraser

I’ve mentioned fellow Carina author Susanna Fraser to y’all before–and I have indeed featured her before right here on Boosting the Signal. I’m delighted to have her back for her latest release with Carina, a romance novella just in time for the holidays. If Christmas-themed romances are your cup of spicy, aromatic tea, then you really can’t go wrong with a Fraser.

A Christmas Reunion is the story of star-crossed lovers reunited at Christmas just a week before the heroine is set to marry another man. For today’s post, Susanna’s stepping into the point-of-view of that other man—the perfectly wealthy, charming, and suitable Sir Anthony Colville.

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A Christmas Reunion

A Christmas Reunion

I need a wife. Whether or not I want one hardly matters.

Other gentlemen have the luxury of delay, or even of never wedding at all should true love fail to enter their lives or if the thought of a settled existence does not appeal. Those gentlemen either lack entailed property or have trustworthy heirs for it already, brothers or nephews or cousins who will take good care of their lands and dependents should it come to that.

I am not so fortunate. The cousin who would inherit Colville House, and with it responsibility for the health and well-being of my tenants, my lands, and my mother and sisters, is a rogue and a wastrel of the first order. Every day that I go without fathering a healthy, legitimate son and heir and, ideally, an equally healthy younger brother for him, is a day everything my grandfather, my father, and I have worked for decades to build remains at risk of utter ruin.

Lady Catherine Trevilian seemed an answer to my every prayer. She is a clever and self-possessed young lady of excellent birth, ideally suited by both family connections and inclination to be a great political hostess as well as the mistress and patroness of my estate. No, I am not passionately in love with her, but nor is she with me, so there is no imbalance there. We are friends, we can talk for hours, we can make each other laugh, and until today I was confident we would be happier together than ninety out of a hundred married couples in Society.

But today I saw her with Captain Gabriel Shepherd, the baseborn and penniless poor relation of the family who became Catherine’s guardians after her father’s demise. They had not seen each other in five years, the good captain having been driven into the army after the two of them were caught kissing under the mistletoe, if you please! I would happily regard this as a mere youthful indiscretion—after all, who of us hasn’t experienced desperate calf love at sixteen or eighteen or twenty?—except that neither of them can tear their eyes from the other for any length of time, and last night I saw them passionately kissing on the staircase.

I would never wish for Catherine to be unhappy. By any logical measure I would be a better husband for her than Captain Shepherd. Who knows if that grand Romeo-and-Juliet passion of theirs would last if she actually married him and had to live an everyday life with a man so far beneath her in birth and fortune? With me she would always have safety, stability, and a secure place in the world she was born into.

Yet I will never be able to offer her that passion, that wild intensity of feeling. And now that she’s tasted it again—and as a woman grown, no longer a girl barely out of the schoolroom—will she truly be content without it?

Still, I need a wife most desperately. I wish I knew the right path to follow.

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December 5, 2014 by