All Posts By

Angela Korra'ti

New samples for Valor and Vengeance!

Harlequin alerted us authors at Carina to a Nifty Thing: namely, that you can sample our books before committing to buying them, courtesy of functionality up on Overdrive.com!

I have therefore elected to add the Overdrive samples for both Valor of the Healer and Vengeance of the Hunter to their respective pages! Go to the Valor page or the Vengeance page and look for the “Read an excerpt” links. You should see the Overdrive sample come up in a popup window (note: this only works if you have Javascript active).

If you’d like to go directly over to the Overdrive pages for each book and see the samples there, you can do that here and here.

All hail the folks at Harlequin for making this available to its authors!

November 17, 2014 by Angela Korra'ti

Quebecois Music

De Temps Antan at St. James Hall, Vancouver BC, 11/8/2014

My third visit to St. James Hall, a.k.a. the Rogue, proved every bit as delightful as expected and as they always do, De Temps Antan put on a lively and spirited show.

A satisfyingly large posse of my local AND online Quebecois trad fandom friends were on hand: in addition to myself and Dara, Dejah and Michelle from the Seattle crowd came up for the show. Ginny and Gary from Coquitlam were on hand, as well as Carol all the way from Iowa! And this time I brought Geri along so that she could see De Temps Antan in action, since she had not before. We all claimed a table close to the front of the room, since Ginny and Gary had ever so helpfully reserved it. There was singing! There was podorythmie! And there may possibly have been mammoth jigs on Dara’s head while the band was playing “Valse St-Sévère”.

Full deets behind the fold!

November 11, 2014 by Angela Korra'ti

Boosting the Signal

Boosting the Signal: The Siren and the Sword, by Cecilia Tan

I know Cecilia Tan via the Outer Alliance mailing list, and so when she put out a call for help promoting a title she’d re-acquired rights to, I told her, sure, send me something for Boosting the Signal! So this is another out-of-band post, a bit delayed since I’m still neck-deep in editing and also in Canada this week. However, here’s Cecilia’s post for The Siren and the Sword. Her protagonist’s goal? Make it through his first year of a secret magical university hidden in Harvard–and deal with both his emerging bisexuality and his emerging magic.

This piece is an excerpt from the book, and lays down the beginnings of both of these goals. Check it out, and if you go check out Cecilia’s book, tell her Boosting the Signal sent you!

The Siren and the Sword

From The Siren and the Sword: Magic University Book One by Cecilia Tan

Another student came up to their table in the dining hall, a pale-skinned boy with black hair. Kyle stared as the newcomer slid his hands over Michael’s shoulders and Michael tilted his face upward for a quick kiss of greeting.

They made almost a matched pair, though Michael’s cheeks were a little rosier and his hair like straight silk, while the other’s curled in small black tendrils. “Who’s your new friend?”

Michael kept looking up at his friend. Boyfriend, Kyle corrected in his mind. “His name is Kyle Wadsworth. Seems to be a bit of a late bloomer.”

The newcomer extended a hand to Kyle, who shook it. “Frost. Timothy Frost.” Had his hand felt cooler than Kyle expected? Or was it— “Frost, like…”

“Robert Frost, yes. Hmm, Wadsworth, eh?”

Michael shook his head and spoke as if he’d read Frost’s mind. “He hasn’t been assigned a house yet. Or shown any magical aptitudes.”

“That is curious,” Frost said, moving away from Michael and taking the empty seat on the other side of Kyle. “No party tricks? No visions?”

Kyle opened his mouth to say “No, I…” then stared in disbelief as Frost snapped his fingers and a few fronds of some kind of plant appeared in the palm of his hand. He opened Kyle’s limp hand and dropped them into his palm.

“You seem less than impressed?” Frost’s eyes were ice blue.

“I, um, I’ve never seen anything like that before…?” Kyle stammered.

“Not a botanist either, I would guess,” Frost said with a sniff. He snapped his fingers again and Kyle jumped as the long fuzzy stalks in his hand suddenly developed ice crystals.

“How did you do that?” Kyle said, too amazed to worry about the sneer Frost was giving him.

“He invoked his Name,” Alex said with a dismissive wave. “Yeah, I’d call that one a party trick, Frost.”

Frost shrugged. “I’ll always be able to prove who I am though, won’t I? Put your eyes back in your head, Wadsworth. If they fall on the floor, they’ll get dusty.”

“How many times did the bell ring for you, Frost? Once?” Alex said, a toothy smile on his face.

Frost’s pale cheeks reddened, but he didn’t say anything in return. He stood smoothly and returned to standing behind Michael’s chair, running his hand over Michael’s silky dark hair possessively.

Michael looked up at him again. “Fourteen,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“According to Kimble, anyway.”

Frost’s eyes narrowed. “The cards will decide,” he said with a shrug. “I’ll see you later, darling.” They exchanged another very quick kiss, then Frost left.

The two girls were glaring daggers at his Frost’s back as he went and that made Kyle feel a bit better. “Honestly, Michael, I don’t know what you see in him,” one of them said.

Michael shrugged. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Apparently not. But really, fourteen? Kyle, that’s amazing.” She had wavy red hair with blond highlights and reached across the table to shake his hand. “My name’s Marigold, but I can’t make marigolds come out of my ass.”

Buy the Book: Riverdale Ave | Amazon | B&N | AllRomance

Follow the Author On: Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr | Pinterest

November 9, 2014 by Angela Korra'ti

Television

One more Doctor Who reaction post for the end of the season

Funny, despite having bailed halfway through this season, I still have stuff to say about Doctor Who. This is what comes, I suppose, from still paying enough attention to read recap posts, just to see whether I actually want to rebuild my level of give-a-damn.

But from what I saw in Tor.com’s reaction post over here, one spoiler in particular actually made me go GRR and made Dara promptly announce “Well, darn, so sad that Capaldi’s run GOT CANCELLED HALFWAY THROUGH, isn’t it?”

Here’s the spoiler, now that I’ve found a nice WordPress plugin that lets me hide spoilers inline in text. (Though dammit all, it doesn’t work on Livejournal and Dreamwidth. So if you want to click over from there to see the spoiler, here’s the post’s permalink.)

No seriously, THIS IS A SPOILER

Namely: the Brigadier as a Cyberman?! What? WHAT? WHAT?!

I’m not a Classic-era fan like Dara and Paul are–but I have watched enough Classic-era Who at this point that I do have a strong affection for the character of the Brigadier and I appreciate why it was significant that his daughter showed up in the new era.

But turning the Brig into a Cyberman? I’m with some of the commenters on Tor.com’s thread–that’s just wrong. 🙁 And it makes me overall happy that I did in fact bail partway through this season, because I seriously would not have wanted to watch that.

Also, editing this post to add this commentary, after an interesting discussion with Facebook friend Angela about this, who quite enjoyed the episode.

Even aside from the various issues I have with Mr. Moffat, the overall grimmer, darker tone of this season by itself probably would have made me bail, unfortunately. Even if a story is technically well written, has compelling action, and is acted well, if it’s unremittingly grim, this is just not something I want to deal with in my entertainment. It’s a matter of my personal taste rather than a question of whether the story is inherently bad.

It is, nonetheless, a thing I consider. And a lot of this is tied very heavily to my medical history–because after several successive years of medical crap repeatedly punching me, I don’t want repeated emotional punchings out of my entertainment. I need to see hopeful things. I need to see optimism. This is why I never watched Torchwood’s Children of Earth either, despite hearing from multiple directions that it was a very strong story. Because it’s also a very grim story, and I’m not in a space in my life where I’d enjoy that kind of thing.

Likewise, I avoid reading a great deal of fantasy (both urban and epic) that goes grim and apocalyptic. I avoid dystopias for similar reasons, and only make periodic exceptions–e.g., the Hunger Games, or Carrie Ryan’s zombie books. (Yet in the case of the latter, despite the grim setting, there is still hope and optimism, and that’s what I need in the end.)

In this season of Doctor Who, while with my Writer Hat on I can see the story arc they’re trying to do and even in some ways respect that they’re trying something different… with my Viewer Hat on, it’s just not a story I’m enjoying. That makes me sad.

But I do respect that other viewers aren’t going to share my opinion, and that’s OKAY. Spoilers of the magnitude that this season has ended with are bound to cause shock waves in the fandom, and wildly varying reactions are inevitable. (See also: the wildly divergent reactions in Tolkien fandom to the Hobbit movies, and in particular to Tauriel.)

I’m going to keep paying enough attention to the show to at least read recap posts and listen to podcast reviews, but for the time being, I am not going to be watching. I’m glad other folks are still enjoying themselves with the show though!

November 9, 2014 by Angela Korra'ti

The Internet

Bye Firefox, it was nice knowing you

Those of you who follow Dara, either via her Crime and the Forces of Evil blog, her LJ or Dreamwidth mirrors, or her social networks, will have already seen her post Mozilla and Firefox Careen into a Ditch, in which she recounts going into it a bit with Mozilla’s OpenStandards Twitter account–about why in gods’ names they chose to show some support for Gamergate.

Since Dara put that post up, the Daily Dot picked up on it, and y’all may note–some of Dara’s tweets are in fact cited in that article.

The Mary Sue’s picked up on the story as well, right over here.

It shouldn’t take any of you all much of a stretch of the imagination to guess that I’m with Dara on this. The whole Gamergate debacle is something many, many other people besides me have decried, so I’m not going to get into that here–I have nothing new to contribute to that that y’all haven’t probably already read.

What I will say is that Mozilla has disappointed me here. While I cannot bail entirely on using Firefox, due to having to keep it around for purposes of day job testing, I can and have decided to make Safari and Chrome my primary browsers for personal use. Firefox had already irritated me with its constant memory leaks on OS X, as well as its breaking of Disqus-based comments on several sites I regularly visit (like the Mary Sue, Kevin and Kell, and Ensign Sue). Way back when, when it first launched its system of fast updates, it also made my life difficult at work since Selenium had trouble keeping up with its rapid-fire changes. Which is a pain in the ass when much of your job depends upon automated browser testing.

On the other hand, I liked Firefox’s smart bookmarks, which was a handy way for me to hit RSS feeds of a couple of sites like the BBC and the Seattle Times, whenever I wanted to read news–I could pick and choose which articles I wanted to read. And I had been planning to switch my primary browser on my laptop back to Firefox if I saw any sign that they’d fixed the Disqus problem, despite the memory leaks being annoying enough that I’d had to install a plugin whose express purpose was to alert me to restart Firefox once it passed a certain level of memory consumption.

(Pro tip: if your damn browser needs its user community to write a plugin to fix an ongoing problem FOR YOU, you’re doing your development wrong.)

But now? I’m done. Safari gets to be my permanent main browser now.

November 7, 2014 by Angela Korra'ti

Books

Spotted on Dear Author today: to DNF or not to DNF

Dear Author pointed at this article today, in which the article writer admonishes people who bail on a book before finishing it. I do not agree with the article, though I’ll give its author props for a cogently written argument.

As you all know, Internets, I am a voracious reader–voracious enough that I’ve started reading books in a whole extra language, for fuck’s sake. I read on the bus. I read at lunch. I read while waiting in lines for stuff. I read print. I read ebooks. I read on my phone. I read on ereaders. If there’s a newspaper lying around and I have nothing else to read, I’ll read that. Hell, if there’s something suitably interesting on it, I’ll read the back of a cereal box.

So trust me when I tell you that 999 times out of a thousand, if I commit to starting a book, chances are very high that I will finish it. If I pick up a book in the first place, I’ve already done my due diligence–I’ve read reviews of it, I’ve checked out its ratings, I’ve probably even read sample chapters. Something about the book has piqued my interest and made me think, okay yeah, this is possibly a book with which I will be happy to entertain myself for a few hours.

But every so often, I will DNF a book. (That’s Did Not Finish, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the acronym.)

And when I do, it’s typically because something in it has actively pissed me off. Crappy writing isn’t usually enough by itself to make me do that–though I’ve found that if I have too many reactions of “no no no YOU’RE WRITING IT WRONG”, I’ll bail. More often than not, though, it’s because something in the storyline has pissed me off. Usually, a character that does something that makes me want to climb into the book and punch them out of irritation.

As the article I link to points out, sure, it’s possible that a book that does that to me will eventually hand me something awesome that makes up for it pissing me off. But I can think of exactly one example of a book where the writing was compelling enough to make me stick around, despite the fact that I actively loathed every character in the book. And the book in question did not in fact redeem itself in my experience.

So I don’t honestly see the point of sticking around to finish a book that irritates me. That’s tantamount to saying “gosh, hitting myself on the head with this hammer really hurts! But maybe if I keep at it long enough, it’ll start feeling better!”

Seriously, who has time for that?

What about the rest of you? What makes you bail on reading a book?

November 7, 2014 by Angela Korra'ti

Boosting the Signal

Boosting the Signal: Underground, by the Northwest Independent Writers Association

This is another out-of-band Boosting the Signal post, which I’m doing mostly to support the 2014 NIWA anthology, and because I can! So y’all remember I’m in NIWA, right? There’s an anthology coming out TODAY! It’s called Underground, and one of the participating authors, Roslyn McFarland, sent me in a piece called “Soldier Boy”, which is a prologue to her piece in the anthology. Enjoy!

Underground

Soldier Boy

Prologue

How long has it been?

Swords rose and fell accompanied by a cacophony of sound: the clashing of steel, the thudding impact of a weapon meeting its mark, the screams and moans of the dying. As a soldier of Scotland, ’twas my duty to play the part as directed by my superiors. This primarily involved the bloodying of my hands, an occupation in which I did not revel despite my unusual—let’s say, aptitude.

Then came the change.

Years? Decades? Centuries? So long since I’ve even bothered to keep track, I have no idea.

The pervasive harmonies of trauma and war stilled as soldiers returned to their homes or were committed to the grave. I stand alone amid the echoes of their memory. I don’t know why. Why me? Why this trail, this path, this lake? Mine is not to know, only to protect. I assume that’s what I am, what I do. A protector. Any who come upon me shouldering the mantle of darkness or bearing a soul full of anger and fight, soon meets the specter I cannot. Death will come to call within a fortnight, claiming yet another soul not my own.

Therein lies the crux of the situation. Though neither food nor drink pass my lips, rest also purely optional despite my ceaseless wanderings, I do not die. I live. Alone. Endlessly alone. Human contact is as surreal a concept in my waking days as the possibility of an endless sleep claiming me in the night. It doesn’t happen. It can’t happen.

It is my destiny. My curse.

I walk through the mists and weeds along green shores, forsaken, the burden of the souls lost by my hand weighing down each step.

Then she came.

The lass with the bright eyes and fiery spirit, who either doesn’t know my tale or doesn’t care. Whose odd accent and stranger clothes, products of a new era, do nothing to disguise the strength of a soul bearing its own heavy burdens. Whose touch, soft skin, cocky yet kind smile, blow warmth through the husk of what I am, relighting embers I thought long since withered away, buried by the ash of time and death.

How long has it been, since I felt the warmth of human touch?

How long before my curse takes her?

Anthology Blurb

What does “underground” mean to you?

This anthology from the Northwest Independent Writers Association presents fourteen “underground” stories, each with a different interpretation of the titular theme. In these pages, you will visit a murderer’s hideout, walk the road to the afterlife, plunder a dragon’s lair, uncover a mysterious archaeological artifact, glimpse human existence after an environmental apocalypse, and delve deep into dark secrets, crime syndicates, forbidden worlds, sacrifice, and the human psyche.

Featuring stories by:

Mike Chinakos • Amber Michelle Cook • Pamela Cowan • Jake Elliot • Jonathan Ems • T.L. Kleinberg • Jason LaPier • Maggie Lynch • Roslyn McFarland • Cody Newton • Dey Rivers • Steven L. Shrewsbury • Dale Ivan Smith • Laurel Standley • Jennifer Willis

The Northwest Independent Writers Association (NIWA) supports indie and hybrid authors and promotes professional standards in independent writing, publishing, and marketing.

Buy the Book: Amazon (print) | Amazon (Kindle) | Barnes & Noble (Nook) | Kobo