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Vengeance of the Hunter

Bone Walker, Short Pieces, Vengeance of the Hunter

Long overdue Kickstarter update + Vengeance of the Hunter

Just to bring folks up to speed on where I am with all the things I’m trying to pull out of my head: my long-waiting Kickstarter backers, y’all will have noticed I have not yet delivered unto you Bone Walker or any of the other remaining rewards. This is a combination of four factors: one, Vengeance of the Hunter pretty much eating my brain for the last few months; two, my abrupt return to the land of Medical Fun (spoiler alert: not really fun); and three, emergency eye surgery on the part of Dara, as I’ve previously posted; four, delay on getting the rest of my edits back from JoSelle, who’s been working on editing Bone Walker for me.

As of this writing I am in what will be hopefully the final line edits for Vengeance. My goal is to finish this edit pass and hand the manuscript back to my editor this weekend. She will let me know if I need to do any remaining tweaks to it, and the goal is to get it squared away before I go offline for surgery on November 11th.

I have also been talking with JoSelle about getting those edits on Bone Walker back, and our game plan moving forward is that she will be doing everything in her power to get them to me by end of November. Either way, I will be commencing my edit sweep on Bone Walker on December 1st. If I have enough brain for it following surgery, I’ll actually start before–but this is me allowing myself some time for recovery to happen. Ditto on finishing the shorter works due to Kickstarter backers.

Related to those shorter works as well–I’m working on getting some cover art together for “The Blood of the Land”, the short story I’d previously done in the Warder universe. Once that’s ready I will be making that available as an immediate freebie to Kickstarter folks, and slightly after that, will be deploying it onto the various places where Faerie Blood is already available for sale.

Meanwhile, Dara’s having had to do eye surgery has thrown her for a loop in getting soundtrack work done, too, but she is recovering from that nicely and we hope to resume work on that ASAP. I also need to hand Dara the data she needs to do the poster and postcard layouts for the Bone Walker cover so that I can get those out to folks as well.

Kickstarter folks, as soon as I’m done with the Vengeance edit sweep, you’ll be hearing from me further. I’m really sorry for this ongoing delay, and that I have to ask for your patience for a little longer. Hang in there. Bone Walker is coming.

Bone Walker, Carina Press, Faerie Blood, Other People's Books, Vengeance of the Hunter

A few promo things make a post

Item the first: Debut Carina author Sonya Clark would like y’all to know she’s having a giveaway for her forthcoming release Trancehack, which is futuristic paranormal romance. Call it PR with a side helping of SF, if you like! Deets can be found right over here.

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Item the second: speaking of my fellow Carina authors, the awesome Joely Sue Burkhart and Raelyn Barclay are running Coyote Con, a virtual convention, all this month! What’s a virtual convention? It’s a series of online chat discussions on various interesting topics, pretty similar to what you’d find at an actual convention in person.

I’ve been in a few of these panels now myself, and there are more to come as the month progresses! And for those panels you may have already missed, Joely and Raelyn are posting transcripts too, so you can catch up on those here.

The panels I was in in particular were Epic Fantasy, Self Publishing, and LGBTQ/Diversity.

There are a couple more panels today, and there’ll be more the remaining weekends of the month. And one chat room’s also dedicated to just general hanging out too! The full schedule is here!

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Item the third: I will be going to Orycon from November 8-10–the weekend right before my forthcoming surgery, in fact. So unless you’re one of the people likely to show up for the annual Murkworks Thanksgiving Day Homeless Waifs Turkeyfest, this is going to be the last chance to spot the elusive Wild Anna outside her natural habitat. If you’re going to be there, find me and say hi, mmkay?

Likewise, I am going to GeekGirlCon this coming weekend, right after I go see Great Big Sea in Edmonds. I’m going to be REAL busy this weekend. 😀

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Item the fourth: This is your friendly reminder that I am down to three print copies of Faerie Blood, so if you’d like a print copy of this book, talk to me! Getting it directly from me remains the only way to acquire it since I currently have no way of selling it online. I ask $15 if I’m going to hand deliver it, $20 if I need to mail it to you.

I also have a small stock of CDs that contain the various formats of the ebook edition, both the original Drollerie release AND the current Second Edition as well. For these, I ask $5 each.

I will have both of these items with me at GeekGirlCon and Orycon as well!

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Item the fifth: Kickstarter backers, just so y’all know, I have totally had my brain eaten by Vengeance of the Hunter edits. I ran behind on it, and am scrambling along with my editor (who is made of solid gold awesomeness, All Hail Her Name) to get the manuscript finished up so that we don’t impact the schedule. We’re in the middle of line edits now. I will be jumping back to Bone Walker the instant we sign off on this book.

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Item the sixth: I have not forgotten the series of posts on advice on self-publishing; these too have had to be paused while I charge through edits on Vengeance. They will resume soon. Thank you for your patience on that; I’ve seen quite a few hits on these posts, so I do want to finish the series up.

Bone Walker, Vengeance of the Hunter

Status update from VCON

Well, I think this is a new first for me: I’ve just spent practically all of VCON holed up making a mad dash through the rest of developmental edits for Draft #2 of Vengeance of the Hunter. I swear to gods, people, my editor? She’s made of solid gold awesomeness, and I’ll go on record here and now as saying that Draft #2 has improved considerably because of her. It’s still the shortest book I’ve ever written, but at 84K, it’s still a credible length for a novel.

(I did at least get to see a couple of things at VCON, though. I made a sweep through the dealers’ room and spotted a couple of books I liked the look of, one of which I’ve already bought in ebook form, the other of which I’m going to track down if I can. I would have gotten the paperbacks, except that my shelves are already pretty damn full, the lament of book geeks everywhere. And oh yes, I bought a new Doctor Who t-shirt, one which has all of the first 11 Doctors on it. And it’s weird to type that, rather than ‘all of the Doctors’, now that I know there’s a new guy on the way.

And I did go to the Turkey Readings today, which were awesome and full of win and LOL. Also, I did get to say hi to GoH Mur Lafferty, whose name I know from her work on the podcast Leviathan Chronicles.)

But anyway. Vengeance is in, though my brain is goo. The Editor of Awesomeness will be commencing her next round of edits on it ASAP and I expect to be on tap to charge through those as soon as she throws them back to me.

Those of you who are patiently awaiting updates on Bone Walker, I swear to god I haven’t forgotten you. Vengeance however has eaten my brain. So has the Not-So-Happyfun Medical News I got earlier this week, and the other reason I’ve more or less spent the entire convention hunched over my computer is that I’ve not been in much of a mood to make social noises at a hotel full of strangers.

Y’all will be getting an update on Bone Walker as soon as I can get my brain back. The next thing that’s likely to happen there is that I’m going to get the long overdue posters and postcards made, so stand by for an update on that by the end of this week, mmkay?

Now I think I need to sleep for a week.

Vengeance of the Hunter

Vengeance of the Hunter: TURNED IN

Internets, I am pleased to report that finally, finally, I have turned in a draft of Vengeance of the Hunter, book 2 of the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy, to my editor at Carina Press.

I have come away with a few lessons from this. The first of these is that writing to a known deadline has proven harder than I anticipated–not only getting the book done, but planning it in such a way as to produce a still fairly coherent draft. When I sent the book that became Valor of the Healer to Carina, I’d had time to polish the hell out of that. It was draft six.

This time, not so much. I was working pretty much right off the draft of the synopsis I’d sent in to my aforementioned editor, so I had a pretty decent overall idea of where the story was going to go–but holding to it, and keeping the words going, was a challenge.

And um, yeah, I sorta kinda blew my deadline. Not horrendously, but close enough that I’m now going to be hard pressed to plow through the developmental and copy edits when my editor hands them back to me so we can stay on schedule. Lesson learned: start Victory of the Hawk sooner.

Also, have I levelled up again in Writer by stumbling across a deadline, or what? I’m not the first writer to do so and I’m sure I won’t be the last, but um, yeah, my chagrinned face. Let me show you it. *^_^*;;

ALSO: surprising me deeply, this has proven to be the shortest manuscript I’ve ever completed, clocking in at around 76,500 words. Given that Valor of the Healer came in in its final form at 118K, you can imagine that I’m baffled by this TOO. This was me trying to apply my editor’s lessons from the work done on Valor to cut down hard on my natural tendency to verbosity, but I’m thinking at this point that I probably hugely overcompensated. I’ll have to find out when the requested edits come back.

Now, my style has tightened up somewhat since I originally wrote Faerie Blood, as well as the earlier drafts of Valor. Bone Walker came in pretty compact as well. And, Vengeance has a lot less of me setting up the characters since as of this book, I have introduced most of the major characters already–and I’m upping the stakes of what’s going on and expanding the scope of the action as well. So a lot of this book is plot-driven rather than character-driven.

But I’m introducing notable new characters as well and I’m not sure I’ve developed them enough yet. I’ve flagged this as a place where I need guidance, and am now on standby for my editor’s requested changes.

Internets, my brain, it is GOO. But Vengeance of the Hunter in its initial incarnation is DONE DONE DONE. More bulletins as the book begins to progress towards its shipping form. And meanwhile: stand by for further updates on the coming of Bone Walker!

Rebels of Adalonia, Valor of the Healer, Vengeance of the Hunter

Trilogy titles announcement!

With the agreement of myself, my agent, my editor, and the rest of the team at Carina Press, we now have final titles for my trilogy!

As of RIGHT NOW, the book formerly known as Lament of the Dove shall be henceforth referred to as Valor of the Healer!

Book 2, formerly Shadow of the Rook, becomes Vengeance of the Hunter.

Book 3, formerly Lone Hawk’s Flight, will be Victory of the Hawk.

And the series title over all will be Rebels of Adalonia.

I’m feeling quite happy about these titles over all, especially for Book 1, since that very nicely captures the whole character arc I’m doing with Faanshi in that part of the story. And I like the alliteration of the V and H words in each title.

I’ve been asked this on Google+, so I’ll go ahead and note here that the title changes were brought about for two reasons. One, because ‘Lament’ was determined to not really fit Faanshi’s character arc. This was in fact something that beta readers had brought up to me (and did I mention, YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME LIKE THAT), so when Carina raised the issue, it wasn’t surprising to me at all. Two, because ‘Dove’ was thought to be kind of questionable for the fantasy market. This, too, wasn’t really surprising. I also had a beta reader note to me that they felt that ‘Lament of the Dove’ actually sounded like a Western! And on a related note, especially given that a lot of Carina’s buying audience is coming out of the romance genre, I could also see people thinking ‘Dove’ has connotations of inspiration romance–which is definitely not what I’m writing.

So! Valor of the Healer it is. I get to make appropriate changes in the copyedit pass I need to do this weekend! And y’all be on the lookout for this to get incorporated into info right here on my site as well as in upcoming announcements as they happen!