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here be magic

Boosting the Signal

New Boosting the Signal special feature: the Here Be Magic boxed set!

I hope y’all enjoyed the special run of Boosting the Signal feature posts that I did for the 2015 NIWA anthology, Asylum! Since that seemed to do pretty well overall, I’m going to do a similar one for another recent release by a group I’m involved with: i.e., the newly released boxed set by my fellow bloggers at Here Be Magic.

This is a digital boxed set, and you can read up about it right over here on participating author Linda Mooney’s site. I’m not actually in this boxed set (I was going to be, but was not able to finish a novella for it in time), but since this is a release by my Here Be Magic peeps, I wanted to give it some signalboosting love regardless. And if you’ve been following my periodic HBM posts, or the HBM blog in general, you’ll know that the authors in this group are a mixed bag of paranormal romance, urban fantasy, and fantasy. The boxed set reflects this!

What’s the difference between a boxed set and an anthology, you might be asking? Fundamentally speaking, not much, actually. This is one gigantic ebook that contains multiple stories, but in this case, the stories are longer than the short stories you’d expect to find in an anthology. We’re talking novellas here, folks.

I’ve got a few pieces from participating authors that I hope will boost your interest in checking the release out, so stick around. These posts will start TOMORROW.

December 28, 2015 by
Short Pieces

Resurrecting an old short story for Dragon Week!

Chieftest and Greatest of Calamities

Chieftest and Greatest of Calamities

It’s Dragon Week over on the Here Be Magic blog this week, and in honor of that, I’ve resurrected one of my oldest surviving pieces of writing: a short story called “Riddle of the Golden Dragon” that I originally wrote in high school. That story is now linked in on my Short Stories page, and you can go directly to read it Riddle of the Golden Dragon! Go easy on it. I did write it in high school. 😉

Alert readers will note that the city of Shalridan is mentioned in this story. It is, indeed, set in the same world as the Rebels of Adalonia books, though I wrote this long before I changed the name of the country of Alendar to Nirrivy. You can assume that this story is more or less semi-canon to the history of Nirrivy. By which I mean, it’s set so far back along the timeline before Adalonia conquered Nirrivy that it can count as a legend at the very least.

And do come on over to Here Be Magic to see our celebration of dragons this week, won’t you? I posted yesterday, talking about all my favorite dragons, giving a shoutout to one of my favorite Le Vent du Nord songs, and mentioning the story there too! Check back as the week progresses to see what other Here Be Magic authors have to report about dragons, too!

July 13, 2015 by
Bone Walker

Bone Walker is ALMOST HERE

Conflikt proved to be quite delightful in general, but also in particular for selling copies of Faerie Blood and Bone Walker! I sold six of the one and three of the other, and the release concert went quite swimmingly as well. I made piccolo noises on a stage that contained ALL OF THE MEMBERS OF TRICKY PIXIE.

And I played all the notes I needed to play, in the correct order, and at the right times. WIN! I’m here to tell you, too: I am NOT used to performance adrenalin, and for a short while after that show was over, I was shaky!

Also WIN: two people I didn’t know coming up to me to ask me to sign books for them, which was pretty awesome. And mind-blowing, because at least one of those two people was (or so I was informed by well-meaning friends of said person) very shy about approaching me. I am not used to THAT, either!

But now that I’m home, I can return to the business of getting Bone Walker out to you all. Particularly my long-waiting Kickstarter backers, to whom I shall start mailing copies of the print edition this week.

Meanwhile, the ebook goes on official sale TOMORROW. I’m now up into two digits of preorders, so YAY and thanks to all who have preordered so far. I am also moving forward with deploying the book for sale up on barnesandnoble.com, since they don’t do preorders. And since it’ll take a bit for them to actually process the book, I elected to put it up TODAY, so hopefully it’ll be done by tomorrow and Nook owners will be able to scarf the book along with everybody else.

(And don’t forget, if you want to preorder the book today, all the places you can do so are linked up on the book’s official page!)

Last but not least: yesterday was my turn to post on the Here Be Magic blog, and I did in fact post about Bone Walker, right over here! I talk some about the magical importance of music in the Warder universe, and I’m looking for comments on what songs are magical to you. I’ll be giving out a print edition of Bone Walker to a randomly selected commenter, so CLICKIE!

February 2, 2015 by
Rebels of Adalonia

For those of you who have read Valor and Vengeance

I need to do a post on Here Be Magic tomorrow, so I’d like to do a roundup of random interesting worldbuilding trivia about the setting of Valor of the Healer and Vengeance of the Hunter!

So if you’ve read either or both of the books, and you have questions about any aspect of the world, drop me a comment and I’ll include it in the post that’ll go up tomorrow on the Here Be Magic blog!

September 3, 2014 by
Boosting the Signal, Carina Press, Other People's Books

Tuesday Boosting the Signal and general news roundup

Hi all! Was your Memorial Day weekend a good one?

Since we’re coming out of a long holiday weekend, I wanted to remind y’all that this past weekend I posted not one, not two, but THREE Boosting the Signal posts. If you happened to miss them, here they are:

Fraser Sherman

Danielle Ackley-McPhail

Kimberly Long-Ewing

Related to Danielle’s and Kimberly’s posts, I wanted to mention that while their two books are officially not released until September, you can in fact buy the paperbacks now. So the links I included for pre-order on their pages are actually viable purchase links. I’m told this is how Dark Quest Books operates, and that soft-launching books is helpful for accommodating reviewers.

And on a related note, I’ve got some more Boosting the Signal posts coming over the next few weeks. However, they’re going to get rather more spotty through June and July, because I seriously need to be in focused deadline mode for Victory of the Hawk. I will continue to post pieces as I get them, but they won’t be as common for a while. Your patience in advance is appreciated!

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Meanwhile, in the name of giving a bit of outside-of-Boosting-the-Signal signal-boosting to some of my Carina peeps, I’d like to call the following things to your all’s attention!

One! Jeffe Kennedy, one of my fellow posters at Here Be Magic, is dropping her first fantasy novel this week! She’s been marketed more in the past as fantasy romance, but this is the first of her books getting designated as straight-up fantasy. Speaking as someone who likes having her fantasy with a side serving of romance, I expect to be checking out The Mark of the Tala. Jeffe’s got a post up at Here Be Magic about her favorite fantasy tropes, too, if you want to go check that out.

Two! My fellow Carina author Kari Edgren turns out to ALSO be a fellow Pacific Northwest author. And her new Carina release Goddess Born turns out to be HIGHLY relevant to my interests–not only because it’s invoking Brigid from Celtic mythology, it’s also got a heroine who’s a healer. And y’all know how much I like me some healers. I’ll be buying this one, too.

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And, another post of mine from over the weekend that you may have missed: Amazon has been throwing its weight around again. I link off to some other posts about it, too.

May 27, 2014 by
About Me, Other People's Books, The Internet

A few things make a post

Some good reading on the Intarwebz today! First up, I bring you today’s Big Idea column over at the Whatever, where Mr. Scalzi brings word of Brad Meltzer’s new children’s books about Amelia Earhart and Abraham Lincoln. Parents of small children, especially daughters, go check this out. Especially if you’re fans of Calvin and Hobbes. The art for the Amelia book looks adorable.

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Meanwhile, Jim Hines has put up a good post today going over a writing advice question I hear time and again: i.e., whether you should try to write to the market. I said over there, and I’ll say here too, that even though “don’t try to write to the market” and “be aware of the market” seem contradictory on the surface, for me they’re actually kind of not. You want to be aware of what people who aren’t you are writing, so you aren’t writing in a complete and utter vacuum, and accidentally writing stuff that people lost interest in reading five or ten or even more years ago. Plus, you never know what awesome ideas you may have spark for your next book.

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Fellow Carina fantasy author Shawna Thomas is talking up her work over at Eleri Stone’s place, and in particular about coming-of-age fantasy. Go give her a look, ’cause fantasy by Carina is love!

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I’ve been following the news posts on TheOneRing.net for a while now, because hi, yeah, Tolkien geek, yo. But this post of theirs made me up and join their message forums for the express purpose of voicing my appreciation to their forums member who wrote some nice fanfic about Dís, the mother of the dwarves Kíli and Fíli, the only female dwarf Tolkien ever named. Looks like Cirashala’s getting her epic on with further fanfic about the character, too, based on what she’s saying in the thread that the news post links to. I approve!

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And last but least, speaking of Tolkien, I’m posting about reading fantasy in other languages over on Here Be Magic today! I talk up the Trilingual Hobbit Reread, but also a couple of the novels I want to read out of Quebec SF/F as well, like the ones by Élodie Tirel I’ve been talking about, as well as Esther Rochon.

C’mon over and tell me about nifty non-Anglophone genre works English speakers should know about, won’t you?

January 14, 2014 by