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Kit’s Busy Day Out
I went out to write today, and wrote an entire Old Races short story, 5700 words, which…pretty nearly did my brain in. I’m going to have to take a revision pass at it in a few days, because I’m not sure how coherent it is. At about 5K my brain dried up and I went to ask Twitter to cheer me on so I could finish it, and cheer they did. Good peeps, are Tweeps. :)
I dropped by Chapters Bookstore, too, to see if they had MAGIC & MANNERS in yet, and look what I found on the shelves, pretty as can be:
I was delighted. :)
I also went and found Easter Things for an Easter Basket, and jeez o flip, when did Easter become a holiday for grown-ups? There are all kinds of exotic high end chocolate eggs and expensive pralines and all sorts of crap, but it’s remarkably difficult to find a damn chocolate rabbit, and let’s not even talk about jellybeans, which generally they don’t understand in this country. I found some “soft sugar fruit eggs” or something like that which are obviously jellybeans, but god forbid they should be called that. Anyway, eventually I found appropriate things, but good grief, it shouldn’t have been that hard.
And lastly, because I’ve done a huge amount of work so far this year, I went and rewarded myself by getting my ear…not repierced, because there was still a hole there. But got a hypoallergenic post of greater size shoved through my tiny tiny ear hole, so that I will eventually be able to wear earrings in it all the time. Probably the earring that got shoved through it today, in fact, as my other ear is now full of similar earrings that I never bother to take out.
I only have one ear hole left to fix, now. I don’t know what I’m going to do for cheap body mod rewards when I’m done with ’em.
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Recent Reads: The Old Races Collections
I’m starting a new Old Races short story project, so during our Great Internet Hiatus, I re-read the two story collections I’ve done.
I almost never re-read an entire book I’ve written. I read URBAN SHAMAN when it was published, and I’ve read THE CARDINAL RULE twice just for fun, but generally I just flip through a book looking for a detail if I need to look something up, so it was kind of fascinating to actually sit down and read two books in a row written by me.
I still think BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER is one of the best things I’ve ever written. There’s one story I would demystify a little more now if I could revise it, but overall I’m really pleased with the whole collection. Incredibly pleased with it, actually.
YEAR OF MIRACLES as a collection doesn’t hang together as well, to the point that reading it has completely changed what I intended to do with the new ORSSP. I am, in short, dissatisfied with the YoM collection, and so I’m going to be writing 3-5 new “Origins” stories—stories that happen before the Negotiator Trilogy—and then a whole bunch of “Aftermath” (post-trilogy) stories, including Grace’s story, “Kiss of Angels,” for the new project.
All the Origins stuff will eventually be collected in a print edition that will contain the novella “Year of Miracles” as an anchor piece, and all of the Aftermath stuff will be (more eventually, I suspect, as there’s more to do there) collected in a print edition with “Kiss of Angels” as the anchor piece. I will be much happier with that, and will feel they make much stronger collections than the current Origins/Year of Miracles/Aftermath chronological setup I’ve got going.
What was interesting, from a reading-to-refresh POV, is that wow, there’s stuff I’d TOTALLY forgotten about. Whole characters I’d completely forgotten, nevermind the setup for stuff I implied (to myself if no one else) while writing them. Of course, the flip side of that is there are places where I clearly had a vision for where I was going when I wrote a story and I now have essentially no clue where I intended to go. I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but it’s kinda funny to read a story and think “Yep. Yep. I was goin’ somewhere with that, all right,” and have NOOOOOOOOO IDEA where that somewhere was. :)
So I took a lot of notes, and generated a lot of new ideas, and if I can shape the Origins stories up a little, I have a really quite clear idea of what I’ll be doing with the Aftermath stuff (it more or less involves an apocalypse O.O). I think it’s gonna be good!
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Kickstarter comes to Ireland
First, before I start nattering about my own nebulous projects, lemme point you at three (3!) excellent Kickstarters that are currently running:
1. Lawrence Watt-Evans offers up delicious steampunky pulp! with illustrations! in TOM DERRINGER AND THE ALUMINUM AIRSHIP!
2. Ellen Million is running a second fantasy coloring books for so-called grown-ups, with a wide variety of artists pitching in books this time!
3. Patricia Bray & Joshua Palmatier have launched TEMPORALLY OUT OF ORDER, an anthology I really wish I could participate in but was obliged to face reality regarding. Especially bitter given how many terrific people are writing for it. Woe! Go forth! Make it happen! Make my woe EVEN GREATER! :)
And, on that note…
Today Kickstarter announced that as of October 21, denizens of Ireland would be able to run Kickstarters, in euros, to land in Irish bank accounts.
I am, of course, now trying hard to convince myself that I don’t have to be the FIRST person to run an Irish Kickstarter. That’s going about as well as you’d expect it to. :)
I actually went and started a project page, but I didn’t get very far before it became clear that the project–the Old Races story KISS OF ANGELS, about Grace O’Malley–was poorly suited for a Kickstarter. For one, while I imagine it as a novella, I suspect it could easily balloon into a book. A full-length book, even. Which means doing short stories as levels and incentives is…impractical.
I kind of think the way to do it would be as another Old Races Short Story Project. The goal with that was to produce half a dozen Old Races stories/roughly 30K worth of words. I suspect that’s probably more on point here: that would be the actual project, with things like an anchoring novel(la) for a collection and additional stories being stretch goals. So it’d be something like “if KISS OF ANGELS contains itself at a sensible 30K, there’ll be up to another 40K worth of short stories; if KoA ends up 60K, there might be only one more short story to fill out the collection.”
Something like that. The Old Races novels are about 125K, so that would kind of be my top end goal: I’d be willing to write somewhere between 100-125K on the project.
Of course, the other problem is that the ORSSP was a year-long project with a story delivered every other month, and that’s actually right about what I’d probably want to do with another one. Which means this could very easily be a two or even three year delivery schedule, which is…mental.
(Sorry, talking out loud to myself here, thinking things through.)
Maybe I should just do another ORSSP straight-up. Launch in October, end in November, first story delivered in January, etc. Because that was a really fun project, and didn’t require an anchor piece at all (because I’d written one for as a Help I Have An Emergency crowdfund project, mind you, but still). Hm.
‘course, I actually *owe* somebody an Old Races story before I launch any other sorts of projects, anyway, and I have a ton of other stuff to do as well, so I say to me: shut yo’ mouth. :)
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Year of Miracles update
Okay, so for a very long time, YEAR OF MIRACLES, which is the collected stories of the Old Races that I wrote a couple-three-four years ago now, has been sort of malingering because I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. My publisher didn’t want it, and for various reasons other people don’t either.
Now, here’s what happened: when I did the ORRSP, I told those patrons who supported both it and the YoM crowdfund that if and when a publisher picked up the book for publication, I would send those patrons who supported both signed copies of the books. I made an offer to ORSSP patrons to add $15 to their ORSSP subscription to be upgraded to the “get a signed book” version of the project, for if and when the book was published. My expectation had been that a publisher would accept the book and I would just ask for an unusually large number of free author copies, and that the extra payment to upgrade would basically cover postage costs.
That, unfortunately, hasn’t happened (which is why the entire proposal was based on the caveat that this would happen if and when a publisher picked up the book: I had not sold it at the time and I wasn’t about to make an absolute promise based on a theoretical sale!). But I want to get the book out there for the general public, and I hate to feel like I’ve left my patrons hanging in some fashion.
So I’ve been talking with my patrons and I think we’ve come up with a solution. I’m going to do a special edition for them (if you were a patron of either the ORSSP project or YEAR OF MIRACLES, you should have email about this; if you don’t have email about it, you’re probably one of the 12 or 15 whose addresses bounced when I sent email out), for which I’ll probably write a couple more stories. For those patrons who don’t want to order a print edition, that’s fine; I’ll send e-versions of the stories out too. :)
Then YEAR OF MIRACLES will be made generally available as a print-on-demand book through Amazon/CreateSpace/ExtendedCreateSpace. I’ll probably compilate the current 3 small e-books into one larger edition as well. All of this will happen on a date to be announced later, dependent on other factors.
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ORSSP: Complete!
The last Old Races e-book collection, AFTERMATH, has now been published!
This collection has one reprint, “Perchance to Dream”, a Janx story also available in the anthology DRAGON’S LURE. It has the ORSSP stories “Awakening” and “Aftermath” (which was the surprise bonus story for ORSSP patrons who subscribed to the ORSSP in the first 5 months of 2011). The other two stories, “Betrayals” and “Choices,” are brand-new.
Margrit Knight has broken the long-held covenants of the Old Races. Ancient rivals are scattered, friendships are broken, and the dragons, djinn, selkies, vampires and gargoyles are beginning to step out of the shadows and into the light.But the new world may not be what they expect. Dragonlord Janx faces more than he bargained for when human magic interferes with his own. Half-vampire Ursula Hopkins is only starting to understand what she may have unleashed by awakening her brethren, and Margrit Knight herself still has debts to pay after the death of a djinn…
Watch the future unfold in these five new stories of the Old Races!
Buy the AFTERMATH collection:
at Amazon
at Barnes & Noble
at Smashwords
Links to all the blurbs and various places to purchase the e-books are available through this nifty animated ad that I made:
(I made the ad for Bitten By Books, but because it’s animated it was TOOOOO BIG for them. But I liked it enough that I wanted to use it, and, y’know, if you want to, you can too. :))
