Author Archive
I’m proud to announce that Candlemark & Gleam will be publishing my fourth novel, the space adventure The Daughter Star. Here’s the blurb:
Marta Grayline has problems: her stable, fulfilling life as a freighter pilot has been yanked out from under her, she’s stuck on her miserable home planet with her obnoxious family, her beautiful girlfriend’s now on the opposite side of an interstellar war, and, worst of all, she’s bored to tears. When her enigmatic sister Beth offers her a way out – enlisting in the Novan Emergency Fleet – she jumps at it.
Now Marta has questions: Why was her ship attacked and destroyed? Who are the strange people who rescued her, and what’s their connection to the mysterious alien Abrax? What’s the seven-note song looping endlessly through her head supposed to mean? And, strangest of all, why is there a door to a dead planet in the science lab of a hidden space station?
Marta’s quest for answers will take her to the frozen dark side of a faraway planet, into the tense politics of an armed rebellion, through vast subterranean caves, and into the heart of the enemy’s defenses. She’ll have to face ancient forces, her own doubts, and the inside of an alien mind if she wants to save her sister, find answers to the questions burning in her mind, and unlock her own potential. The Daughter Star, the red beacon in the night sky, could either see the genesis of a startling new future for humans and Abrax, or Marta and Beth Grayline’s annihilation…
This story is set in an entirely new universe, in which humanity lives in a ternary system (three stars) hundreds of years after Earth’s destruction.
I originally wrote this book as a “pace book” for The Spark, meaning that when I got stuck on the other book I’d go work on this one instead for a while. I haven’t done anything like that, working on two books in tandem, either before or since. It was a very unusual way to write two books that really had nothing to do with one another. I actually finished this book earlier than The Spark, but the revision process turned out to be ten times more difficult as I struggled with where I wanted this book to go.
I originally intended The Daughter Star to be a light, fun adventure story. It kind of hasn’t worked out that way. With every revision the story got darker and more complex, as Marta Grayline has to deal with big issues of war, loss, transformation and what it really means to be human.
I have kept in the jokes about how heavy gravity affects bras, though.
This is the first in a planned trilogy about the Grayline sisters. The second one will be about Marta’s younger sister Violet, who manages to Ruin Everything for the people who deserve it most.
Stay tuned for more Daughter Star news!
What I’m Working on Now
Posted on: September 15, 2012
Seanan McGuire makes these lists every month of what she’s working on, and every time she does my eyes grow big. Every once in a while I like to do the same thing, just to get an idea of where I’m at with all my projects. It’s been almost a year since I did this last. To be fair: it’s been quite a year.
I’m not including anything that’s not in process in one form or another. I’m not including a couple of things because they haven’t been announced yet, or I’m still trying to find a home for them. But here’s the rest:
The Daughter Star – Announced this week (more on that Monday)! I’m working on the first round of revisions now. First in a planned trilogy about the Grayline sisters. This thing has eaten my life at the moment.
The Seeker Star – Second book in the Grayline sisters trilogy, it’s at over 50,000 words. Stalled while I finish revisions on Daughter Star.
Gifts of the Sky – Extrahumans #4, starring Jill, Penny, Torres and some big flying doofus. A little over 20,000 words but stalled out while I work on other stuff.
Siphane and the Whale – The book formerly known as Memory’s Fire, about the adventures of introvert Siphane and her bitchy robot pal Lurbira Call. New SF universe, far future, giant war, space whales, lots of fun. First draft done, no energy to revise right now.
Fury’s Stand – Disgraced fortysomething princess gets sent into exile, only to bump up against plots to ruin everything. Set in a world modeled after the 12th century Byzantine Empire. 16,000 words. Slow going, stalled while I sort out everything else.
The Adventures of Stacy and Jazz – Short stories about a suburban woman and her demon-hunting pal. Shopping them around in various places. I have three stories done and the first bit of a fourth written.
CT News Junkie column – Every week. CTNewsjunkie.com. Politics and Connecticut. What could be better?
And that’s it! It’s a surprisingly robust list.
Got a couple of reviews for THE SPARK already! Check them out:
The Book Smugglers (they review the whole series–and give you reasons to try it out!)
That’s all so far. If you do read the book and want to leave a review, thank you! Amazon, B&N and other retail sites are awesome places to leave reviews, as is Goodreads. If you review the book on your own site, let me know and I’ll link to you.
Contest
Also, there is a great contest going on over at The Book Smugglers: you could win the entire series! Go check it out.
THE SPARK is out today, at last! Here’s the Amazon link!
This book has been a long time coming, and I’m going to have more thoughts about just how long later in the week. For today, though, it’s time to celebrate!
I feel like I ought to have a ritual for today, some kind of combination of words and actions to ensure that things go right. It’s probably my theater background.
See, theater folk are superstitious.
And I mean, really superstitious. In high school, we were reading “Macbeth” in English class, and I happened to mention the name of the play in the theater’s green room.
“Out!” ordered one of the techies. “Out, now!”
“You can’t be serious,” I protested. But of course, he was. There was some disagreement on what, exactly, I had to do while I was outside, but I wasn’t allowed back in the theater building again until I’d done it.
It was, to be fair, kind of a spooky theater. When the curtain was closed, the stage could get very dark. For one show I delighted in lying down and staying perfectly still in the darkness, and then, when someone hesitantly tried to cross the stage, saying “Don’t step on me!” It scared the hell out of them. I got an award for it at the cast party.
That theater building was also haunted. There was a rumor of a kid who had killed himself in the creepy concrete basement under the stage. There was a door to nowhere in there, and that was where the ghost was supposed to live.
I once did a production of “Kiss Me, Kate” for my town’s summer theater program, and all I remember is that there were a lot of complicated dance moves that I, a notoriously uncoordinated teenager, had to learn. One of them was this weird sequence for “Another Opening, Another Show” where everyone on stage did a fancy sequence with their feet and hands. It was drilled into me so often that I still remember, twenty years later, how to do most of it.
Anyway, before every show at my high school’s theater I would lie down on the stage and clear my mind. Then I would do the “Another Opening” song and dance in some quiet part of backstage. Then, last of all, I’d go downstairs and ask the ghost if it was okay if we did a show, and would he please come and watch.
Everything settled, the show could then go on.
That’s kind of how I feel as another book release draws near. I should have a ritual. Something to make sure it all goes according to plan. Maybe I can find a part of the house to do the “Another Opening” dance in, if I can remember all the steps.
Or maybe I can just refresh Amazon’s sales page obsessively, and call that tradition enough!
Mandolia A-Z
Posted on: August 27, 2012
In honor of THE SPARK coming out tomorrow, here’s a list of things any tourist should know about Mandolia!
Annsfair – A small city on the Rail Straits, about a thousand kilometers southeast of First Landing. One of ten original colony sites. Noted for pleasant weather and the ferry crossing to Thyner’s Island.
Bandalee – A hot, dry district in the far south of the continent.
Burning Hill – A district of First Landing, named for the orange-red treelight that could be seen at night atop the hill when the city was first founded. Bounded to the west by the Mandol River, to the east by the starport, to the north by the northern river farms, and to the south by East First Landing and East Square.
Colony Societies – There are very few formalized colonization activities on Mandolia, so the planet is being widely settled by Colony Societies. Most of these will give colonists homes, work and land in the colony in exchange for staying with the colony for a period of years. Bailey Island was settled by a Colony Society.
Downtown First Landing – The center of the city, a very modern and new neighborhood with high-rises and lots of commercial activity. The financial and political heart of Mandolia.
East Square – Center of the East First Landing neighborhood, just off the bridge. A commercial focus of the city.
First Landing – Capital and largest city on Mandolia. Officially founded in 2090. 2120 population approximately 230,000. A little less than half of all Mandolians live within fifty kilometers of First Landing. Read the rest of this entry »
Release Week for THE SPARK!
Posted on: August 26, 2012
Yes! It’s that time again: book release week! THE SPARK (Extrahumans #3) is coming out on Tuesday.
I get incredibly nervous and flustered when a book is about to leave the nest, so you’ll pardon me if I’m under a chair, cowering. Failing that, I’ll be obsessively checking Amazon, Twitter and pretty much everywhere else to see how things are going.
How you can help an author out on release week:
1. Buy the book! (obviously!)
2. Leave a review! Goodreads, Amazon, B&N, your blog, wherever you like.
3. If you do leave a review on your site, tell me! I’ll link to you.
4. If you like this series, suggest your local public library buy it! We have hardcovers these days. Sturdy and beautiful.
5. Spread the word! I have NO PR MACHINE, so every little bit helps!
Anyway, there’s going to be some good stuff happening this week, including DEALS on other Extrahumans books, reviews, interviews, and more! Plus some cool book and story news that I hope I’ll get to share with you this week.
Stay tuned!
I love maps. I admit it, I’m a map obsessive, and I always have been. When I was a little kid I made a huge cardboard map of the streets in my town–and it was almost 100% accurate. I may have forgotten a few streets here and there, but the upshot was that I’d looked at the map of Newington so many times that I had it basically memorized. I can still tell you where Twenty Rod Rd. is, even though I can barely remember where I’ve left my purse.
I also love books with maps in them. Fantasy books are great for maps, thanks in large part to the fantastic ones Christopher Tolkien drew for his father’s books. Some science fiction books have them, too–such as Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, which sometimes will have a very simple map of the Hegen Hub in it. Most speculative fiction books don’t have maps, which is fine. But it’s still a really good idea to have some conception of where your characters are. Very simple things can profoundly affect what happens in a particular world. Take, for instance, this map of the Confederation (see the Extrahumans series) that I whipped up:
THE SPARK, which releases on August 28th, is in part about an uprising on Mandolia. If you look at the map, you’ll notice that Mandolia is pretty far away from Earth and Calvasna, which are the most populous and capital worlds of the Confederation respectively. Earth and Calvasna are the heart of power for the Confederation, and Valen and Mandolia, where our characters can sometimes find a little bit of wiggle room around government repression, are out on the fringe. That distance allows a lot of the events in the book to happen without an immediate crackdown.
Even then, it’s good for me to know which planets are near which other planets. Mandolia and Valen are very close, which impacts travel time and communication, and there’s a lot of traffic between the two worlds. Quela, on the other hand, isn’t really all that close to anything.
Here’s another example of a map I’m working on:
This is for a fantasy project, and it shows two major things: one being the size of the Sona Empire now, and the other being how large the Sona Empire was a long time before the story takes place. Therefore a major piece of history is very clear on the map. A few other spots on the map are labeled. I can use this map, which keeps evolving, to track where my characters are and what their world is like. The book begins at the Yastine Convent, which is in the mountainous north of the empire, near the border, far away from the capital. That makes it a certain kind of place, and certain kinds of things can happen there.
I didn’t have a firm grasp on this story until I drew this version of the map. I must have drawn and redrawn it a dozen times before I got it right. Once I did, though, I had a better grasp of where all the players were and what was possible. I could see where the protagonist would travel, and I could see where the book would end up. I also knew what was crucial to this world, and what the story would revolve around. I knew some of these things already, but the map helped me place those abstract ideas into something more concrete.
I don’t think I’d put either map in an actual book right now, and I certainly don’t have to. Sometimes readers don’t need maps to follow along. I always liked imagining the geography of Narnia and Prydain as a reader; I didn’t need to see it. But if you’re writing fiction, whether fantasy, SF or contemporary, it’s not a bad idea to have some kind of map to keep track of where things are, and what everyone’s doing. That map can be anything from what I’ve created here to a simple diagram showing where the various buildings on the street where your story is set are located. For THE SPARK I drew a crude street map of First Landing, so I knew where in the city Dee was and where she could go next.
Maps are a great way to think about fictional worlds, no matter their scale or genre. if a writer really knows the space her characters are in and uses it well, the world starts to seem more three-dimensional to the reader.
Preorder THE SPARK now!
Posted on: June 28, 2012
Preorders are now open! I’ll be posting more about the cool rewards you can get as the pre-order period continues.
The release date for THE SPARK is creeping up on me. It’s only about two months away, which means that for the next two months there’s going to be all kinds of pre-release goodness happening!
There’s a part of me that’s amazed that my third book is going to be out soon. It’s all happened so quickly! Two years ago I was just submitting BROKEN to Candlemark & Gleam, which was still a few months shy of its first release. A lot was different for me two years ago, I feel like I’ve traveled light years since then.
But there’s another part of me that’s written all this material since, and is impatient to share it with everybody. It’s strange to suddenly have one foot back in the familiar terrain of the Extrahumans universe while working on new works set in completely different worlds, with very different characters! I suspect that’s how it’s going to be for a long while to come, if I have the privilege of still being able to write and publish for as long as I want.
In the meantime, I’m going to have a lot to say about THE SPARK in the weeks to come before August 28th hits. I think you’re all going to like following Dee on her adventures. I hope you do! If you want a preview of the first two chapters, we now have one up over at fReado! You can either follow the link or use the widget below. Check it out: a preview of THE SPARK! Read the first two chapters right now!
Short Story – “Ramona’s Demons”
Posted on: June 4, 2012
I’m pleased to finally be able to announce that my urban fantasy story, “Ramona’s Demons,” will be published as a part of Topside Press’s inaugural anthology. Topside is a new publisher specializing in transgender literature (yes! it exists!), and is brought to you by some of the same folks who are behind PrettyQueer.
“Ramona’s Demons” is an urban fantasy story about what happens when a routine tracking assignment turns into a battle to save an otherworldly kid from demons. Hope you’ll check it out!
The Extrahuman Union 