Ordinary Day

So a bunch of us in NIWA thought, hey, wouldn’t it be awesome if we banded together and put several of our books on sale for 99 cents? We are doing exactly that.

Me, I’ve put Faerie Blood on sale for 99 cents for the entire month of June in honor of this, and also because I CAN. This price will be valid until the end of the month. As always, all of the official links to buy this book are on the Faerie Blood page!

HOWEVER: several other NIWA-author titles will ALSO be on sale for 99 cents, for a narrower window of time, from the 12th until the 15th! We have a Facebook event describing this and which titles are participating! (If you’re not on Facebook, worry not–this is a publicly readable event so you should still be able to see the book list even if you’re not a Facebook user.) So keep an eye on that link, because more titles are getting added to it over the next several days. Be poised with your wallets to snap up all these nifty deals on the 12th, won’t you?

And in the meantime, Dara’s also jumped in on this tasty sale action. She’s set up a discount download code of “niwa” for anybody who’d like to snag a digital download of the Bone Walker soundtrack for 40 percent off! And as always, the soundtrack can be scarfed directly from Bandcamp.

ALSO! Although this is not actually part of the sale, don’t forget, the short story “The Blood of the Land” is also available for pennies. If you go to Smashwords, you can grab it for any price YOU choose, including free. Everywhere else, it’s 99 cents, and that will be the story’s permanent official price.

Spread the word, everybody!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

THIS JUST IN:

Now that the Bone Walker Soundtrack is an actual thing that you can actually buy, Dara has taken the liberty of doing a really awesome thing: she’s set up pages on the Crime and the Forces of Evil Bandcamp page to include both Faerie Blood AND Bone Walker‘s print editions as merch associated with the music. WHICH IT IS.

And what this means for you, O Internets, is that now there is a way to order print copies of these books without having to come directly to me. Even more importantly, it means that all methods of payment Bandcamp accepts are now ways that you can pay for the book–including credit cards as well as Paypal.

You can go straight to the Crime and the Forces of Evil Bandcamp page’s merch section and order the books from there. The page for Faerie Blood is here, and the page for Bone Walker is here!

The official pages for Faerie Blood and Bone Walker have both been updated with this information. Moving forward, this will be the recommended way to order print copies of either of these books, since it provides the most flexibility for how to pay.

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I mention all of the above, by the way, because tonight I got Bone Walker‘s FIRST TEST PRINT, and we’re moving forward with the printing, and so soon I will have COPIES TO SELL YOU ALL. SO EXCITING!

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On a related note, although I’m now able to take orders for the print books via Bandcamp, I will still accept direct requests to buy the books in either ebook or print form.

However, since people keep asking me how to go about paying me for stuff, I have spun off a standalone Buying From Me page on the site that explains what things I can sell directly, what their prices are, and what methods of payment I can personally accept.

Please consider this the canonical reference source for how to order things directly from me. I’ll be updating my FAQ to point to it too.

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And while we’re on the topic of that soundtrack, I have taken the liberty of giving it its very own page here on my site. Because it’s shiny, I’m proud of it, and I wanted to make sure new visitors to my site can find out about it.

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Last and OH MY assuredly NOT THE LEAST:

I have an official cover for Victory of the Hawk! \0/ I’m really excited about this cover, since a) it’s gorgeous, b) it’s dynamic, and c) it is a well and thoroughly proper fantasy novel cover.

Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, I give you Kestar Vaarsen, Knight of the Hawk, and baron of Bremany!

Victory of the Hawk

This cover will be getting added to Victory’s official page, and it’ll be added to the lineup of thumbnails on the homepage too!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Today’s Bone Walker major news item: if you’re a reader of ebooks on Kobo devices and/or apps, OR if you’re Android-inclined and like to get your digital media from Google Play, then the book is now available for preorder on platforms FOR YOU!

The Kobo preorder link is here! And the Google Play link is here!

Both of these links have been added to the official Bone Walker page as well!

I can’t deploy to Barnes and Noble yet–NookPress doesn’t support preorders, which is irritating. So if you’re Nook-inclined, hang in there, your link is coming. I’ll be deploying up to B&N on the 2nd, to try to get the book live by the 3rd.

And it’ll take me a bit longer to deploy up to iBooks and Smashwords, since both of those platforms require a few extra hoops to jump through before I can deploy there. I hope to get those platforms up this weekend, since both of them do support preorders.

MEANWHILE: Dara has completed work on a first draft for the PDF that will eventually become the print edition of the book! We DO need layout and format checkers for this, so if you’d like to volunteer to sanity-check the PDF, please let me know and I’ll set you up with a copy of the file. There’s a complimentary final copy of the ebook in the format of your choice in it for you if you aren’t already getting it for some other reason.

AND! In exciting news about the soundtrack, it actually charted for a little bit on Bandcamp’s Alternative chart! It even briefly made it up to the Top 40 on that chart! Very tiny pond, but WE WERE IN IT NONETHELESS. And don’t forget, if you’d like to check out the soundtrack, you can do so right over here. You can stream the whole thing to check it out if you want, and you can buy the digital version RIGHT NOW, or pre-order the CD!

You can ALSO preorder the album from Amazon right over here!

And when Dara has more links for that, I’ll pass ‘em along.

SO EXCITING YOU GUYS. And very soon it will be Conflikt, and we’ll have the release party concert for this thing, and DID I MENTION WE’RE GOING TO HAVE ALEXANDER JAMES ADAMS AND S.J. TUCKER PLAYING WITH US? Which I can actually say now because S00j has posted about it on her VERY OWN WEBSITE? \m/

If you’re coming to Conflikt, DO come see us!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Folks, this is what the top of my Not Recently Played playlist looked like this morning:

It’s a Real Album and Everything

I had the distinct pleasure of listening to this on the way into work this morning, and have never been more pleased to tell Dara, in the parlance of my day job, “QA signs off on this release”.

I’m particularly excited about the instrumental tracks. The fiddle playing shines like diamonds, a testament not only to the skill of our three fiddlers, but also to Dara’s engineering and the final polish from the official mastering engineer. The Kitsune at War and Bring the Storm tracks in particular capture the mood of those bits of Bone Walker perfectly. And I gotta say, the Klopfenpop remix of The Burke-Gilman Troll kicks all the ass in a tri-state radius. I’m pretty sure it left no unkicked ass anywhere between Vancouver and Portland.

Release of this thing should therefore be coming REALLY SOON. I’ll be letting all backers of appropriate levels know when the digital download of the soundtrack is ready for you. Dara will be moving forward with that as well as with the creation of the physical CDs. She’s made some lovely case art using the covers of both the novels, and has picked out some gorgeous paper to use for the liner insert as well. Looking VERY forward to having these to sell when we hit Conflikt at the end of this month!

Don’t forget, if you actually want one of the physical CDs, preordering on Bandcamp will be the best way to get it. And if you haven’t listened to the preview tracks yet, you can find them right over here.

And let me encourage you all to please share the heck out of this link, too! Remember, Dara and I as well as the various musicians who all appear on this soundtrack are indie artists here, and if we want to have a prayer of selling this thing to the general public, every little bit of word of mouth helps so much.

Lastly, let me finish up by noting that I’m also very close to having the Bone Walker manuscript ready to release to proofreading. I need to put the sample chapter of Faerie Blood into the back of it, and I have ALSO gotten permission from Carina Press to cross-promote my Carina books in the back of the book as well. So I need to do that work.

Once this is done, I’ll be ready to have the book proofread. I’ve had two people express interest already in proofreading, but if anyone else wants to volunteer, let me know ASAP!

Thanks again to all for your patience and support!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have finished my edit pass through the second draft of Bone Walker. Which now puts me SIGNIFICANTLY closer to delivering this novel to my Kickstarter backers, and then to the world at large!

All the mad props go to editor JoSelle and also to backer Susan, since their two edit passes combined to help me fix quite a few things in the manuscript. I rarely make actual typos. But I do periodically repeat words, leave words out, or replace a word I intend with some other (correctly spelled but nonetheless incorrect) word. Susan caught a whole bunch of places where I’d done things of this nature, and JoSelle caught others.

What happens next? Now I need to write the front and back matter for the book, which will include the Acknowledgements and the Author’s Notes. I’ll be adding blurbs that I’m getting in from a few folks, and I’ll put in an updated About the Author section and probably some data on my other books as well. I expect to have these things done by this coming weekend.

Once those are finished, I’ll be putting out a call for volunteers to proofread what will hopefully be the final master copy that I’ll use to start generating the official ebook. So if any of you all might be up for proofreading that, let me know!

The ebook I create will be the epub, from which I’ll also be creating a mobi to deploy to Amazon. As we did last time, however, Dara will be taking my master working file and using that to create the print layout and the PDF edition. The epub, mobi, PDF, and print masters will also need checking, so I’ll be putting out a second call for THAT.

Meanwhile, I’ll be moving forward with buying Bone Walker its own ISBNs as well as filing copyright on it, and working with Third Place to prepare them for creating the print books as well. More bulletins on all of these things as they happen!

And last but definitely not least, Dara has been moving forward with creating the artwork for the soundtrack release. As I’ve been doing my edit pass this weekend, she’s been working on the liner notes for the CD. It’s been a very busy weekend for both of us!

But Bone Walker is COMING. And I’m really excited to be about to deliver Kendis, Christopher and Elessir’s next story to you all!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

I’ve already told my Kickstarter backers this, but for the rest of you, I am delighted to announce that Dara has officially sent the soundtrack for Faerie Blood and Bone Walker off to be mastered!

We are very excited about this, as it means we’re very, very close to being able to finally deliver this long-overdue reward to my Kickstarter backers. But it also means that Dara’s also able to deploy a brand new album! We’re even doing a replication run for it, so that we’ll have physical CDs to sell at Conflikt next month.

Want to check out what Dara did? You can find the album available for preorder RIGHT NOW right over here. So many exciting things going on on this. We’ve got vocals from Leannan Sidhe and Alexander James Adams, you guys. We’ve got multiple awesomely played fiddles. And we’ve even got a bitchin’ remix of the Burke-Gilman Troll set, courtesy of nerdcore master Klopfenpop.

What’s NOT up yet on the preview are readings by yours truly! I’ve read excerpts from both Faerie Blood AND Bone Walker for this soundtrack, and I’m here to tell you, I have much more respect now for people who do audiobook narration for a living. I only did four pieces over a weekend, and my throat really felt the work. But Dara did a masterful job layering my readings in on top of the instrumental sets, and we’re both very proud of how those tracks came out!

Important note on those readings, too–the Bone Walker readings are a little spoilery, so if you aren’t one of the Kickstarter backers who’ve read the early draft of the book, be advised about that. I tried to not get TOO spoilery with the excerpts I chose, which are both very action-heavy, but there will be some things in there that will probably make you go “WUT” until you actually read the book.

And SPEAKING OF THE BOOK–I’m about to go on two weeks of vacation over the holidays, during which I plan to be editing like a mad editing thing, in order to get Bone Walker ready to ship by Conflikt. And now that we’re signed off on the release of the soundtrack, Dara will be able to step up the pace on the cover design as well as desktops, postcards, and posters for backers. I’ll be bringing postcards and posters to Conflikt, too!

VERY excited about this, and looking very much forward to getting Bone Walker to you all!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

And now, a long overdue update on Victory of the Hawk! AND Kickstarter stuff!

Have been running annoyingly behind on getting this monster done, and managed to miss most of VCON for the second year in a row working on catching up. Got to the point that now I’m within scope for getting this monster’s first draft done by the end of this week, and shortly thereafter, there will be development edits.

How fast I can charge through those will, in turn, impact how fast I can charge through line edits. If all goes well, I could conceivably be done beating on this book by the end of the month. I’d like to be done before I scamper up to Canada again in November, this time for Operation SWING!, in which there will be ridiculous amounts of De Temps Antan!

If I’m done with edits on Victory by then, I’ll be swinging around to finally working on the edits on Bone Walker. When I go up to Canada for the De Temps Antan shows, I’ll be taking the entire week off–and between the two shows, I’ll be holed up in Cumberland working on edits on whatever’s popped next off the queue.

Once I can finally actually free up enough brain for the Bone Walker edits, they should go reasonably quickly since they’re all line-level edits, and I’m not going to be making any structural changes to the book at this point.

When Bone Walker‘s edits are finished, Dara and I will work on layout and on the design of the cover. And when that happens, I’ll have a better idea of when the final ebook and print editions will be deployed. The likely timeframe for this is early 2015, at this point. I’d like to have Bone Walker out before Victory is due to drop in April 2015.

Meanwhile, Dara has been doing a hard push to finish up the Bone Walker soundtrack. She’s very close to finishing the musical bits, although she and I still need to do the recordings for the readings I’ll be doing as accompaniment to the musical tracks. My ability to musically participate in the album has had to fall to the wayside, due to my having to focus on writing actual words, about which I’m sad. But on the other hand, we’ve gotten in excellent people to work with Dara. Especially Alexander James friggin’ Adams, about which I am not sad int he slightest.

When Bone Walker is cleared off my plate, I’ll be turning my attention to finishing up the novellas in the Warder universe, also due to Kickstarter backers. All three of these are still untitled, but to refresh your all’s memories, they are:

• Origin story for Millicent Wray, who later is Millicent Merriweather, Warder of Seattle
• Story set in Providence, RI, about a psychic who must help a man solve the murder of his Warder sister
• Story of a musician who helps a Warder stop the hunt of migrating deep sea creatures

And once all THIS is done, well, we’ll see what happens next. What’s most likely to pop off the queue is the long-overdue Queen of Souls, which needs to be cleaned up so I can try to query it somewhere.

Wish me luck, folks. The rest of this year’s going to be busy, and next year promises to be more of the same!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

I’m still dealing with my obligations to Carina Press for the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy, which means I haven’t been able to put attention to finishing up editing Bone Walker and prepping it for release. To wit: AUGH.

Meanwhile, Dara and I both have had medical crap to deal with, as many of you know–my medical crap from last fall, as well as Dara’s eye surgeries, plural. She’s got another one coming as well, since she developed cataracts after the last procedure, and that’s got to be dealt with. To wit: AUGH.

AND, as Dara’s been posting about a lot lately, she’s had to throw a LOT of time into renovation of one of the tenant spaces in MurkSouth. This has taken a huge amount of her time and our money, though now she’s finally finished with that, and if I may say so she’s worked magic in that kitchen. You can see before and after pics here.

BUT, we do finally have some progress to report! Even though I’ve been stymied on dealing with the book, Dara’s made some progress on getting the soundtrack done. She’s had significant progress on the instrumental sets–and we do also have some very, VERY exciting news.

We got Alexander James Adams.

Those of you in the Pacific Northwest fandom community, and hell, any of you who are into filk and SF/F-based or pagan-based music at all–you know who I’m talking about. He who stepped in to take up the mantle of song when Heather Alexander went off to Faerie. THAT Alexander James Adams. We are beyond delighted to have him joining us on this project, lending not only fiddle, but backup vocals and some drum work to various tracks.

And now Dara’s got a preview track to share with you all. It’s right over here!

This album is going to ROCK.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Namely, Bandcamp embeds! So here, have a couple! (Does this also work on Dreamwidth? LET’S FIND OUT.)

Like “Manteau d’hiver” by Le Vent du Nord!

And “La déroutée” by Yves “Most Badass Accordion Player in Quebec” Lambert and his trio! A song which rattles me around every time I hear it. I LOVE the repeated chorus.

And last but MOST ASSUREDLY not least, Dara’s got some tasty previews up for the WE SWEAR TO ODIN IS ACTUALLY FORTHCOMING Bone Walker Soundtrack!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

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.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.