Ordinary Day

This has started getting talked about in a few public places, so I’m going to go ahead and address it here. Long story short, Drollerie Press is in a slow state of collapse, pretty much due to the ongoing serious health issues our senior editor, serasempre, is suffering. All indications are that this is an honorable collapse, mind you–and as someone who’s suffered her own health problems in the recent past, I can certainly attest that it’s tough to get through day to day things if your health is rocky, never mind running a publishing company.

There are rumors that Drollerie may be sold, but at this time they are only rumors. I have however taken the step of asking for the return of my rights to Faerie Blood. I don’t have a confirmed date as to when this will happen, given that it (like all other outstanding things that editor Deena needs to take care of) is dependent upon her ability to get to it. But given that this is now in the queue, if you want Faerie Blood, you should go ahead and get it from the site of your choice. Drollerie’s own site is your best bet as that’s the source most likely to get me any payment for it.

Or, if you are so inclined, I have a small number of CD copies of Faerie Blood still available. If you’re local to me, you can have one for $5. If you’re not local, you can have one for $7.

What I will do with the book once I have it back remains to be seen. Much will depend upon whether Drollerie is in fact sold (in which case the possibility exists that new management may be interested in keeping it), or on whether I can find a home for it where the book hasn’t already been queried. I have received Good Advice that one way to go about that may well be to finish Book 2 and query them together. We’ll see.

Bone Walker remains the most likely means through which I could query Faerie Blood anywhere else, since that’ll wind up being a full novel. The current novella-length pieces I’m thinking about for the Warder universe (the Oscar story, the Elizabeth/Ross story, the Millicent origin story) will also have to be considered.

More on this as I know it, all.

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Those of you out there who’ve been with me a while will know I’ve been hosting the semi-regular Drollerie Press blog tours. My fellow Drollerie authors and I have had some fun doing these, but in 2010, we’re seeking to expand the scope of our efforts. We’d love to find some non-Drollerie authors with whom we could do blog post exchanges. So far our little tours have been monthly (although we’ve canceled a couple of times for various reasons), but the interval in question would be negotiable depending on how many authors wanted to get involved and what their commitments would be like.

We are of course writing in a mix of genres at Drollerie: urban fantasy, romance, SF, horror, etc., and we’re predominantly in electronic form, although a few of us have our work available in print as well. Ideally I’d like to find other authors who are e-pubbed and/or who share our genres, but print-based authors are of course very welcome as well.

Drollerie of course lives here, and if you’d like to check out an example of one of our recent blog tours, check out the December master post I put up on Drollerie’s main blog. If you’re a writer reading this and you might be interested in setting up an exchange of posts, let me know! Drop me a comment, message me on LJ or DW, fling me email, whatever works. I look forward to hearing from you!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

So over at Drollerie Press we’re in the middle of a 12 Days of Christmas giveaway, featuring several free downloads by a lot of us DP authors–and which will culminate in the giveaway of a free ebook reader a bunch of us are chipping in for! It’s a jetBook Lite, and you can find out more about it and the giveaway in general here. Skim all the site’s recent entries for the downloads available so far!

Meanwhile, I’ve finally gotten a bit of sales data from my editor serasempre, who informs me that during 3rd Quarter 2009, I sold 148 copies at Fictionwise! This means I now have 165 confirmed sales so far–and this isn’t counting anything from Mobipocket or Amazon or other sites, not to mention Drollerie’s own store during that period. So when the royalty statement finally shows up, I’m hopeful it’ll have some interesting numbers indeed.

For the home audience–this means that by very rough estimation, I’d be getting somewhere in the vicinity of $375 for these confirmed sales. And if I can confirm another 335 or so, this gets me into the territory of Anna Can Buy a New Guitar. Y’all want me to have one of these lovely things, don’t you?

Well, if you’ve bought Faerie Blood, this is exactly what you’ll be contributing to, and I have not forgotten my pledge in the earliest days of this blog of mine that if I do get that guitar, I will totally post video of myself playing it. And I’ll very likely also do another poll and giveaway, because let’s face it, folks, this will be a guitar you all helped me buy. Which means you totally should have a shot at helping me name it.

Ultimately, though, the really important thing to note here is that holy crap 165 of you out there have bought my book. I really hope you’re all enjoying it! And I thank you for your support.

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Those of you who know about my completed but unpublished novels will know I’ve got Queen of Souls, a Persephone and Hades story on the queue to be edited into queryable shape. So it should surprise none of you that I’m quite interested in checking out Frayed Tapestry, by my fellow Drollerie author Imogen Howson. In fact, as the cool kids like to say, her post for this month’s Drollerie Blog Tour, on the topic of dangerous writing, is Relevant to My Interests indeed.

Check it out, folks! Here’s what Imogen’s got to say.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

This is another plug post for a Drollerie book I just finished: Beautiful Death by Joely Sue Burkhart.

We've got ourselves an SF romance here, folks, with callbacks to Greek mythology. As you might guess, what with the whole Queen of Souls thing, I love me some Greek mythos--although with this story, it's more an interesting congruence of naming choices rather than a retelling of any myths, since the plot's not particularly mythical.

Isabella Thanatos, a.k.a. "Beautiful Death", is the First Marshal of New Olympia, the civilization that's arisen from the ashes after humanity is nearly wiped out by an alien virus. But her entire life has been a lie--as she discovers when she finds out she's been deliberately infected by a mutated form of that virus, and that her own father is responsible. She must turn to Hades, the alien leader who's been exiled to Earth and against whom she's fought for five years, for help in overcoming her father as well as the changes the virus is about to wreak in her.

Go check it out, y'all, and look around as well for freebies--it's Read an E-Book Week over at Drollerie!

I got a giggle this morning out of this article up on cracked.com, wherein they asked readers to send in Photoshopped versions of the inboxes of villains. I particularly like the Dalek one, and the one for John Locke of Lost.

Meanwhile, I shall note that I've been fairly quiet around here lately aside from book posts, but in general things are well. Work is good. Been working on adjusting my thyroid meds to improve my sleep; as a general Note to Self, I should remember that if I'm having trouble sleeping, chances are actually pretty damned high that my thyroid levels are off. *^_^*;; Last couple of nights I've slept better than I have in weeks. Let's see if I can keep that up, especially heading into surgery.

solarbird and I are hoping to go see the Lucy exhibit at the Science Center tomorrow afternoon, before it vanishes on the 8th. Most of the exhibit is apparently about the history of Ethopia and then you get to see the bones, but it sounds interesting in general. And I'd like to see the bones. For SCIENCE!

Tomorrow is also the day this month's Drollerie Blog Tour posts go up. So watch this space for that.

Sunday, there will be Jam.

And I have now purchased antonstrout's Deader Still, bringing the yearly tally of Books Purchased up to a scant seven. It would have been nine, but I couldn't actually find mdhenry's Road Trip of the Living Dead or Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest at Third Place. I shall have to punt to B&N for these!

So as promised, today is the day that Drollerie Press authors are coming around to each other's blogs to introduce themselves and their writing. I'll be putting up a full list of all the posts as soon as I have them, but in the meantime, I'd like to introduce y'all to my fellow author JA Howe. Y'all say hi!

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Hi! I'm JA Howe, and soon you can read one of my stories in the anthology Stereo Opticon by Drollerie Press.

The story actually comes from one of the worlds I've written about, in this case the land of Kritter, a high fantasy land full of dragons, knights, elves, harpies and so on.

I love doing world-building when writing. I write up very in-depth notes about the worlds I'm creating, which include studies of the different cultures -- have you ever wondered what it's like in a harpy society, for instance? That's the kind of questions I ask when world-building. But it isn't only fairies and so on; I also love to do studies of different mythologies to see if they can fit into my own tales somewhere. And I study things such as microbiology, archaeology, puppetry, weaving and zoology. I'm not a professional scientist but I do try to make my worlds realistic as possible.

I've written since I was very young, and read for longer. I was published first about eleven years ago at Pablo Lennis, back then a print magazine which now has an internet version called Surprising Stories. Yes, I write for both no-pay and paying publications because I believe in as much readership as I can get. And it seems to also have helped me along the way, to practice my craft. Because there are now editors of paying pubs that take my work. (My first were at Nevermore and Beyond Centauri, for instance.)

Now, I don't make a lot from writing, no. I am disabled so that complicates things, and makes me get writing done more slowly than I might otherwise. However, it's also been a boon to me because although I lost the ability to work a 9-5 job several years ago, I've been able to keep on at writing. I've written in and out of hospitals, actually, and yes I'm proud of that fact: I have severe lupus which has really affected my central nervous system, but I am still here!

So look for my writing here and there, on the internet, and in print magazines. I also write for Helium.com. So far it's been stories and poetry, mostly fantasy but also some science fiction and horror. And I'm working on my first novel, which might be about Kritter. Though, there are other possibilities, believe me!

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Watch this space, folks, for where to go to check out the rest of my fellow authors!

It's official: I'm organizing an actual blog tour! Eleven of the authors at Drollerie Press, including myself, are joining forces to tour around each other's blogs. I'm hoping to make this a monthly event to promote not only my writing, but also that of the other writers of Drollerie as well.

This month we're doing intro posts about ourselves and what we write, and we're trading off posts to each other's blogs. We'll be having posts go live on January 31st, and I'll post a full list of links to the posts as soon as I have 'em.

I myself will be taking on a post from hyperbard, so watch this space for her post!