Ordinary Day

Today’s top story: screw Black Friday, we’re releasing the first single from the forthcoming Bone Walker soundtrack NOW! Because we CAN!

Dara’s got her post up about it right over here, in which you can stream the premaster mix of “Something’s Coming” right off of Bandcamp. If you’re inclined, you can buy that single. AND you can preorder the album!

If you backed the Kickstarter, you of course don’t need to actually buy it because we will be sending it to you. But DO spread the word! And check out the previews of the other tracks that’ll be coming!

We’ll be doing the official release for this thing at the next Conflikt in January, along with the release for the actual Bone Walker novel! SO EXCITING. Stand by for more on this as it happens!

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As I think I’ve mentioned before, Dara and I are fans of the Doctor Who Podcast, one of the many Doctor-themed podcasts available for your listening pleasure. In addition to reviewing new episodes when they come out, they have extensive knowledge of the Classic-era series as well as the Big Finish audio range, and all of their presenters are just generally fun to listen to.

One of the things we find particularly charming about them is the jingle they wrote for whenever they review a Big Finish release! It goes like this:

Big Finish with Ian! And Michelle from across the Atlantic Ocean!
Ian from UK, and Michelle from the United States!
Reviewing Big Finish, sorting out the wheat from the chaff and nonsense
Saving you money on the ones that are not so good!

It’s insidiously catchy, enough that every time we hear it show up in an episode of the podcast, we start singing along. Hell, THEY’VE even songvirused themselves with it.

So the other night I said to Dara, “I wonder if this thing would work as a round!” And the fun thing about having a spouse with her own music studio? She can FIND OUT.

Behold! Dara’s round edition of the Doctor Who Podcast Big Finish Review Theme!

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And while we’re on the topic of things you should signalboost, don’t forget, Faerie Blood is ON SALE for $2.99 until this coming Monday! All the details are right over here!

I will also honor the sale price for anyone who wants to buy the ebook directly from me in the format of their choice!

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Last but DEFINITELY not least, Victory of the Hawk is now available for preorder as well AND has shown up on Goodreads. So if you’d like to get in some preorder love on Book 3 of the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy, NOW IS THE TIME! Links are on the Victory of the Hawk page!

And if you haven’t read Valor or Vengeance yet, now would also be a VERY good time to get caught up on those. If you haven’t read anything of my writing at all yet, or if you’ve just read Faerie Blood and aren’t sure whether you’d like my high fantasy, you can even see some shiny samples that’ll let you read up to 10 percent of each book, provided courtesy of Overdrive! The samples are available on the Valor of the Healer and Vengeance of the Hunter pages!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

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!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

This is kind of exciting–I’m actually seeing Vengeance of the Hunter showing up in fiction roundups on a couple of fairly high-profile sites. Namely, tor.com and Heroes and Heartbreakers! Wow.

However, both of these roundup posts are mistaking me for writing romance. I’m not, despite the fact that I’ve got me a shirtless Julian on my cover for Vengeance of the Hunter. I do have a love story building in this trilogy, but it’s not actually the A plot. I’m better quantified as “fantasy with romantic elements” than outright romance or even romantic fantasy. Think Doranna Durgin before she started writing paranormal romance, or Tanya Huff’s fantasy novels, or early Esther Friesner. That’s the kind of flavor I aim for in my writing.

This, folks, is a side effect of my publisher for this trilogy targeting a lot of its marketing towards a romance-heavy audience. And I’m okay with that–the covers Carina has given me so far are a good compromise between their aiming towards the majority of Carina readers, and what I’m actually writing.

I just want to make sure that if you want to check out my stuff, you’re not confused by what’s on the cover!

Last but most assuredly not least, SF Signal has me in an April roundup post right over here. Scroll down to the V’s and you’ll see THIS.

REALLY Good Company

I… WOW. I’m next to Tanya Huff and Mary Robinette Kowal. *^_^*;; Gosh. Makes me feel like a Real Writer!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

As of this morning I received an official final Word doc version of Vengeance of the Hunter. This means we are now SIGNED OFF on the text of this book. Next comes the cover copy and the cover art, and I hope to be showing you all these some time soon in coming weeks.

And this means as well that I need to start planning on Victory of the Hawk and start writing this puppy WAY sooner than I did Vengeance. Getting Vengeance ready to ship was an exercise in pushing it, and I need to NOT DO THAT for Victory. Expect me to be posting more updates about the third installment of Rebels of Adalonia in coming weeks as well, for the sake of visibility and accountability!

ALSO: I need to start the official edit pass on Bone Walker. Which will be starting THIS WEEKEND. I want this thing done and dealt with and hopefully ready to ship before Vengeance comes out in April. Again, look for more updates to come on this.

Likewise, I have the shorter works I want to finish off as well and get to Kickstarter backers who are LONG overdue for getting the shinies that are due them.

Lot of work before me, folks, as I head into 2014. Looking forward to taking it on and letting you know how it goes!

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.

With the agreement of myself, my agent, my editor, and the rest of the team at Carina Press, we now have final titles for my trilogy!

As of RIGHT NOW, the book formerly known as Lament of the Dove shall be henceforth referred to as Valor of the Healer!

Book 2, formerly Shadow of the Rook, becomes Vengeance of the Hunter.

Book 3, formerly Lone Hawk’s Flight, will be Victory of the Hawk.

And the series title over all will be Rebels of Adalonia.

I’m feeling quite happy about these titles over all, especially for Book 1, since that very nicely captures the whole character arc I’m doing with Faanshi in that part of the story. And I like the alliteration of the V and H words in each title.

I’ve been asked this on Google+, so I’ll go ahead and note here that the title changes were brought about for two reasons. One, because ‘Lament’ was determined to not really fit Faanshi’s character arc. This was in fact something that beta readers had brought up to me (and did I mention, YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME LIKE THAT), so when Carina raised the issue, it wasn’t surprising to me at all. Two, because ‘Dove’ was thought to be kind of questionable for the fantasy market. This, too, wasn’t really surprising. I also had a beta reader note to me that they felt that ‘Lament of the Dove’ actually sounded like a Western! And on a related note, especially given that a lot of Carina’s buying audience is coming out of the romance genre, I could also see people thinking ‘Dove’ has connotations of inspiration romance–which is definitely not what I’m writing.

So! Valor of the Healer it is. I get to make appropriate changes in the copyedit pass I need to do this weekend! And y’all be on the lookout for this to get incorporated into info right here on my site as well as in upcoming announcements as they happen!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.