Ordinary Day

In the midst of all this HEY BONE WALKER IS OUT excitement, do not forget, Victory of the Hawk is ALSO on its way. And there’s official cover copy for it now and everything, so I have updated the official Victory of the Hawk page with it! AND, I have also found it up on iBooks for preordering goodness, so I’ve added that link to the page too.

I have also taken the time to update various high-level pages on the site to be current with the status of Victory and of Bone Walker. The About Me, FAQ, and Books pages have all been updated too with current data, including how to get print copies of Faerie Blood and Bone Walker by ordering via Bandcamp!

Likewise, I have made sure that the current main places to get all of my books are called out on the overall Books page. This includes the direct links to go to the Crime and the Forces of Evil merch pages on Bandcamp, where you can order the aforementioned print editions.

It ALSO includes a direct link to the Audible page for the audiobook edition of Valor of the Healer, which IS a thing that exists, let me remind you all.

***

Last but not least, I saw the news break last night courtesy of James Nicoll’s LJ that SFWA has opened membership to self-pubbed and small press authors.

To wit, awesome.

I still don’t qualify for membership by the criteria they’re discussing, which are based around “how much income do you pull in from your writing?” They are setting that bar at a level that’d be the equivalent of what authors can get from an advance from a traditional publisher. And honestly, that seems reasonable to me.

Now, though, this changes my likelihood of ever joining SFWA from “well, THAT ain’t gonna happen” over to “possibly feasible, if I keep growing my available titles and sales”. And this does please me. So as I said on the comment I left on the post, I would like to thank the folks in SFWA for making this policy change.

Meanwhile, I am still very pleased that NIWA is a thing that exists, and have renewed my membership with them. The opportunity to be in an organized group of independent authors IS very valuable–if nothing else, the chance to team up to sell books at local conventions is very, very welcome. And I do recommend that fellow indie authors who aren’t yet at SFWA-qualifying levels of sales consider checking them out.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

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!

***

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!

***

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!

***

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.

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 in the 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.

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.

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.