Category Archives: My Novels

Posts about my published novels and book-length works in progress.

BLUE MAGIC – cover post and a review

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I get a note whenever some post of mine goes up on TOR.COM, and one came today; I assumed it was my latest Buffy post, but instead it’s my article about the quasi-collaborative process involved in getting the lovely covers of both books in this series. You can find it here–enjoy!

In other news, Publisher’s Weekly was less enchanted with Blue Magic than they were with Indigo Springs. They do applaud my ambition, though, which is no small thing.

Edited to Add: I was wrong. The Buffy Post, Big Bad 1.0, is up here.

Story Sale, Blue Magic Review, More Buffy

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I am happy to announce that my story “The Sweet Spot” will appear online at Lightspeed Magazine in the not too distant. This is the fourth of my Proxy War series (the squid stories, in other words) to see print, and the second featuring the character of Ruthless from “The Town on Blighted Sea.”

In the meantime, if you’d rather talk Buffyverse, Love is a Path Marked by Bloody Footprints is up at Tordotcom.

And Mrissa’s short review of Blue Magic on LJ points out, quite rightly, that it’s a better read if you’ve read Indigo Springs. My favorite bit:

I was pleased with the fact that the characters in this modern fantasy acted like modern people: they read detective novels and tried to figure out the atomic weight of magical substance and generally were not interchangeable with the 13th century.

A taste of BLUE MAGIC… the first review

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Here’s a bit from Kirkus, trimmed for spoilers and length:

In the unreal, magic (a blue substance called vitagua) is frozen into glaciers and as it melts it trickles back into our world. The process can be gradual or explosive. Astrid Lethewood, a “chanter” (she crafts magical objects using vitagua), fears chaos and violence and seeks a gradual course. There are dreadful complications, however… Astrid’s old friend Sahara Knax, now brimming with vitagua, has made herself the center of a cult, the Alchemites, who worship Sahara as a goddess. Problem is, though the Alchemites think they’re saving the environment, Sahara’s only interested in power and will sacrifice anybody to keep it…

… Previously charming and intimate, the narrative’s now become a seething fireball of ideas, actions and plots, complicated by GBLT and environmental agendas and a cast of thousands. Undeniably, something changed when the story jumped from local to global, and readers must judge for themselves which approach they prefer.

69 days until the book is out. Eeee!

95 days until Blue Magic is out!

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That’s right, it’s just over three months away! You can expect to hear more as we get closer to April 10th–there will be at least one contest, and I or TOR will almost certainly put up a first chapter, and I have yet to figure out what else.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! In just a couple weeks I’ll have a new story up on Tor.com. It’s called “Among the Silvering Herd” and I hope you all enjoy it very much. Or, if you’d rather get your Whedon fan on, watch the TOR blog for my 2012 Buffy Rewatch series, coming any second now.

AND A SET OF STEAK KNIVES: there are still exactly three slots open in my winter UCLA course, “Creating Universes, Building Worlds,” which begins January 25th. Come spring, I’m scheduled to teach Novel Writing I… and I’ll let you know when registration’s open for that. Finally, I will be teaching Novel Diagnostics at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle on Sunday, January 29th from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m..

What have you all got going on?

Blue Magic Cover Reveal

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Blue Magic will be out on April 10th, which is a mere 124 days from now, and I am excited and extremely proud to have the official go-ahead on showing you the cover art…

Lovely, mmm? This is a composite image–the portrait is by photographer Clayton Bastiani and the nebula (here’s the original) comes to us from NASA. The exquisite design is by Jamie Stafford Hill. All of this effort was pulled together by the Tor Books art department, and in particular the wonderful Irene Gallo. Thank you, team Tor! It’s a beautiful cover and really appropriate.

What I love about this cover–besides that it looks so at home with the original Indigo Springs art and that it’s gorgeous in its own right–is that the figure could be one of several of the characters from the novel… but that’s something I’ll talk about in a later post, after more of you have read it. I’m actually contemplating a Who is She? contest, to run after Blue Magic‘s available… when? Oh, April 10th, that’s right.

P.S. If you click on the image, it gets bigger.