Category Archives: Announcements

Story sales, articles, reviews, any kind of publication announcement.

LEAP! (Or… when we said #24hourbook, we meant 24 hour book!)

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So what did I do yesterday? This:

LEAP

A novel by 29 writers from 4 cities written in 24 hours around the world

February 29th, 2012. In Kuala Lumpur, it’s Sara’s birthday, a day she dreads, even though it only comes around once every four years. In Delhi, Tanya makes a dash for the airport and the carefree lifestyle that she has always dreamed of. In London, Dave wakes up from a bad dream to find his life in fragments that he must piece together before the day is out. In Vancouver, Win’s day goes from bad to worse, as she struggles to face up to her past.

On the leap day of the 29th of February, Spread the Word brought together four teams of writers from across the globe to write a collaborative novel. Spanning Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, London and Vancouver, four characters connect, disconnect, and follow their own journeys of discovery. There was a whole lot of hilarity and hard work, and much coffee and chocolate was consumed. We would love you to enjoy the fruits of the writers’ labours. Visit Spread the Word‘s website to download the book as a pdf or an ePub file from 5pm on World Book Day, Thursday 1st March. There will be an all-singing, all-dancing e-book version available soon!

Team Vancouver consisted of…
Sean Cranbury
Alyx Dellamonica
Jenn Farrell
McKinley M. Hellenes
Alex Leslie
Arley McNeney

Edited to add: I asked them to tell me something about them, and here’s the result:

Arley McNeney’s first book, Post, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best First Novel, Canada and the Caribbean and longlisted for such awards as the Saskatchewan Book Prizes and the ReLit award. Her second novel, The Time We All Went Marching, was released by Gooselane in October. Arley is a former Paralympian in the sport of wheelchair basketball and won two World Championship gold medals and a Paralympic bronze at the 2004 Athens Paralympics. She works as a social media coordinator for various nonprofits and blogs about her hip replacement on her blog Young and Hip. She can be reached on Twitter @arley_mcneney.

AmReading: Stephen Baxter’s STONE SPRING

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I will be interviewing Guest of Honor Stephen Baxter at Norwescon this April 6th and to that end I’ve started Stone Spring, first in his most recent series, The Northland Trilogy. It’s an alternate history about dike-building stone age Britons. The main character is a teenaged girl, Ana; of course, among a people whose life expectancy is in the thirties, this means she is in no way a kid.

I love AH and haven’t read as much of it in the past couple years as I did when I was reviewing for Locus, so it has been a lot of fun. And I’m looking forward to the interview. If you’re gonna be at NWC, it’s at 2:00 p.m. on the Friday.

My previous read was also a novel, Stephanie Burgis’s Kat, Incorrigible, which is a thoroughgoing romp. Kat’s twelve with two marriageable sisters and a family disgraced by their dead mother’s very public use of magic. Her eldest sister is thereby feeling very much obliged to buy into an arranged marriage with the obscenely rich Sir Neville, and naturally it falls to Kat, who has no gift for being ladylike, proper, or even especially inconspicuous, to find a way to save her.

The book is available now and there will be a sequel, Renegade Magic, out in the spring. I’d say they’re appropriate for kids ten years or older, and I found it thoroughly fun.

Finally, I will be mostly unavailable for today, as February 29th is when I and 28 other writers from four cities are participating in the International 24 Hour Book Project. It’ll be #24hourbook if you want to follow the Tweeting fun.

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!