Wild Things hits the Eeee! bookstores today

My novelette “Wild Things” will be up on the Tor site soon where every any anybody can read it, but the eBook version is available for preorder today on the MacMillan site, on Amazon, on iBooks and at Google too. (All versions are DRM-free, and the prices aren’t identical so do shop around). Eee!

“Wild Things” is set in the same universe as my first novel, Indigo Springs, and its sequel, Blue Magic. Timewise, it happens between the events of the two novels, and it’s set here in the Lower Mainland of B.C. and in the wine country around Oliver and Osoyoos.

Here’s the cover:
wild things cover art

Here’s what Tor says about it:

Ah, love. A many splendored thing. Here is a rather unusual love story, sweet and strange as could only happen in the post-magical reality of the Indigo Springs “event.” Read More…

Still going Wild, but not until November

First a PSA: my novelette “Wild Things,” got rescheduled for release on Tor.com. It will be out in early November. Sorry to have misinformed you all. In the meantime there’s still “The Cage” and “Among the Silvering Herd” to be had there.

Second, a celebration: my stepsister B has had a baby boy; he is small and adorable and photos are pouring in. I’m happy for her and her husband, and even happier that my father gets a chance to be a granddad.

Third, and not-quite-endlessly, the mini-reno: the cats continued to be aflutter and restless as the office renovation continued. They got a break for one weekend, because of VCon–there was no point heaving a lot of stuff around when there wouldn’t be time free for dismantling the bedroom. But for Canucksgiving Kelly and I put on the final push: we dismantled the two big pieces of furniture–the bed and the desk–and swapped the rooms.

Displaced stuff and a cat:
Minnow would like me to put the house back together now.

And oh! The bedroom is so pretty! We bought an old dresser and put the pitcher from the Tucker family homestead on it, and it’s so very olde fashionedee. All that work was so exhausting–I felt ill with fatigue, and also nearly beaned my face with a falling shelf–and so worth it. Take that, Martha Stewart!

Old stuff

Rumble, who does apparently believe that crap rolls downhill, dealt with his stress by trying to forbid Minnow from eating or using the litter box. You can all imagine how popular this choice of his has been with the cat parents. We now have multiple feeding stations on the go and are watching him like hawks. We’re also trying to lure her into the shiny new bedroom on occasion, by giving them both treats, but only when both of them are in there.

Picture Pages

I haven’t been out much with the camera lately; I’ve taken lots of shots of the mini renovation we’re doing, and a fair number of images of the cats, but a lot of my walking lately has been utilitarian: I’m going somewhere, and the route’s not so photogenic.

But Barb and I did get out to Everett Crowley and Riverside Parks a few weeks ago. Both parks were new to us, and I got a few decent shots of the Fraser River even though the light was very bright indeed. Here’s one to send you off to your weekends with, hopefully, a bit of Ahhhh!

Riverside Park Vancouver

I will be at VCon this weekend, flashing Blue Magic ’round the Friday night book launch and doing the usual scads of panels on Saturday and Sunday. Maybe I’ll see some of you there!

All my TOR stuff are belong in the iStore

So not into the Kindle thing? Opposed to Amazon for any reason at all? But kinda into e-books? This may be the post for you.

My publisher, TOR, has currently got four works of mine out as e-books, and recently they’ve made it to the Apple ecosystem. This means iPhone and iPad users can load up my two novels, Indigo Springs and Blue Magic. The two novelettes available in this format, The Cage and Among the Silvering Herd.

Like all of TOR’s stuff now, these files are DRM-free, which logically should mean that you can buy them from iTunes and read them on other devices. I haven’t attempted to do this yet, but if there are wrinkles in the process I’ll let you know.

(All this stuff is of course findable if you go to the link with my name on it: A.M. Dellamonica.)

Like anyone in practically any kind of business at all these days, an unknowable portion of my fate is tied to good user reviews and ratings. As far as I can tell, you do not have to have purchased any of the above stories from the iStore to rate it. (This isn’t true of apps–you have to own one to post about it.) So… if you have read and liked one of them, and have a minute to hit the iStore and say so, I’ll be in your debt.

I #AmReading, but for how long?

Happy Fourth of July, U.S. Friends!

I am about a third of the way into The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization and have only just reached the first gory corpse in Patrick O’Brian’s Red Rain.

Neither book is completely doing it for me: The House of Wisdom is good, but I seem to be absorbing it in small chunks. I feel predisposed to extreme pickiness, to feeling dissatisfaction with the books I’m tackling. I’m not sure there’s much wrong with them, but we definitely aren’t playing well together.

I’ll note that this all started well before I started busily bustin’ words for my WriteAThon commitment. On which note, some braggage:

Tuesday – 1,464 for a total of 28,887
Monday – 1,146 for a total of 27,423
Sunday- 850 words, total of 26,277
Saturday – 1,280 words total of 25,427

Sponsor me here! Win naming rights to stuff on Stormwrack! The number of donors in the pool tripled this week, but the odds of winning the draw are still excellent!)

Okay, back to my point, which is books. Reading for pleasure. The delights of the written word. What has been working for me, in terms of reading, is some of the stuff on the ever-delightful Longreads–I read a good piece on a tornado that ripped through Moscow, Ohio, and a New Yorker article about how having pots of money (or even thinking about it) can affect a person’s capacity for empathy or generosity.

So yay Longreads, and all that, but I am still struggling to sink into a good book-length work, fiction or non-fiction, that I haven’t already read. Has this ever happened to any of you?